Future of the Book – Page 7

Bookmark – The “LookStore” and, Now, “Wall to Wall-papered Books”

2012/08/082014/06/19Books On BooksLeave a comment

These are Tony Sanfilippo’s slides used for his Ignite presentation at the 2012 meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The slides have been transferred to YouTube with a voiceover.

As the book evolves, so too the ways in which it reaches us, or we reach it. We have lived through one stage of that evolution with online bookstores. We are living through another with ebooks.

It’s not over yet.

Two years on, a Romanian company offers customized wallpaper showing shelves of book spines with your choice of free ebook titles and their QR codes printed on the spine. To “pull a book from the shelf”, scan the code with your favorite ebook reader and settle in for a good read. See the video: http://www.bibliotecapemobil.ro/

http://www.psfk.com/2014/06/digital-library-wallpaper-qr-code-scan-books.html#!0GAL3

An E-Reader Annotation Mini-Manifesto

2012/08/072018/06/15Books On BooksLeave a comment

Teleread and an employee of Readmill have begun a bookmarkable conversation about an important feature of books that must translate into the digital world: shareable annotations.

To share annotations in a print book, you have to lend the book or photocopy the relevant pages. Currently, our e-incunabula thrash about in the barbwire of a three-way no-man’s land: between publishers and librarians, between anti-DRMists and pro-DRMists and between the ebook as a licensed good and the ebook as a sold good to which the “first sale” doctrine applies. We haven’t brought sustainable peace to any one of those fronts yet, although there are fleeting signs of olive branches on the battlefield.

Penguin experiments with the New York Public Libraries, Bilbary has pulled together a collection of over 400,000 works (including Random House ebooks) to make available to US and UK public libraries, the Douglas County Library in Colorado continues its purchase-only effort.

Small and large publishers have been and are going DRM-free or nearly so. In 2009, Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting started a list of DRM-free publishers and stores. Today, she can add among others Springer, Tor/Forge and Pottermore (with effects addressed in interesting detail by Mike Shatzkin).

As Matthew Bostock argues,

“Translating the act of annotating physical books to the digital experience is all good and well, but isn’t there more we could do? Isn’t there more we could dream about? We’re talking about e-readers here—small devices that are connected to something that has the potential to truly evolve the entire concept of digital reading. I’m referring, of course, to the web. … If we share what we highlight with other people, and bring a discussion right into the margin of a book, what do we have, and what have we done? We have added value to the digital reading experience. And looking at annotation in this way, there’s a clear reason why we should give it a little more thought.”

See Matthew’s mini-manifesto on annotations on Teleread:

No doubt known to Matthew, but there are forces at work to nudge us toward his vision. The standards world has not been sitting on its hands: the W3C and NISO both have initiatives underway to address the minimum required technical specifications for a standard on shareable annotations.

The book evolves.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120806 – The BISG Endorses EPUB 3, Amazon UK Sells More Ebooks than Print

2012/08/062012/08/06Books On BooksLeave a comment

“The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.”

For the record and from the Library of Congress:

“The Open eBook Publication Structure or “OEB,” originally produced in 1999, was the precursor to EPUB. Version 1.0 of the Publication Structure was created in the winter, spring, and summer of 1999 by the Open eBook Authoring Group. Following the release of OEBPS 1.0, the Open eBook Forum (OeBF) was formally incorporated in January 2000. OEBPS Version 1.0.1 [OEBPS_1_0], a maintenance release, was brought out in July 2001. OEBPS Version 1.2 [OEBPS_1_2], incorporating new support for control by content providers over presentation along with other corrections and improvements, was released as a Recommended Specification in August 2002. EPUB 2 was initially standardized in 2007. EPUB 2.0.1 was approved in 2010. EPUB, Version 3, was approved as an IDPF Recommendation in October 2011. It is substantially different from EPUB, Version 2, both in using only a single form for textual content and in having support for audio, video, and scripted interactivity (through Javascript). No longer supported are the EPUB_2 formats for text content, one based on the Digital Talking Book [DTB_2005] format and a second form based on XHTML 1.1 compatible with OEBPS_1_2. A single new encoding for textual Content Documents is based on HTML5/XHTML and CSS3, despite the fact that both of these W3C standards are still works in progress. SVG is supported for graphics and it is possible to have an EPUB_3 document whose “pages” consists [sic] only of graphics, for example for a graphic novel. Several legacy features are deprecated. Some legacy structures may be included for compatibility of EPUB_3 documents with existing EPUB_2 readers. EPUB_3 readers are expected to render publications using version 2 and version 3.”

