by MMills -

Other Electronic Books: Print Disability and Reading Machines

A guest post by Mara Mills, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. Mills is currently researching the history of talking books and reading machines.

The demand for “print access” by blind people has transformed the inkprint book. Some scholars today distinguish between e-books and p-books, with the “p” standing for print, yet already by the early twentieth century blind people and blindness researchers had partitioned “the book” and “reading” into an assortment of formats and practices, including inkprint, raised print, braille, musical print, and talking books. In turn, electrical reading machines—which converted text into tones, speech, or vibrations—helped bring about the e-book through their techniques for scanning, document digitization, and optical character recognition (OCR).

The first such reading machine, the Optophone, was designed in London by Edmund Fournier d’Albe in 1913. A “direct translator,” it scanned print and generated a corresponding pattern of tones.  Vladimir Zworykin (now known for his work on television) visited Fournier d’Albe in London in the 19-teens and saw a demonstration of the Optophone. At RCA in the 1940s, he built a reading machine that operated on the same principles, followed by an early OCR device that spelled out words letter by letter using a pre-recorded voice on magnetic tape.  John Linvill began working on an optical-to-tactile converter—the Optacon—in 1963, partly as an aid for his blind daughter.  Linvill soon became chair of the electrical engineering department at Stanford, and the Optacon project became central to early microelectronics research at the university. Linvill and his collaborator, Jim Bliss, believed that a tactile code was easier to learn than an audible one, because the analogy between visible and vibratory print was more direct (both formats being two-dimensional). Extending the technique of character recognition (rather than direct translation), in 1973 Raymond Kurzweil launched the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind, a text-to-speech device with multi-font OCR. As he recalls in The Age of Spiritual Machines, “We subsequently applied the scanning and omni-font OCR to commercial uses such as entering data into data bases and into the emerging word processing computers. New information services, such as Lexis (an on-line legal research service) and Nexis (a news service) were built using the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine to scan and recognize written documents.”

Harvey Lauer, one of the foremost experts on twentieth-century reading machines, was the blind rehabilitation and technology transfer specialist at the Hines VA Hospital for over thirty years. Colleagues Robert Gockman and Stephen Miyagawa have called him “the ‘father’ of modified electronic devices for the blind and the ‘Bionic Man’ of the Central Blind Rehabilitation Center.” Lauer attended the Janesville State School for the Blind, where he studied music and tinkered with electronics and audio components. He earned his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1956 and his M.S. in Vocational Counseling from Hunter College the following year.  Shortly before his retirement from the VA in 1997, Lauer wrote a speculative paper on the “Reading Machine of the Future.” By that time, personal computers were common and flatbed scanners were becoming affordable for home use. Text-to-speech software was beginning to replace the standalone reading machine. Yet the increasing complexity of graphical user interfaces inhibited blind computer users, and a conservative approach to reading (i.e. tying print to speech) was embedded in commercial OCR software. Lauer advocated a “multi-modal reading aid” with braille, tonal, vibratory, and speech outputs for translating text and graphics. With Lauer’s permission, I’ve excerpted the following selection from his unpublished article.

 

READING MACHINE OF THE FUTURE
BUT THE FUTURE WON’T JUST HAPPEN

Harvey Lauer
September 12, 1994

From 1964 to the present, I have used, tested and taught fourteen reading machines and many more devices for accessing computers.  Working for the Department of Veterans Affairs, formerly the Veterans Administration, I saw much progress and several lessons forgotten.

The system I feel we really need will have a choice of modalities—speech, Braille, large print and dynamic graphic displays.  It will be configurable according to the user’s needs and abilities. It will scan pages into its memory, process them as best it can, and then allow us to read them in our choice of medium.  Automatic sequencing would be our first choice for easily-scanned letters, articles and books.  But it will also let us examine them with a keyboard, a tablet, a mouse or perhaps tools from Virtual Reality. It will offer us any combination of speech, refreshable braille or large print as well as a verbal description of the format or layout.  Because we will be able to use that description to locate what we want to read, it will be easier to use than current OCR machines, but not larger. When we also need to examine shapes, we will switch on tonal and/or vibratory (graphical) outputs.  As I have noted, examining the shape of a character or icon is far easier than reading with such an output.

