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One of the most interesting sessions on the last day of The Unbound Book conference, was the session on Future Publishing Industries. According to the program the session focused on the affordances and political economies of the publishing industry and libraries. Underneath a small summary of three of the papers presented on the panel and of the discussion afterwards.
James Bridle is a London-based publisher and an all-round creative person, who is involved in all kinds of book-shaped experiments. He finds himself in between and on the border of books, technologies of social reading, and literature. He, amongst others, devised the first book of Twitter, where he printed out his tweets in the form of a book. Bridle begins his talk by stating that there is a certain weight of expectation that people have concerning the physicality of the book. The physicality is what reveals the weight and cultural value given by people to a material object. What is it exactly that is so important about books, Bridle asks. Books exist in time. They exist through time. They are advertisements for themselves; you are immersed within the space of the reading process itself. You spend time with books and go on journeys. In this way books become the souvenir of their own experience. They are both a gift and the locus of more conversations around the book. The problem is, Bridle explains, that we have mistaken the temporality of the book for the physicality of the book. What we really care about is not about how books smell or feel in our hands. Ebooks create a cognitive difference because they don’t give the temporal qualities of the book: they are transient, they go away, and there is no way to enact temporal activities within them. This is starting to change though. Underlining, dog-earring, seeing your process as you go through the book; these instances of knowing where you are and of feeling that you are inside a book, in the space of a book, are being recreated online.
An important aspect of interaction with a book, Bridle states, is through making notes. Through note making we are in many ways doing something far more interesting with books. And we are encouraging people to have these interesting behaviors. However there are also weird behaviors around the book that we don’t talk about. For instance book guilt and the obsession of having to finish a book. Book fear, when you are unable to write in a book or book-ear. This is something that we can change however, Bridle states. We can now encode the totality of the reading experience. We can capture and engage with an archive. This is social reading, Bridle explains, something that provides a lasting and shareable experience. You can either keep them for yourself or share your thoughts. Bridle set up Open Bookmarks, to encourage certain behaviors, and to encourage best practices. Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers, according to Bridle, this is the direction publishing will be going into. Music wants to be recorded and almost all music is recorded. This is starting to happen with books too: books are subliming; they are going up in the air. But we need to keep our experiences intact and this is what publishers need to be involved in. Because this is where literature is going, and this is where the reader’s experience is going.
Nicholas Spice is the publisher of the London Review of Books, a literary magazine, tabloid, with an improved newsprint which appears twice a month. It has about 100.000 readers worldwide. They publish long-form essays on books and what comes out of these books. Spice explains how digital publishing has changed things much for the LRB, it for instance drastically changed the economics of distribution. The traditional distribution chain has been very inefficient, Spice explains. For literary books/magazines it has always been very hard to create readerships, as adverts and reviews are very hard to arrange. Bookselling is a very inefficient way of getting books to the public. High quality literature in the 1980s still had the same reach as it had in the 18th century. The old system was thus immensely inefficient. The change, according to Spice, has to do with the fact that at the LRB they don’t have to print and distribute anymore in order to reach the audience. People come to find them and find them naturally through search engines (instead of they finding them). The content sells itself; it has become an advert for itself. Also the form has hanged. Online the form has disaggregated; people don’t have to read the whole magazine anymore. This has changed the way people engage with the magazine. The output produced by the LRB has become both more and less ephemeral. Everything has now come to the surface; the whole history of the LRB is now online. The average time spend on the website is two minutes and that is quite good. But it is two hours on average with the physical form. The question is, can the LRB survive and flourish in this way? We are attracting very many new readers, Spice states. But the nature of the things and the mode of engagement with the reader have changed. New forms of creativity and literary production are coming up. One of them is the handling of critique and evaluation by the reader, instead of by critics themselves. Will the LRB be welcomed in this world in the long term? The difficulty is that it is an exclusive medium, not an inclusive one. It is the magazine to be in because it knows what to keep out. Editors and staff are sifting out everything. Complexity, difficulty, and things that take time and rarely succeed: that is the LRB. And it takes time: the editing, the writing, and the reading. Even the letters to the editors are heavily edited.
The LRB is very continuous with the main trust of intellectual endeavor since the start of civilization. It has taken years of practice to create objects of intense complexity and interest to the people who want these. Spice does not want to defend this tradition, but this has been what our civilization has been about: the philosophy of the book as being of supreme importance to us. We overestimate, romanticize, and fetishize certain things: the openness of form over completed things, fragmentation over linearity, the draft over what is finished, the spontaneous over what is considered. You can already find these tendencies back in the romantic age: the overvaluation of the social over the solitude. There is a fetishization of real-time over artificial time, Spice states. What happens spontaneously is supposed to be better than long form and contemplation. Is that adding value to the thing itself, Spice asks? Do these things add value to the text, the richness of the text? Is the real conflation to be found between information and the information chain and what we do with that information? What we make out of it to create value is necessarily slow. And the LRB is inherently dedicated to that tradition. Two main questions remain for Spice: can the LRB survive in that world? And, will this new environment be capable of breaking down the tradition of creating works against real-time?
Simon Worthington is one of the founders of Mute, which he started up 17 years ago together with Pauline van Mourik Broekman. Mute is published as a magazine (biannually). As Worthington states, they have always been experimenters in their long history of publishing. Worthington describes the present situation in the publishing world as a slow motion train rack. All these massively disruptive things are going on: the competition market, capitalism, the supposed long-tail and the long-tail of labor… Because of this situation, Mute has always been changing their publishing models. They are both a journal and a critical group in that area, always with a small public and in that sense always in a crisis. Mute started up with the web, in 1994. Their approach has always been free to share; they put all their stuff up online to support interaction with their readers. Their model is based on subscriptions and/or on buying print objects. In 2005 they moved into POD. This was an important change for the value chain and for how things move along, the quality of POD has improved and if needed they print in small runs and they can print internationally, without shipping costs, made possible by companies like Lightning Source.
They also work as a technologist group, making tools. At the moment for instance they are working on a project on e-conversion systems. They have been working in the open source community for a very long time. Their main problem has always been how to sustain a project. They have been trying to find ways to recompense themselves. POD did help a bit with distribution and costs in this respect, Worthington claims. If you have a commitment to free and open, the people at Mute look upon epublishing as the way to go. Looking at the tools that are there however, they decided that they do not all fit to their purposes, so they decided to make their own tools.