Coincidentally, Amazon UK reported today that it is now selling 114 Kindle ebooks for every 100 print books it sells.

The EPUB format is not natively readable on the Kindle device or in the Kindle application. Customers can add conversion apps easily to their devices to make EPUB readable on a Kindle, but as consumers seek the advantages of an industry standard, how will Amazon respond?

Feel free to suggest new additions to the timeline!

Added 20120806.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120725

As we are still in the Age of e-Incunabula, what better than a trip half way around the world to Japan to see one of the world’s largest collections of Western incunabula — and an excellent site to bookmark?

The National Diet Library’s site refers to itself as an exhibition based on the book “Inkyunabura no Sekai” (The World of Incunabula) / written by Hiroharu Orita, compiled by the Library Research Institute of the National Diet Library. Tokyo: Japan Library Association, July 2000 (in Japanese).

The exhibition provides a timeline of incunabula from the second half of the 4th century when the shift to the codex occurred to 1980 when the British Library began entering data on its collection of incunabula into the ISTC. The site provides much more than this chronology.

Images from the collection, statistics on the type fonts used, coverage of design and how the quires (sheets of paper folded, forerunner of book signatures and files in EPUB!) were arranged, and the binding process — all are covered straightforwardly and often in entertaining detail. Look on this site and consider how far we have to go with our ebooks and apps!

Added 20120725.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120719

Not as interactive as the Counterspace timeline for typography below, but certainly as densely informative, and it extends to typography online.

Added 20120719.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120717

Another timeline, this one focused on bookbinding. Is .zip the binding for an ebook?

Added 20120717.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120710

On the heels of the question above comes an outstanding interactive infographic on a critical element of the book and ebook: typography.

Added 20120710.

Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120706

Yet another ebook timeline, and this one is broken down into interpretive categories, “The Age of Writing” and “The Network Era,” which is thought-provoking. Are we in “The Age of the Tablet”?

Added 20120706.

Start of the Ebook Timeline

In 1936, “Chronology of Books & Printing” appeared in its revised edition, published by Macmillan in New York. In 1996, Cor Knops picked up the torch and started a Book History Timeline from Sumerian clay tablets (he could have started with the caves at Lascaux!) through to 1997 with the first issue of “Biblio Magazine” but with little acknowledgment of ebooks.

Now in 2012, looking back to 2002, we find this journalistic stab at a timeline for ebooks.

Forged together, the chronologies would have to include “As we may think” by Vannevar Bush in 1945, Ted Nelson’s coining of “hypertext” in 1963-65, the Apple Newton in 1993 (how many publishers and authors have kept track of the free downloads of their Newton ebooks?) and much more.

Another extension of the ebook timeline appears in this book by Marie Lebert, which fills in important gaps, misses others and offers more than a few overemphasized continental developments. Her timeline takes us through 2009, which means that the signal events in 2011/12 of ebook sales’ outstripping those of print in some markets are still to be added.

Let us not to the marriage of print and digital admit impediments

2012/08/012012/08/04Books On BooksLeave a comment

See on Scoop.it – Books On Books

The Bodleian is offering a prize draw to attract participation in its crowdfunding for the digitization of its First Folio.

“Dr Paul Nash, an award-winning printer, will reprint Leonard Digges’s poem in praise of Shakespeare from the front matter of the First Folio. It will be printed on a folio bifolium of English, hand-made paper and printed in the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop at the Story Museum. The text will be composed by hand, using types first cast in the 17th century, with ornaments. Each sheet will be printed with a title and colophon, sewn into a paper cover.”

They call this “kickstart” the “Sprint for Shakespeare” in conjunction with the cultural and sports Olympics events going on this year.

Where there’s a Will, there should be a way.

See on shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Ebooks: do we really want our literature to last for ever?

2012/07/302012/08/04Books On BooksLeave a comment

See on Scoop.it – Books On Books

A book published earlier this year by an Argentine firm raises questions about the desirability of indelible ink and trackable data, writes James Bridle…

The title of Bridle’s item in “The Guardian” — or “The Groaniad” as it is fondly known for its ponchant [sic] for typos — is “Ebooks: do we really want our literature to last forever?” It’s hard to tell at first whether Bridle has his tongue partly in his cheek.

He introduces his theme with William Gibson’s collaboration with Dennis Ashbaugh — “Agrippa (a book of the dead)” — which is covered in the July 20 post below. Though he mentions the competition to reverse-engineer the cryptography that encrypted the poem on its floppy disk at the playing of its first reading, he doesn’t mention the site (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/) dedicated to archiving the event of that first reading.