In short, the system will offer a three-level approach to reading.  The first choice is to have a page or screenful of text recognized and presented either as a stream of data or as data formatted by the machine.  We can now do that with OCR machines.  At the second level, we can choose to have the machine describe items found on pages or screen displays and their locations.  We can have either brief descriptions or descriptions in “excruciating detail.”  We can then choose items by name or characteristics. That won’t always be sufficient, so we will have a third choice.  We can choose to examine portions of the page or individual items found by the machine, using speech, braille characters, a display of tones, an array of vibrators, a graphic braille-dot display or magnified and enhanced images. Once the basic system is developed, it will constitute a “platform” for people like us to test its practical values and for researchers to test new ideas for presenting information to humans.

It’s 1997.  You place a page on your scanner.  It could be a recipe, a page from a textbook or part of a manual.  You direct the machine to scan it into memory.  You suspect that it isn’t straight text, so you don’t first direct the machine to present it in speech or braille.  You request a description of the format and learn that the machine found two columns of text at the top, a table, and a picture with a caption.  It also noted there were some tiny unidentified shapes, possibly fractions.

You then turn to your mouse (or other tracking device) which you move on an X/Y tablet.  (This concept of a tablet was best articulated by Noel Runyan of Personal Data Systems in Sunnyvale, California.) You switch to freehand tracking and examine the rest of the page for gross features, without zooming.  You find the table, plus what appears to be a diagram and some more text.  With the mouse at the top of that text, you switch to assisted tracking.  Now the system either corrects for mistracking or the mouse offers resistance in one or the other direction, depending upon your choices.  As you scan manually, the text is spoken to you.  After reading the block of text, you read the caption and examine the table.  You find that some of the information needs to be read across columns, and some makes sense only when read as columns.  You are thankful that you don’t have an old-fashioned OCR, screen reader and Optacon to tackle this job.

Then you find a longer piece of data you want to copy, so you “block and copy” it to a file.  In examining the diagram, you find tiny print you want to read, but the OCR can’t recognize it, so you zoom in (magnify) and switch to the mode in which shapes can be examined.  Depending on your equipment and your abilities, you can have them presented as vibrating patterns on an Optacon array, as tone patterns, as a graphic, dot image on a rapidly-refreshing array of braille dots, or as a combination of those modalities.  You may or may not have the skill to read in this way; few people make the effort to develop it nowadays.  What you do is examine the characters slowly and trace the lines of drawings in which you are interested.

With the new instrument, we won’t have to give up nearly as often and seek sighted assistance.  Optacon users will no longer have to remove the page and search about with camera in hand as if reading a map through a straw.  Computer users will still have our screen access software.  OCR users will still have their convenient, automatic features.  However, when you use a current OCR machine to scan a page with a complex format, the data is frequently rearranged to the point where it’s unusable.  Such items as titles, captions and dollar amounts are frequently scrambled together.  It makes me feel as if I am eating food that someone else has first chewed. With the proposed system, when its automatic features scramble or mangle our data, we can examine it as I have described.

The exciting point is this:  The proposed integrated system with several optional modules would harness available technology to allow us to apply the wide gamut of human abilities among us to a wide gamut of reading tasks.  In 1980, I presented this idea in a paltry one-page document added to an article about reading machines.  I then called it the Multi-dimensional Page Memory System.  I’ve given it a new name—the Multi-modal Reading Aid.

 

by Davis Schneiderman -

40 Ruminations on the Future of DEAD/BOOKS

1. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished to forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

2. And yet the first obstacle is certainly the book itself—clunky and musty and shouting nonsense all the time. Thus the first solution is to re-make the book into a two-way communication node; cast it as self-aware in some small sense, gesturing toward the contradictions of its authorial positions.

3. A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A book produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book or e-book.