Worthington goes on to reflect upon the perceived anxiety about technology and its disruptivity on reading and on the fear of losing the book. He thinks this is a misplaced anxiety. These anxieties are better seen as the effects of global capitalism: that is why bookshops are closing. The return on profit is not high enough within retailing. The larger publishing industry has been a succession of buy-outs towards the creation of a global supply chain. Only the last few years ebooks have become a real thing. What is the trend now? It is a global supply chain. These kinds of pressures have been destroying the small bookshops and independent publishing.
Mute is a small publication, via ebooks and html5 they create things the reader wants to buy. But according to Worthington the future will be controlled by the Apples and Amazons of this world. It will be a vertical model, a capitalist control market. The securing of that market and the holding on to walled gardens is another example of the train-rack. In this situation you don’t know who your customers are anymore and they charge you 30% for controlling the market. These forces are much stronger than the changes in our reading habits etc.
Coming back to smaller publications, Worthington asks how they can be run. They are all nodes in a network of critical and cultural writers. The Eurozine conference reflected on the same issues, how to create a relationship with your audience that isn’t just about reading but about creating something like sustainability. This is very hard to do in a situation where in the UK the top ten publishers control 70% of the market. Donations and things like flat rates wont work they just don’t have the reach. Flat rates and state taxation will never happen and the market does not really welcome smaller publications. It is a hard nut to crack. For Mute, Worthington concludes, at the moment it is the combination of ebooks, html5 presentations and experiments with social reading that do it. But the situation stays precarious.
Questions
How will we be able to sustain the educational and quality aspect of publishing with so much trash and information around?
Simon: The web is dominated by brands. In that way the web mirrors the world we live in very closely. If that is publishing it seems to continue online
Nicholas: Cultural leaders will decide what is quality together. A large circulation of the LRB is always bums on seats and the internet makes that process more intensive.
James: We are going towards an editorship of crowds. Not that we are moving away from experts, but books have always been about recommendations to your friends and now they are just moving to the web. Access and filtering is something publishers have always done and it will increase this role online.
Simon: We need the disruption of the web: why does the meme exist? you need to break these things apart. In the UK the fixed book price disappeared and this has made the book industry and the retail industry collapse with the rise if the amazons etc. Localized variety will be destroyed by global apps and amazons.
How can we promote a culture of solitude? How do you envision that, what could be a next step?
Nicholas: We shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating two sorts of benefit and value. One of the best things of new media is the way it has facilitated contact between people, not only in virtual space but also in physical space, for instance with the LRB bookshop. This was impossible in the old system; you could not reach the people economically. But this is a benefit that has to do with social organization; it has nothing to do with the content and the value of the content and the things that are discussed. I think here solitude is very important. People can write books together but obviously they don’t do it. You cannot produce interesting thoughts quickly; you need to think them out. More than simple blogosphere blatter, we are talking about solitude and time. The evidence is not very strong that the content and value of what is being said is very high.
James: There is a huge conflation here with the social aspect. A blog doesn’t involve comments explicitly. Like everything it can be written solitary too, it is a tool. In the way we build these tools, it is very important to look at the way we use them. Open Bookmarks was also designed to read solitary. I want to see a shift in our emphasis on what these technologies can do to the reader. We can use these tools to create new experiences, almost all on the reader’s side. They can be valuable for them on the solitary side though; we should not force the social in them.
Bob Stein: These are all beautiful statements on all of the best things of print culture (akin to Sven Birkert). I don’t want to fight against that and I don’t design things that force people in a certain direction. It is however another thing altogether to want to figure out what the affordances of these new technologies are all about. For me the age of the individual is coming to an end, the way we are judged etc like this. Will these technologies lead to new societies? I want tot put it in the context of how deep the shift will be from print culture to digital culture
Nicholas: I think it would be wonderful that the individual would be less important, but I am more of a pessimist. I don’t see factual evidence of that changing and of the evidence of technology on changing people that much.
Simon: We need to look at the context of the whole media spectrum: it is about different ideas being in circulation. These experiments need to be run. You want to see what happens when more people write and explore ideas.
The ghost of the author is all around you. Shouldn’t we be cautious of sucking authors into the entertainment industry?
Nicholas: Authors are already part of an entertainment industry. The interesting thing is how the egos of authors will deal with the dispersion of their reputation. As Freud said, we write because of fame, money, and the love of women. The question is, how to get your thrills in the digital age?
James: Authors as performers is something that is not comfortable for me. Yes they have always doing this to some extent. I think we should provide authors with tools that support them. Writing is not such a solitary attitude; authors exist as parts of much larger networks and discussions. The world is what I am writing about so I am in the world when I am writing about it. The writer is also of the network. We are building these huge dichotomies of the web as social and the offline world as non-social and this is not helpful.
We have been discussing the social mob and the solitary individual. But what about the small team or group? If you take out the global industries, what the world looks like is small bands of groups of experts (publishers etc.) and small groups or experts of creators. They are still constrained groups, but not as large as society as large. There are expert bands on the one hand and technology bands on the other. Can we ask ourselves, can there be a way in the future for small expert groups to benefit from small groups of technologists? Blogging experts might also learn something from traditional experts. Can we combine expertise of all sorts on the one hand, and the social networked public knowledge on the other hand?
Simon: Small pockets and groups and the way they connect is very traditional and very physical sometimes. New tools need to be made, and some new kinds of practices need to come in place to let these groups know about each other.
Geert Lovink: We need to disassociate the book from the romanticized solitary author.
TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
Last week I attended a fascinating roundtable at Kingston University London which focused mainly on the position of electronic literature within the literary and artistic field and within academia more in specific. The roundtable, entitled From the page to the screen to augmented reality: new modes of language-driven mediated research, had as one of its preconceptions the idea that electronic literature is not given the attention and with that the status it deserves, especially within literary criticism. Within electronic literature one can say there is a very broad understanding of language in a multi-modular way. With the use of new technologies in language-mediated practices, new research platforms and research methods are being explored which has led to a rich variety of products. What unites creative practitioners and researchers is their exploration of the word and the abstract character of language and its materiality in different media in an experimental practice. The main question remains: why isn’t this work part of a more mainstream platform?