But as Bridle notes, the physical might have now accomplished the disappearing act the digital could not. He refers us to “El libro que no puede esperar|The Book That Can’t Wait,” which its publisher Eterna Cadencia just released in print with ink that disappears in two months. Bridle’s contrarian view to the negative press greeting this instance of print-performance-art is “the persistence of books is a myth in any case: … One of the advantages of ebooks might in fact be that they are easier to move on from, to delete, to forget, preventing us from getting bogged down in bad books and past selves, and, as Eterna Cadencia want us to do, move on and discover new things.”

That may be a clever Heraclitean spark — or Zen cone as “The Guardian” might have it — disguising a marketing ploy. But that very clamor for attention and the clamor of the self-publishing remind us of what is really at stake: time.

Our ebooks may be “reading us,” but perhaps we are the ephemera in this case. Long after we have ceased being tracked, some of those ebooks and books — like the illuminated manuscripts this March at the British Library’s exhibition “Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination” — will mark the human effort to prove the myth that our words and images will last.

See on www.guardian.co.uk

A bookmark for the librarians: Pew’s 10 lessons in e-reading and 1 more from BOB

2012/07/26Books On BooksLeave a comment

A bookmark for the librarians: Pew's 10 lessons in e-reading and one more from BOB | Books On Books | Scoop.it

Pew Internet’s latest report on e-reading offers librarians ten valuable lessons on how they can increase the usage and demonstrate the value of their collections.

The 11th corollary — there are “herds” of ebook readers out there whose watering holes are here:

ReadCloud (an Australian site aimed at schools).

These are only five among several to watch. Most of these reader apps are available for the iPad, and even Amazon has introduced the facility to share annotations and comments via Twitter and Facebook in Kindle Fire 6.3.

There is also a new kid on the block: Zola, one to watch if only for its ambition to compete with Google Play and Amazon.

Now, if Overdrive were to enhance its recent acquisition Book.ish with this social reading facility, then …!

Caveat: Michael Kozlowski has this to say about the phenomenon: “In the end, social media in electronic books is severely lacking. … Having more embedded social functions in an e-reading indie app or mainstream company taking [it] to the next level will only help the industry grow and spurn [sic] more companies to offering competing or better options.”

And that’s where the 11th corollary comes in. Librarians might be able to make a difference — introducing (or following) their patrons into the social e-reader experience, making the global more local, sparking local reading groups and reading lists, providing a local human interaction in helping readers find books and answers about them.

If the companies mentioned have not already reached out to the library community and publishers to push this possible next step in the evolution of the book, perhaps the librarians should reach out to the social ebook readers and the publishers?

The Future of the Past: Bookmarking a forthcoming title

2012/07/232012/07/23Books On BooksLeave a comment

Tom Abba and Baldur Bjarnason are writing a book — about “books, electronic textuality and materiality and is a manifesto of sorts.”

Some of it slips out intentionally in Abba’s blog. He comments on Touchpress’s app of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Flipboard’s setting of design trends and Visual Editions’ app version of Marc Saporta’s “Composition No. 1.” Here’s hoping that they also address Agrippa (a book of the dead), the work of art created by novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. That’s right, futurists, 20 years ago.

Expanded Artists’ Books: Envisioning the Future of the Book

2012/07/23Books On BooksLeave a comment

Here’s a twist, or is it?

The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago issued a call for proposals yesterday (19 July) for projects that “provide concept(s) of how the digital work may be transformed into a physical book object – ….”

The premise behind the “award of two $10,000 commissions for new artworks for the iPad [which] will have physical counterparts that intersect, modulate, or inform the digital components of the artwork” is:

“Artists’ books claim all aspects of the book (format, typography, structure, etc.) as potentially expressive. As immersive hybrid experiences for the reader/viewer, these works expand the limits of what we traditionally think of as a book. Simultaneously, we consider that tablet-based mobile platforms are emerging as a dynamic arena for investigation of the notion of the book. Expanded Artists’ Books utilize the rich capabilities of the tablet platform to imagine new forms that a book might take, such as exploring how interactivity challenges the traditional closure of text or the performance of time.”

William Gibson’s novels leap to mind as examples of predictive fiction (fairly uncannily when you compare Google’s VR glasses to the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace Deck that allows characters in the Sprawl trilogy to enter and navigate “Cyberspace [that] consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” (Gibson 69)

So why not predictive book art to envision the future of the book?