4. A store where books are bought and sold is a bookstore or bookshop. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. In 2010, Google estimated that there were approximately 130 million distinct books in the world.[1]

5. His novel BLANK was published by Jaded Ibis Press in March 2011. The novel consists of 20 chapter titles that Schneiderman has claimed in an HTMLgiant.com interview follows morphological structures in line with the work of Vladimir Propp. The titles, such as “A Character” or “Another Character”, are separated by blank pages that contain 20 randomly spaced pyrographic or burn illustrations by artist Susan White. Additionally, the work has a “soundtrack” of three remixed Bach tracks from DJ Spooky. These tracks are available as part of a $7500 fine-art edition of the novel, which comes encased in a plaster. The plaster must be broken by the reader to access the blank novel. Jaded Ibis does full-spectrum publishing, and Blank will be available in an e-book edition and a color edition to supplement the black-and-white commercial edition.

6. E Ink (electrophoretic ink) is a specific proprietary type of electronic paper manufactured by E Ink Corporation, founded in 1997 based on research started at the MIT Media Lab. It is currently available commercially in grayscale and color[1] and is commonly used in mobile devices such as e-readers and, to a lesser extent, mobile phones and watches.

7. BLANK signals Schneiderman’s move toward conceptual writing, which is also reflected in a number of his recent web publications called the “Un-Death of the Author” series. In these, Schneiderman publishes well-known literary works under his name, as per the prologue to The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English), that appear on a 2010 edition of the website Publishing Genius.

8. The adverb [SIC]—meaning “intentionally so written”—first appeared in English circa 1856.[2] It is derived from the Latin adverb sīc, which contains a long vowel and means “so”, [note 3] “thus”, “as such” or “in such a manner”.[3] In English, [SIC] is a homophone of [SIC]k /ˈsɪk/; its Latin ancestor is pronounced more like the English word seek [ˈsiːk].[4]

9. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 which uses wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media.[1] The Kindle hardware devices use an E Ink electronic paper display that shows up to 16 shades of gray, minimizes power use, and simulates reading on paper.

10. In one early instance, a letter written in July, 1876 by Dr. Enoch Mellor to the editor of the Literary Churchman discussed “the cheap insinuation of ignorance which can lie in a bracketed [SIC].”[5]

11. BLANK is the first term in Schneiderman’s DEAD/BOOKS trilogy. His first sequel to BLANK, titled [SIC], consists of three divisions.

12. The first division includes public domain works Schneiderman published under his name which appear to originate from other writers who are not Schneiderman. For instance, Schneiderman published one of the earliest Old English poems, “Cademon’s Hymn,” the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, and “Tyger, Tyger,” as well as sections of Moby Dick; or, The Whale, Ulysses, and appropriately, “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.”

13. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb form of [SIC], meaning “to mark with a [SIC],” emerged in 1889, citing E. Belfort Bax‘s work in The Ethics of Socialism as one of the early examples.[1] That piece by Bax, “On Some Forms of Modern Cant,” had actually appeared even earlier in Commonweal, published in 1887.[6]

14. This 1996 law, also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or the Mickey Mouse Protection Act[2] effectively “froze” the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or after that were still protected by copyright in 1998 will not enter the public domain until at least 2019.

15. The third division of [SIC] includes works under in the public domain after 1923, the year frozen by the Mickey Mouse act, and so includes Wikipedia pages (which comprise much of the paper you are now reading), Supreme Court verdicts related to intellectual property, genetic codes, and other untoward appropriations.

16. Usage of [SIC] greatly increased in the mid-twentieth century.[7] For example, in state-court opinions prior to 1944, the Latin loanword appeared a total of 1,239 times in the Westlaw database; in those from 1945 to 1990, it appeared 69,168 times.[8] The “benighted use” (see Form of ridicule) has been cited as a major factor for this increase.[8]

17. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (original Spanish title: “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”) is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

18. It originally appeared in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur in May 1939. The Spanish-language original was first published in book form in Borges’s 1941 collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), which was, in turn, included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944).

19. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about (the non-existent) Pierre Menard, a 20th century French writer. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard’s work.

20. Borges’ “review” describes Menard’s efforts to go beyond a mere “translation” of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually “re-create” it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation and interpretation.

21. Borges: English 1962: Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote translation history: Spanish – 1942, 1944 / French – 1951/ Italian – 1957 / English – 1962 / French – 1963 / Norwegian – 1964 / English – 1965 /Italian – 1967 / Spanish – 1970 / Estonian – 1972 / Greek – 1973 / English – 1974 / Estonian – 1976 / Portuguese – 1976 / Japanese – 1978 / English – 1980.