This question was one of the main topics of the keynote speech by Jay David Bolter entitled Elite and popular: digital art and literature in an era of social and locative media. Bolter paid specific attention in his talk to the cultural position of digital literature focusing on two major questions:
- How does digital literature relate to the traditional (academic) literary community or to the traditional art community?
- How does it fit into our culture’s media practices today?
To explore the first question, Bolter recollects one of the oldest debates on digital literary forms, the debate on hypertext in the 80′s and early 90′s. Recalling an 1992 NYT article by Robert Coover as a representative of the hypertext movement, it was thought hypertext could create a revolution in reading and writing. The reaction of the literary community to that claim could be seen as hostile and defensive: hypertext takes from the author the authorial voice. And, as Bolter states, although digital literature has developed and changed in manifold ways—blurring boundaries—the response of the literary community has not changed. Interestingly enough Bolter claims that where the academic community has ignored digital literature, within the art community digital art has had a more welcome incorporation. Although digital artists even so complain that they are not getting the recognition they deserve, the digital art community is much more involved in a dialogue with the wider art community than the digital literature community with the wider literary community. Bolter explains this situation by pointing out that art has from the beginning been opening up to multimedia and has been expanding its domain to that which was available, extending the definition of what constitutes art at the same time. Because of this specific precondition, digital art has had it easier to connect to these evolving conditions.
Screen. Installation by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Joshua Carroll. Video by Michelle Higa
When we look at the dialogue between electronic literature and the literary academy, the latter community has not been of much help. As Bolter states, the literary academic community does not want to concern itself with the questions brought up by experiments with electronic literature because of the specific cultural position literary scholarship has occupied. This cultural position is reflected in the tight relationship between the technology of print and the cultural research practice of literary academics. This is the kind of scholarship that can be defined as print scholarship. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Eisenstein, Bolter recollects that modern textual scholarship came about with the coming of the printing press. Modern textual scholarship is strongly coupled to the notion of fixity, to the notion of a stable text and author and to scholarly precision in the fixity of the text. So the printing press became the necessary tool for the kind of scholarship that developed. And, as Bolter argues, today the literary academy is still very much defined by the kind of practices that are defined by this fixity and stability of texts. This is also visible in digital text editions and digital scholarship which try to emulate the printed text, for instance the Perseus Project. The print methods are adopted in the digital world as scholarly traditions of the classics are being refashioned. And as Bolter points out, digital technology is particularly effective in doing this. The digital technology can even be said to be better than the printing press in preserving, transmitting and fixing by the use of digital technology.
Perseus Project
Before the start of the workshop the participants were send a list of questions to focus on (which you can find here). Bolter breaks these questions down into two streams
1. Questions on the formal/material and questions on the medium
Bolter claims that the literary community is not interested in both these questions where their focus remains on the printed text. However, electronic literature is not so much interested in emulating print literature. This idea of born-digital text re-mediating printed text was a phase common in the very beginning of electronic literary experimentation. Yet, as Bolter states, today electronic literature has evolved. Not even purely verbal digital texts are interested in mirroring printed text anymore. Electronic literature has become much more interested in the mixing of modalities. This has led to the question whether electronic literature is (still) literature or whether it is or has become art. A comparison is currently made between (experimental) electronic literature and the historical avant-garde, especially there where it concerns thinking about digital forms. However, as Bolter argues, seeing electronic literature in the light of this tradition is a phase within the development of digital literature that are we are moving beyond now as well. Nowadays the study of the materiality of the digital is central to the thinking about digital literature (like it is with other media forms). Where in the print era the focus would be on media specific analysis and on the technology of inscription, nowadays the focus is on multi-modality and the mixing of forms rather than on the plurality of forms. As Bolter claims, the literary academic community will not be off much help here either. His recommendation is to turn to the art community, where they have been thinking about the condition of the medium, in a multi-medial way, for many many years and where they have developed a solid body of criticism and theory to help us.
2. Questions of cultural practice and research.
Again here, Bolter claims, the kind of questions the traditional academic community wants to have answered are not well-related to the development of literary technology. For instance the tools they want to use for research are still very much focused on thinking about text in a print-based way: they focus on lexicography, archiving, philology etc. and not on the new practices that the digital informs. Once more Bolter states, the contemporary art scene and community are the places to look at for interesting dialogue.
Simon Biggs – reRead, Interactive Installation 2009
Bolter goes on to discuss the second question stated at the beginning of his talk: ‘How does digital literature fit into our culture’s media practices today?’ Here he turns to the practices commonly associated with web 2.0 or social media as another possible solution. We are experiencing new forms of digital communication on an enormous scale. These are facets of digital culture that form the popular background for any form of cultural production. As Bolter explains, this plenitude of contemporary media culture is increasingly hard to encompass in a general way. The main reason for this is ‘the loss of centrality’. We don’t really have a center for our culture anymore when it has become so diverse. There are now so many consumers, producers, and modes of production. It is increasingly difficult to claim that there is any form or practice that occupies a centrality. As Bolter clarifies, this is not any different from the situation in the 20th century, but we may have a different sense now of our cultural condition: we are drifting from the print era to a multimedia condition. In the era of print we still had the hope or aspiration of a cultural center. Again this relates to idea that we could fix our culture, that there are certain things that have centrality for our culture. Digital media make us aware of this plenitude perhaps in a way we did not know existed before. We now become aware of the many different forms that are available, non of which comprehend the digital community. We now have more users/producers than with any previous literary form. There are also many new forms that are just beginning to make an impression, like for instance augmented reality technologies, which allow us to write on the world. By writing in a mark-up language we are creating augmented reality experiences that create environments and we overlay these over real spaces. These kind of user created environments add again to this plenitude.