22. The second division of [SIC] pivots on Jorge Luis Borges’s story: “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” taking the publication history of the story, in all languages, and following that history through a replicated series of auto-translations.

23. Borges: English 1962: “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” / first paragraph: The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly listed. They are, therefore, the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier unpardonable in a catalog as a false newspaper whose Protestant tendency is no secret, was the ignorance to impose its readers that these are few and poor Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalog with alarm and even with some sadness.You could say that yesterday we gathered before his final monument, including the funeral cypress, and already Error tries to tarnish his memory …Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable.

24. Borges: English 1965 / first paragraph:  “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”: The visible remains of this author are easily and briefly enumerated. They are, therefore, the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bach Lier unforgivable in a newspaper as a catalog of the false Protestant tendency is no secret, it is ignorance to instruct his readers that they erkalvinistene few and poor, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalog with alarm and even with a little sadness. One can say that yesterday we gathered before his final monument, including the funeral cypress, and already Error tries to tarnish his memory … Definitely, a short correction inevitable.

25. Borges: English 1974 / first paragraph: “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote:” It remains easy to see that the author is listed and briefly. So there are omissions and additions made by Mr. Henri Bach newspaper list for the inexcusable Lier Protestant tendency is no secret, of ignorance, to give readers some erkalvinistene and bad, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have dealt with the anxiety and the list just sad. We could say that we have today, before the final monument, including the funeral cypress, and already Error tries to tarnish the memory of … Of course, a brief correction inevitable.

26. Borges: English 1980 / first paragraph: “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote:” It is easy to verify that remains is that the author described briefly. Therefore, the list of additions made by the tendency of Protestant Henri Bach newspaper said Lier and inexcusable inaction is to give readers some erkalvinistene and bad, from ignorance, otherwise it is a secret Masonic and circumcised not. True friends of Menard deal with anxiety and just sad list.We are including the funeral cypress can say that we have before the end of the monument, and the attempt to color the monument already … but the error correction now inevitable.

27. The version of “Menard” included in the middle portion of [SIC] is thus a version of the story translated again and again until it becomes both recognizable and foreign from its supposed origin.

28. The “immoderate” use of sic—exceeding the normal bounds of usage—created some controversy, leading some editors, Simon Nowell-Smith[note 4] and Leon Edel, to speak out against it.[9]

29. A pathogen (Greek: πάθος pathos, “suffering, passion” and γἰγνομαι (γεν-) gignomai (gen-) “I give birth to”) or infectious agent — colloquially, a germ — is a microbe or microorganism such as a virus, bacterium, prion, or fungus that causes disease in its animal or plant host.[1][2] There are several substrates including pathways whereby pathogens can invade a host; the principal pathways have different episodic time frames, but soil contamination has the longest or most persistent potential for harboring a pathogen.

30. The fine-art edition of [SIC] will be packaged with such a biological pathogen, and the user or reader or viewer or subject or patient will choose to deploy the pathogen over the text. In this way, the book [SIC] will make the patient [SIC]k. This book will retail for $20,000.

31. Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and some other types of books (for example biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a philologist, or, more informally, a bookworm.

32. The third book in the DEAD/BOOKS series, after BLANK and [SIC], is INK.—all dark, a smear of solid ink covering the entire book. Recall a mis-copied photocopy, embellished with a delightfully wasteful band of black ink along its too-wide margin, and then extend this over every surface of the text.

33. The fine-art edition should contain a Kindle soaked completely in e-ink, covered, if you will, with its own reading substance.

34. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us…

35. We need the books that affect us like a disaster,

36. that grieve us deeply,

37. like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves,

38. like being banished into forests far from everyone,

39. like a suicide.

40. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

 

Note: This work is an adaption from Schneiderman’s presentation on the panel “50 Ways to Break Fiction’s Future,” with Debra Di Blasi, Lance Olsen, Yuriy Tarnawsky, and c. vance at &NOW 5 at UC-San Diego, October 13-15, 2011. The text samples freely, but this is most likely evident to you already.