Still from TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
As Bolter repeats, we have so many choices now in terms of media forms and expressions that we cannot claim centrality anymore. What constitutes art in this domain when we have writing forms available to millions of people who do not necessarily participate in art communities? Bolter mentions the example of TXTual Healing created by Paul Notzold which mixes ‘elite’ and ‘popular’. The question is, is this art? Is it literature? Does it matter? Is that still a question we need to ask? Bolter argues for an expanded notion of digital writing, one that is not interested in connecting to any literary or artistic community but one that sees digital writing as a new media practice that loosens itself from these stamps,
For his concluding remarks Bolter focuses on the future of literature. The strong institutional inertia can enable literary forms in print to develop continuously. One consequence of this is that literature will be one of the limited types of writing that remains committed to print where so much more writing is connected to new media. This will be detrimental to literature’s status as it necessarily marginalizes itself if it stays committed to this medium. And if literature self stays anchored to print so the literary academy will also stay anchored in a kind of research that remains committed to print. Should digital literature set out a dialogue with the academic community to set out a new path and cultural practice? Bolter argues for another strategy: digital literature should set up a dialogue with the arts community and should focus on popular writing practices. It should relinquish the role of ‘the avant-garde of literature’ and it should find itself committed to other forms of dialogue with more popular forms of writing.
rr ii, by Joerg Piringer is a visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R.
What interested me the most in the debate that followed after Bolter’s keynote is how much it is akin to the debate surrounding the digital monograph in the Humanities (and to the debate surrounding the Digital Humanities more in general) in the sense that it very much focused on the issue of what defines electronic literature, the power struggles that revolve around this process of defining, and the question what kind of strategical position electronic literature should uptake.
Another similarity I found whilst listening to the discussions between the electronic text practitioners and researchers, with respect to the discourse surrounding the digital monograph is that also in the field of electronic literature the discussion can be stripped down and analyzed on three different levels: a medial level, an institutional level and a political economy level. In the following I shall try to summarize my notion of what the roundtable discussion was about along these three lines.
Still from Still Standing by Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis
The discussion on the medium focused mostly on how to redefine reading in a digital environment. Where are readers now and what are readers? The new generation seems to be lost on print literature. A whole new generation emerges that no longer reads in the traditional sense. Bolter reposed this statement by stating that text still has a strong position within education. This has lead to a situation in which many students don’t now how to read digital literature. A new reading logic needs to be developed, or a new logic of reading with which you start from scratch with every new project. This reading logic is also more than with print-based text very much connected to the body. We read a digital text differently because we interact with it. we loose something of its signification but we also gain things between the signification of the text and its manipulation. Digital text focuses more on play and esthetics. For instance in the work Still Standing, by and Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis, the meaning of the text lies in the body’s interaction with text in space. But perhaps the problem is not (only) with the reader but also with the writer. Interaction design is not a strong feature in most digital literature pieces. When a complicated use-interface is used, this is a problem of the writer and not of the reader. Finally the discussion centered on the problem of defining electronic literature where it is very much coupled to the idea of print, where for centuries literature was actually oral. There is actually a difference between textuality and literature.
Still from Birds Singing other Birds Songs, by Maria Mencia.jpg
In the discussion on how to define electronic literature within an institutional setting the statement was made that if electronic literature does not establish a connection with print, it will never get established as literature. This connection with art that Bolter proposes, turns it into a separate category. Maybe we should focus on a third space in which connections are sought both with the art world as well as with the literary aristocracy. This third space within an institutional setting could focus on digital culture where it can connect to broader forms of digital textuality. In this way electronic literature does not necessarily have to loose its ‘literaryness’. This third space is not about creating a new field but about re-conceptualizing the idea of electronic literature and asking different questions. This third space could also rise above the division made within the traditional academic community between theory and practice and the institution’s suspicion of practitioners. It could focus on interdisciplinarity and practical experimentation. The problem also has to do with the institutional difference between Art and Humanities departments. As a researcher-practitioner, are you in Arts or in the Humanities? It is about creating a new space within the institution. For now digital literature is hidden away in different spots within the university, from the literary department to the department of media or computer science.
As Scott Rettberg explains, the choice for the term electronic literature was a strategic choice, instead of going for a definition like a ‘language-based digital art form’ in which the idea of text as a specific material (like clay/paint etc.) would have been lost. As Rettberg states, digital textuality/electronic literature was a successful institutional strategy to frame it. Not that it is not digital art or that it is a fundamentally different thing, but we should have a lens that borrows something from the literary tradition.
Another part of the debate on the institutional context focused on how to establish quality criteria for electronic literature. How does a research-practice fit within the academic framework? What constitutes peer review for a performative piece, an installation, for electronic literature, and how do you get that recognized within an institutional framework? How can we create new peer review structures? How do you both fulfill academic ánd artistic criteria? How do we create interesting opportunities for practitioners to create work together, collaborative, and to learn techniques and strategies within an institutional setting? How do we create a new methodology?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz demo video by Joerg Piringer
The discussion on the position of electronic literature within the publishing industry and the wider realm of scholarly communication focused on the usual topics, from the debate of how to position oneself in the spectrum of closed and open models, to issues of copyright, governance and ownership of material. It also focused on the ubiquity and lack of transparency of various new media of publishing like Facebook. Are these the places were electronic literature should focus on, is that were they should be publishing? But what about the control over people’s data? Should we claim back these spaces as public spaces, or should we subvert these big company owned environments?
The discussion delved deeper into issues of openness and accessibility. Electronic text practitioners that work within a university setting have the opportunity to make their work openly available because they already have a salary, which in a way gives them the opportunity to be experimental. The problem is however that the present publishing system obliges you to give away your copyright. Within the Electronic Literature Organization however, they use a Creative Commons License [see update underneath]. The problem is that you can’t just put your work on the web, you need to think about copyright issues. This problem becomes more urgent when we think about developing economic structures for creative-practitioners outside of (or on partly within) academia. The culture of free can be detrimental for practitioners outside of the university. What kind of value does free put on your work? On the other hand you could argue that the economic value of art does not only lie in a consumable product (this is a very 19th century economic model), it lies in many things, amongst others in the process of creation and the context in which it is produced and exhibited. Also new models are being set up which recognize this problem and which try to find a solution. Still, the models are most likely going to change. As an electronic writer you need to become a strategic producer within this new framework.
The Electronic Literature Organization hosts many beautiful works on their website. You can find some stunning collections here, here, and here.
Update 02-08-2010:
Davin Heckman from the Electronic Literature Organization was kind enough to provide me with some additional information about the ELD and its copyright license by mail. Underneath a digest of his email.
The ELD does not publish any works except the brief, descriptive entries themselves. As the ELD Handbook states:”Basically, if you write them, you are free to publish it elsewhere as you wish. In addition, the work published here is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/>. In a nutshell, this means that others will be free to use your work for non-commercial purposes as long they provide appropriate attribution and do not alter it (unless, of course, you give them permission to do so).”
The ELO provides the umbrella for the ELD and ELC. Basically, the ELC and ELD are two separate projects. The ELC is a peer-reviewed venue for publishing works of electronic literature, to give artists a venue for publication, to give new readers an interesting way “in” to the field. The ELD is much more open in terms of what we can index. There is, however, an editorial process in place to make sure that the entries themselves meet certain criteria that might make them suitable for use in scholarly projects. The ELD is more of a bibliographic project, geared towards providing a user-built guide to the field as a whole.
Nicola Dale - Browser (2008)
Definitions are intrinsically time-bound. Imagine the fundamental question of ‘What is a book’. To ask this question at this moment in time means we have to take into account the present transformation or remediation of the book. Definitions concerning the nature of the book need to bare in mind its past as well as its potential future. Any definition is for this reason a highly contextual one. The concept of the book has always been flexible as books are constantly evolving, as is our perception of them. Books have survived various medial changes and they (or we) have always found a way to adapt to their new carriers: from scroll to codex and from paperback to e-book. Rather than to pin-down a static definition of the book, we are better of seeing (the concept of) the book as an unfolding process.
I would like to take a look at a few theorists who, since the coming of the Internet and digital media, have tried to problematize and re-think the definition(s) of the book that were in use before the digital era. To determine whether there exists a common denominator to define the book, and if so, what it is, these theorists have focused on a few aspects of the book. By looking at its specific materiality, and at the way the book’s carrier differs from and influences its content (text), and by comparing the book with other media, they collectively guide the conversation of what a book is and should be, further into the future.
On if:book, the group blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, some interesting posts on the concept of the book have appeared over the last few years, written by the institute’s staff. Dan Visel, in a post entitled What we talk about when we talk about books (2006), explains how there actually are two main discourses surrounding the book: one that focuses on the physical form of the book (the book as a specific reading-device) and one that focuses on the content of the book. He explains how these discourses have eventually led to some confusion in the digital world were an e-book for many people could mean both the content itself, as well as its carrier (more commonly known as an e-reader). In his post Visel examines how the so-called limited character of the printed book is being challenged by the potentially evolving content of the online edition. He wonders where we draw the boundaries with so-called networked books. Are the texts it connects to via hyperlinking part of the book? Are the readers’ comments part of the book?
Kevin Kelly, Internet dinosaur and one of the founders of Internet-magazine Wired, states in his essay Scan this book! (2006) that a book can hold essentially everything. In his ideal future of the book, the book becomes a kind of synecdoche of the ‘universal library’. As Kelly states, the universal library will consist of ‘the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.’ In this world of networked books, no book will be an island (as they are in the print world). Each book will be integrated and connected by means of links and tags. Books transform into one universal book. As Kelly writes: ‘in a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.’
Interestingly enough, in Kelly’s view this universal book will incorporate all media, textual media as well as for instance sound and visual media. The writers on the if:book blog wonder however if we, when we use such a broad concept of the book, will not turn it into a meaningless term. Will the book in the end still be a useful concept to use in the online world?
As Roger Sperberg states, in an if:book post entitled What is a book? (2006), a book is foremost something you read, distinguishing it from media that we watch or listen to. He feels that some way or another ‘text’ should remain on the foreground, where text involves a certain amount of what he calls ‘commitment’ from the reader:
‘But if “book” no longer means the intellect is permitted to come to the foreground in this way, if text and how it requires this is diminished to insignificance, then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and what we have then will perhaps be entertaining and educational and absorbing, but it will not be a book, whatever label attaches to it.’
Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies
Sperberg wonders at what point, with all theses multimedia additions in the online world, we still recognize a ‘book’ as a book. What is the essence of a book? Sperberg feels we should be able to distinguish some salient features or expectations of the book. Visel agrees where he states in his previously mentioned post that we should be looking at similarities and relationships between the objects we commonly denote as books. But both Visel as well as Sperberg admit that this remains a non bullet-proof approach. Sperberg finally throws it on intuition (‘we will know a book as we see it’) and Visel concludes there will probably be multiple futures of the book.
Where in Kelly’s utopian future the (printed) book will in the end give way to the screen as the dominant medium or device for reading, the viewpoints of Robert Darnton—the renowned book historian—are more inline with Visel’s, where Darnton foresees a hybrid future for the book. In his seminal article The New Age of the Book (1999) he gives a more practice-based outlook on the book, based on the way books are actually being used at the moment. From these usages he distills a future scenario in which printed books and e-books will continue to exist side-by-side. E-books will become an extension of printed books, an add-on. The book as a reading device is just way too good a format to store and communicate information, Darnton explains. It is a very usable format. Furthermore, reading from screens remains an inferior experience, not to say a real hassle for many people. As Darnton concludes, ‘in short, the old-fashioned codex, printed on folded and gathered sheets of paper, is not about to disappear into cyberspace’.
Darnton’s concept of the book is a hybrid one, one that expands from paper into the digital realm. The digital is a supplement or (in some cases) the paper edition is an abstract. The electronic part is particularly useful for certain publics (especially scholars) and certain purposes (scanning, referencing, searching for information). But Darnton does not believe people will in the end read whole books online. Furthermore, he introduces the importance of the cultural practices and institutional and political economy surrounding the book in academia. In a culture in which the printed book plays such an important role in reputation structures, he wonders whether electronic monographs will essentially be acknowledged as books in these communities.
Nicola Dale - The world as I see it (2007)
The approach to the book of literary critic Katherine Hayles—a specialist in the field of electronic literature—is again a different one. Her focus lies not on the way readers’ usage of books determines its future shape, but on the way the specific materiality of a text influences its meaning, and with that our interpretation of the text. As Hayles claims in her article Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality (2003), one of the main problems with trying to define the book as it is being ‘translated’ into a digital format (which she sees as a re-interpretation of the book) is that, as she states, ‘our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been generally recognized as such.’