Bio: Davis Schneiderman’s recent novels include Drain (TriQuarterly/Northwestern), which did not win the National Book Award, and Blank: a novel (Jaded Ibis), with audio from Dj Spooky, which was not a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His creative work has never appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review and Granta. He has not been the recipient of three Pushcart Prize awards for his short fiction, and has never been a fellow at Breadloaf or Yaddo. Recently he was passed over for a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

 

by JCarrera -

Two Directions for Material Books

I am a book artist who spent twelve years hand printing and binding a book entitled Pictorial Webster’s. I then spent a year with Chronicle Books making it into a trade edition that would sell for $35.00 and yet still retain some of the qualities of a finely printed book of yore. I have been on both sides of the physical book world. I am one of the very tiny publishers that is most concerned with making beautiful books using quality materials and bookbinding technique, allowing the price be dictated by time and materials. Not having an intermediary agent I worked directly with Chronicle and gleaned some insight into the continual march to the cheapest product by the larger publishers.

There is a segment of society that still craves a beautifully bound book, and this segment also tends to have a great deal of wealth. Much like the turn of the 20th Century when the linotype and monotype helped speed the mass production of books, they also spawned the Arts and Crafts movement and small publishers such as Kelmscott Press who published lavish, traditional books. Modern day publishers such as 21st Editions have capitalized on this same feeling that beautiful books are about to become extinct. (21st editions has even registered the phrase “The Art of the Book” as their own!?) I came to publishing from the angle of a book artist. Pictorial Webster’s was first a small run of 100 hand-printed, leather bound books that took me twelve years to produce and all of the copies have yet to be bound. I have noticed that I have made many more sales to private individuals than I have to institutions.

Because Pictorial Webster’s is such a visual book, it lives best as a physical book which accounts for its great sales as a trade edition. When I was ready for the mass produced book to be printed, I was in negotiations with two publishers. One was Chronicle Books, the publisher I thought from day one would be a good fit for selling an “Artist’s Book,” as they had published Griffen and Sabine, aunt Sally’s Lament, and other books that were way off the norm. I had also been approached by Melcher Media, a book packager in NYC. Melcher Medias lure was greater control over the final product. Mr. Melcher did his best to give me the impression we would produce the book using the most responsible production techniques and materials as environmental and economic concerns are important to me. I believe sustainability should be a concern for all disciplines. It is sad that many companies have been using paper pulp made from clearcut rainforests in Indonesia. I had made a decision that I would not print my book commercially if it was to be produced in China. My dream was to buy paper from the Mowhawk paper company which is responsible about using post-consumer paper and produces all of their energy with wind power. My ultimate printer would have been Stinehour press and perhaps use the Acme Bookbindery in the Boston area. I tried to convince the publishers that consumers who would buy my book would also be willing to pay more, but I heard about research that showed that there is a big cutoff at $30 that many book buyers will not cross. I began Pictorial Webster’s in 1996 and planned from day one to try to have a trade edition made. In those days Merriam-Webster had expressed interest in publishing the book and had given me the green light to find a printer that could do it for under $4 per book. (I was told they liked production costs to be 1/8 of list price.) Therefore I was sourcing materials and sending samples of the product to various printers and scouring the shelves of libraries and bookstores to see what was possible in commercial printing. Although there continue to be bright spots in commercially produced books, much of what I have experienced is depressing. At my first real meeting to discuss the production of the book with Melcher, it became clear that China was what they had in mind for everything. “Come on, get real,” was his response to my complaint. “You will never get this printed domestically. It’s never going to make money.” Thankfully, Chronicle delivered production in Canada. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best they could do. Few books are sewn in the United States, and many of the printers I had originally contacted to get quotes for printing the book had gone out of business, including Stinehour Press. One of the stumbling blocks for production in China it turns out was the cream colored paper I desired. At the time we printed Pictorial Webster’s, the only way to get off-colored paper in China was to have an initial print run with a crème colored ink! I wrote an article in Ampersand Magazine detailing my struggle to get my book produced in a way that I thought would make it a pleasing product. As a bookbinder I wanted my book to retain what I thought were the most important qualities of a book: good printing, a pleasing feel in the hands, and good design that works in a book. As much as I agonized, Chronicle was very good at making that happen. Unfortunately, though I thought I had convinced Chronicle Books that making a beautiful book would help drive sales. I bought a copy of their fifth reprint only to discover that it was shipped overseas to China! I had had an understanding with Chronicle that this would not happen. (Was it in the contract? I can’t recall.) I had given them .5% of my royalties, in fact, to help keep production local. The new book is not printed on the Environmental Fiber paper cover that we used for the first book, and the printing on the cover is no where near the quality of the original. . . . I will update this with news as this story evolves.