In Hayles’ vision of the book as it is transforming she agrees with Visel and Sperberg, where in analyzing this process we should think of correspondences (and as Hayles also adds, of dissimilarities!) instead of ontologies. For Hayles it seems however more interesting to look at the processes of the translation of texts from print to the online than looking at the book and e-book as specific objects. We should try to find out what the differences in materiality are between print and electronic textuality and how this specific materiality influences the way we perceive a text. In Hayles’ vision the format of the book and its content are intrinsically connected, and in this way she pulls together and incorporates the two separate discourses surrounding the book mentioned earlier by Visel. Text is not dematerialized and is dependant on its carrier.
Hayles argues that when we claim the digital is immaterial, we bring along our print-centered notions. Thes kind of notions can be found in both the work of Kelly, as well as in the work of someone who in many ways can be seen as Kelly’s opponent, Sven Birkerts. Birkerts is a literary critic and author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), a work very critical of electronic media and online reading. Both in Birkerts’ as well as in Kelly’s view digital text can be seen as missing a specific materiality. With Kelly this immateriality of text and its translation into binary code leads him to perceive all online media as one digital muddle, giving it the potential to mix and recombine with other dematerialized media into ‘a single liquid fabric’. In Birkerts’ opinion on the other hand this immateriality is a big loss. In The Gutenberg Elegies he states that ‘nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page is a thing. The configuration of impulses on a screen is not (…)’ For Birkerts it is very important that the materiality of print fixes the word, where the fleeing and weightless character of online text is detrimental to the autonomy of the word and eventually, as Birkerts concludes, it will be detrimental to the autonomy of the self.
But as Hayles tries to argue, we cannot perceive of a text as an ‘immaterial construction independent from its carrier.’ Books undergo a transformation when they enter the digital domain, an aspect too easily neglected by for instance Kelly. Text is not simply digital bits; in its digital counterpart it also has a specific form or materiality. As Hayles writes, electronic textuality ‘cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.’ In her view of the specificity of digital texts, text becomes a distributed phenomenon. She sees a text as an embodied entity, which in the virtual world can be embodied in various reading devices.
Hayles seems to push the discussion on the book to a higher level where in her view we can not determine or distract what a book is from (looking at) its materiality. We can only look at the way the book’s physicality influences the way we perceive a text. We can only look at a book’s content and how this is influenced by its materiality, in which this materiality can, as Hayles sees it, extend beyond the individual object. A text’s materiality is an interaction between the specific format the text is molded in and the specific meaning or content of the text. As Hayles concludes, in this discourse ‘texts would routinely be discussed both in terms of their conceptual content and their physical embodiments.’
From this short review of different attempts to describe the ever-changing phenomenon of the book, it seems there are various (perhaps even inexhaustible) ways to analyze this increasingly distributed phenomenon. We can look at the similarities and dissimilarities of the different shapes the book shifts into, and we can compare these with the appearances of other media; we can look at the way we ‘recognize’ a book, both in its more intuitive sense as well as the in the way we acknowledge something as a book within certain cultural discourses; we can look at the way a book is used, or we can look at its utopian or dystopian potential as a theoretical concept extracted from its format; and, we can focus on its specific materiality or on a combination of a particular device and its content. All approaches, from looking at the medium to looking at its usage and the discourses surrounding it, seem to add some flavor to the discussion. Perhaps we can only get closer to the transforming book by accepting and stimulating such a plurality of viewpoints. Just like the book itself, the discussion on the book will keep on expanding further into the digital future.
I just finished reading Proust and the Squid, the fascinating book by Maryanne Wolf about how we developed and acquired a ‘reading brain’. Although sometimes a little dense in its use of linguistic terminology, it is a very nice read and highly recommended if you are interested in the way we developed one of the most precious gifts available to mankind: the ability to read and write. If Wolf does one thing with this book, it is give you back the amazement pertaining to your own capability to read; to make out meaning out of tiny shapes and forms on paper and their linguistic, grammatical and semantic connections, literally in the blink of an eye. Wolf not only describes how we as a species adapted our brains over centuries to be able to read and write (which is not an innate capability), but also describes how children every day in a limited time-span are required (and able) to do the same thing. She also describes everything that can go wrong in this process, discussing various reading disorders and their origins in a different mind or brain ‘set-up’ or arrangement. After having read this you will truly realize what a wonder it is you now seem to be reading this text so naturally and smoothly as you actually are (I hope!).
She ends her book with a reflection on the future development of our writing capabilities and skills in a world that will increasingly be dominated by screens and where oral and visual communication and literacies will again be more stimulated. She is neither skeptic nor overly enthusiastic about these developments, bringing back into memory Socrates objections to written knowledge, but also the many positive things text culture has brought to humanity. At the same time the present shifts to new forms of literacy should be judged on their face-value. We will learn new things and develop
many new (mental) capabilities, but should also try to preserve the mind-set associated with writing, becoming in a way as she calls it bi- or multitextual, thus still being able to analyse a text in multiple manners, capable of ‘probing what lies beneath any form of information.’ There are some good reviews of the book here and here. I would like to finish with a nice quote from the end of the book:
“In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking, reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms. Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis. Perhaps, like the memorable image captured in 600 BCE of a Sumerian scribe patiently transcribing cuneiform beside an Akkadian scribe, we will be able to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both of them are precious.”
As already hyped over the Net, Nick Cave (the multitalented Australian singer, screenwriter, actor, writer and what have you) is releasing his second book The Death of Bunny Munro. Surrounding the presentation of his new book, Cave, assisted by publisher Canongate, is launching a huge marketing campaign using all digital/new media marketing possibilities to promote Bunny. This viral operation, combined with the aura surrounding Cave, makes this a very interesting endeavor to take a closer look at.
First of all, what is the book about? From the publisher’s website:
“The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man’s descent and judgement. The novel is full of the linguistic verve that has made Cave one of the world’s most respected lyricists. It is his first novel since the publication of his critically acclaimed debut And the Ass Saw the Angel twenty years ago.”
I have not (yet) read Cave’s first novel (mentioned above) but love his song writing, and although, as novelist Will Self states in his amazing review on Cave as a writer, writing good song lyrics is not the same as writing a good book or poem, Self (with me agreeing – I hope) seems to make an exception when it comes to Cave. From his review, entitled Dark Matter (originally published in The Guardian):
“Cave, as a poetic craftsman, provides all the enjambment, ellipsis and onomatopoeia that anyone could wish for. A word on eroticism and the dreadful dolour of knowing not only that all passion is spent – but also that you’re overdrawn. If Cave were to be typified as a lyricist of blood, guts and angst, it would be a grave mistake. He stands as one of the great writers on love of our era. Each Cave love song is at once perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss to come. For Cave, consummation is always exactly that.”
This promises quite a lot and the fact that Cave’s writing skills extend to prose does not surprise me, although it does make one a little envious of such an unlimited talent.
Published by Canongate, the UK publication of Bunny is planned for September 3rd 2009. Accompanying the book release a beautifully designed website has been created, on which one can (of course) find more information about the book, reviews (reviews from the Australian release are already up here) and information about the events surrounding the release. As this is an international release, being published in 31 countries around the world, these events are an important part of the campaign. Cave is doing webchats, interviews, evenings and talk sessions all over the world. These events will not only gather there own revenue but will definitely also promote the sales of the book. Cave is also booked to come to Amsterdam, states his Dutch publisher J.M. Meulenhoff: On the 14th of October Cave will ‘do’ the renowned venue Carré (an evening with Nick Cave) – press interviews afterwards. Knowing these Carré events, tickets will probably go for around 100 euros. Good plan Nick.
Still, nothing out of the ordinary here. What makes this such an interesting multimedia release however is the fact that Cave simultaneously releases an audiobook version, read by the man himself, with an accompanying soundtrack created by Cave and Warren Ellis (who worked before with Cave on The proposition and in his Grinderman project). The soundtrack uses a ‘3D audio spatial mix’, specially designed for listening on headphones and thus, as the website states ‘creating a fully immersive experience for the listener’. Next to that one can also find videos on the Bunny site (and on Youtube) showing Cave reading from the book (detail: notice bling-bling rings on fingers) – again accompanied by the aforementioned soundtrack: all creating the necessary buzz around the persona or brand of Cave. I watched some of it, and, in a part which recalls a kind of absurdist Ellis, I especially liked chapter 11 part 1.
You can buy or order different formats of the book: the signed, numbered and slipcased limited edition (up to 120 pounds and increasing with every sale – real fans buy everything). The standard hardback, the ebook in EPUB format, an audiobook box set (with DVD of Cave reading extracts from the book) and an audio download will also be available. This multimediality offers the reader all kinds of entrances into the narrative, providing choice and convenience. The Guardian zooms in on this aspect in a very good analysis of these kinds of ‘enhanced book editions’ that will be available for the iPhone:
“The Enhanced Edition does some of the things we’re now accustomed to seeing as standard in electronic texts: you can faff with fonts, change colour, bookmark it, and so on; and there’s some smart social networking stuff attached. But it also includes enhancements that could have a noticeable effect on the experience of reading. Instead of paginating the book conventionally, it’s presented as a continuous vertical scroll (one geek-pleasing trick is that you can adjust the scrolling speed with the angle of tilt of the phone), and the App includes an audiobook that syncs with the written text. Pop on the headphones, thumb the screen and Cave’s voice picks up where you left off.”
The Guardian seems very enthusiastic about the possibilities these kinds of experiments might bring to our reading experience: making it less monolithically text based and more immersed with our other senses, experiencing mixed media at the same time, as we are increasingly more used to nowadays anyway:
“This is interesting. It could be regarded as a gimmick, but if it catches on, it will subtly change the way we experience fiction. If you half-read, half-listen to a book, your experience of reading will partly be shaped by the voice of the audiobook; your memories of the text will be coloured by how you took it in, passage by passage. (…) So, some whiffs of roses and haddock. But the breadth of the package, it seems to me, is at the very least a weathervane. There’s no ignoring the fact that the e-book will, not too far from now, compete with the paperback; and the likelihood is that some readers won’t just use them to read. It’s a longstanding truism to say that every reader reads a different book. As more packages like this find their way to market, the book itself, as well as its readings, will become more plural, more blurred, and less monolithically booky. Smells good to me.”
Well, I am ready for the experience and will try to read the book simultaneously with the audiobook; as I am a fast reader I wonder if Nick can keep up with me, but maybe the rich baritone of his voice will keep my eyes gripped on the words a little longer.
Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech:
“To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. …
Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.”
After his inbox flooded with messages, Eggers send out a bulk email response proclaiming a foreseeable future in which print and books will still play a large role. In order to make that happen, publishers (his own McSweeney’s on front) need to focus on finding a good niche to compete with the digital and this niche, according to Eggers, lies in creating a high quality product with an emphasis on design and experiences that are not duplicatable on the web. From the email:
“Pretty soon, on the McSweeney’s website— www.mcsweeneys.net— we’ll be showing some of our work on this upcoming issue, which will be in newspaper form. The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper
model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive. We’re convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space— if you really truly give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web— then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat.
It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”
I think his arguments also hold for academic books in the long run. Where printed monographs are also slowly but increasingly moving to the web, their printed version might still have some endurance. One of the models now proposed to sustain Open Access book publishing in the Humanities focuses mostly on an online, free Open Access edition and a paid for print edition, consisting of cheaply and in short (even single digits) print run produced POD books. The remit in this model lies predominantly in the sales from these POD books (for those people who still prefer to read from print) or added services on top of the online edition. It might however also be interesting to look into a market of deluxe editions of certain (probably only the best selling monographs and classics) books that people still want to ‘posses’ and pay for because they are beautifully designed or just nice to look at. Different readers, different markets; and just look at vinyl…
One of the most heard objectives against eBooks (let alone against Open Access eBooks) is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, where long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the screen.
Reading attitudes are changing however. In Europe some interesting initiatives are taking place concerning eBooks and their usage. JISC, the UK based Joint Information Systems Committee, recently launched the JISC National eBooks Observatory Survey for which they placed e-textbooks into 120 UK universities. With over 20.000 responses to their survey, this makes it one of the largest eBook surveys ever undertaken. At a presentation about this project at the London Book Fair of this year, David Nicolas, a member of the eBooks Observatory research team, said that eBooks have reached the tipping point. The reading behavior of students is changing as they are much less reading the whole book online as they are viewing the book. This means that the whole book is no longer the unit of consumption in an online environment but rather chapters or even paragraphs.
As the preliminary research results of the eBook Observatory project show, people are reading books on their computers. For it shows that more than 53 per cent of eBook users only read from the screen, regardless of age group! Although, as Nicolas points out, much of the reading has a high ‘dipping in and out’ character, the question remains if this is such a big change from reading a print book. Are we still reading a whole (academic) book from cover to cover?
In order to find out if scholars and students in the Humanities will increasingly read monographs online, a lot more eBook content is needed in this field. This is one of the targets of the OAPEN project. OAPEN is a European project in Open Access publishing for Humanities monographs, led by a consortium of University-based academic publishers from all over Europe. Next to creating a sustainable Open Access model for monograph publishing, the project wants to collect a critical mass of Open Access content. This content will be presented for everyone to use in an online Open Access library. The OAPEN project might not only create critical mass for the advance of Open Access (business models) in the Humanities, but also for research about changing user needs, as the JISC survey has done. And as these two innovative projects show or will show, people are reading books from a screen and probably will do so increasingly. And with this one of the main objectives against Open Access eBooks is being more and more contested.
Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part I)
June 30, 2011 in Art, Copyright, Ebooks, Information and knowledge, Lectures and Conferences, Reading | Tags: AAAARG.ORG, Adrian Johns, Agrippa book of the dead, Alan Liu, attention, Authority, Avaxsearch.com, binding, Bob Stein, Books, broadsides, CD-ROM, Commentpress, David Stairs, DRM, Ebooks, Elisabeth Eisenstein, expanded books, fixity, Florian Cramer, future of the book, Geert Lovink, Henry Warwick, HyperCards, hyperlinks, Hypertext, Institute for the Future of the Book, iTunes, Johanna Drucker, John Cayley, McKenzie Wark, Networked Books, New Media, p2p networks, Peter Stallybrash, Piracy, place, Publishing, Raymond Queneau, Reading, shared attention, social reading, Textz.com, The Voyager Company, unbinding, Unbound Book Conference, Unbound books, William Gibson | 1 comment
Last month I attended The Unbound Book conference, a three day gathering of experts on books, publishing and reading, to collaboratively explore the future of the book and the transformation of reading, publishing and learning. Belated I wrote out my notes on some of the most striking lectures, a mere add-on to the amazing documentation that already accompanies the conference, which can all be found on the conference website. Video recordings of all the sessions were made, and all the talks were also live-blogged by students of the MA in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Their reports of the talks can be found here.
“A long form of attention intended for the permanent, standard and authoritative i.e. socially repeatable and valued communication of human thought and experience (usually through narrative, argumentative or other programmatic organizations of bound-together yet discrete textual, graphic, and haptic elements”
What has changed now are the cultural significances of the book in this time. Features that are emphasized now are long form of attention, permanent, standard, authoritative. Book historian Elisabeth Eisenstein wrote about the standardization and fixity of the book. Even people who are skeptical of these attributes still see them as attributes of the book.
Liu draws our attention to the focus on materiality within new book historical studies. Materiality is seen as historically situated and highly irregular. He paraphrases Peter Stallybrash on the navigation of the bible, a non-linear, hyper-referenced book. The codex and printed books were books of discontinuity. This is also the basis of Adrian Johns’ critique of Elisabeth Eisenstein: the printed book was very irregular. The physical book is thus no more long, standard or authorative as any other online form. The rhetoric focuses on the end of the book: the book is dying, it is heading towards a postmodern heath death into entropy: atomic bites. Reading is at risk, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The death of the bookstore is near. Books are becoming shorter; Liu calls this the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking book, mirroring a recent trend in online publishing. In a way we are going back to broadsides. On a microscale this is visible in for instance the WordPress plugin Commentpress, where books have become paragraph-sized, with their own crowd-sourced comments.
Liu discusses several online book projects related to this idea, including William Gibson’s Agrippa book project. This is not a book, Liu states, as a material longue durée; it is a reality that the long-lasting representation of the book revolves around the book as a long swirl of public discourse, without the actual book actually existing. The book is a long-form of attention that we as a culture crave and which we need to find in the future. The book is a discourse; it is the whole discussion that evolves around it in a culture. The book is thus not a thing (physical book/ebook) but a long form of shared attention.
A video made for the Unbound Book conference by the Rietveld students Adrian Camenzind, Louisa Gagliardi and Lydia Sachse.
The session entitled The unbound book was introduced by Geert Lovink. He stated that this session would not look into the question of morals or into what we have lost or gained—the question of ethics—but that it will look beyond good and evil at the process of the unbinding of the book itself. The unbinding of the book as we witness it right now is very much part of the explosion of the amount of information and the related need to search and visualize this enormous amount of information.
It has come abound in the iTunes model (Amazon’s Kindle ebook store) vs. p2p network sharing (aaaaarg). Cramer compares it with the development of music. Music files haven’t become interactive, what has changed is that they are now being massively shared, what is shared however are simple audio files. What is being swapped on aaaarg are plain vanilla PDF and text files. Electronic books have moved from the codex to the computer file, which can be seen as a hybrid of the codex and the scroll. Developing a book as a software exploitation of it self is very expensive and it needs to be updated. It just does not scale. Epub and PDF works because it is not multimedia and linear.
These developments led to Stein seeing a book as a place. A place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate. According to Stein reading will increasingly take place in the browser, not in mobile apps or in proprietary non-browser based readers, which would be way too complicated. HTML5 offers many possibilities to create beautiful interactive books. That is why Stein devised the online platform for social reading called Social Book. With a group of colleagues he build an eco-system for publishing that sees books as places were people gather. Stein explains how Social Book distinguishes 4 flavors of social reading. Firstly having a conversation with people in the margin of a book. Secondly it means having access to all the comments other people made. Social also means extracting an experts comments, it is a guide through a book. Fourthly it offers interaction with the author(s). Social thus means being able to engage with authors asynchronously or in real time inside the book.