As much as I thought there was hope at some point for mass-produced books – I feel I’m agreeing more and more with William Morris. If you want a beautiful book, you may as well make it yourself. Most physical books for the trade will probably be more and more cheaply made while a very small segment of the publishers – folks such as David Godine will continue to make quality books in design and manufacture as there will continue to be a demographic that craves good books. And as Book Arts continue to flourish in college art departments, hand crafted, self published books will increase as well.

by Jack Kessler -

Non-anglophone worlds?

How about including, here, some resources based in France? For example:

* Gallica : ancient texts plus some not-so, manuscripts & incunabula & printed books & other things, all treasures-of-the-BN, and all digital & online now in several controversial and interestingly-European / non-US American ways —
http://gallica.bnf.fr/
http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

* BnF / Bibliothèque nationale de France : this is the justifiably-famous old BN / Bibliothèque Nationale itself, radically-recast and not always comfortably, in its brand-new buildings & staffs & attitudes toward new technologies, prime example of a “digital library” —
http://www.bnf.fr
http://www.bnf.fr/en/tools/lsp.site_map.html

* Musée de l’imprimerie, Lyon : these folks discovered the old Renaissance type-fonts, underwater where they’d been dumped into the Sâone river from the print shops along the rue Mercière which created the Incunabula Revolution — the Musée workshops use ancient machinery to teach modern printing and binding, and they know much about mise-en-page in le-digital too — and they’re in the city which gave us Sebastian Gryphe, and Etienne Dolet… that last burned at the stake on the Place Maubert in Paris, for his new-fangled notions, proof that these transition-in-media issues are taken seriously, and can be far more bleeding-edge & risky, than many people realize —
http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/
(Their english / l’américain page does not appear to be up, but I’ll be happy to translate…)

* Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon : a leading provincial city-library in France, like many of those one blessed with a large confiscation-révolutionnaire of ancient texts, manuscript & print & other, preserved in the provinces and so mostly saved from marauding Parisian mobs and radical-ideas-in-flux — ideal locale for quietly studying noisy revolutionary texts in their various media transitions —
http://www.bm-lyon.fr/
(Again, happy to translate…)

* La FNAC : where France buys & sells its “books”, nowadays, digital and other — from its origins at the forefront of the modern revolt against the most recent Old Regime in French publishing, and so much-vilified by many — now on the ropes against the digital, and trying desperately to figure out what it all means commercially — France invented the Minitel, long before the “public” Internet, and now everyone in the country has an iPod & iPhone & iPad  & iMac too or is about to get one… iFrance… 🙂 —
http://www4.fnac.com/
(Ditto re. translating…)

The above list represents just the French mainstream, as well: they’ve always had an active media-underground, in addition — the placards, colporteurs, feuilletonières, cat-massacre people, avant-gardes of various types and eras…

There are plenty of experimental sites among the French nowadays, too: walking the lisière, between print media & digital — which appears to interest the conference and the others mentioned on the website.

There is really interesting work going on everywhere, in fact, internationally now, in online digital information — also some very interesting questions about how all this will or won’t scale-up, to international applications… including multilingual access but not just… social & political & economic & cultural questions as well… Kerala is not like Kansas, not at all… Information “wants to be free”, internationally too, and in languages other than english & l’américain — and everyone, Out There as well, still loves “books”.

So, the above are a few France-based suggestions for your very interesting site, and for your interesting ideas about maybe “rebalancing” the new & old media instead of “transitioning” them.

 

Jack Kessler
www.fyifrance.com

p.s. A general note & disclaimer about translation, tho: native-speakers rule!, in this… Pace fabulous exceptions such as Arthur Waley and W.S. Merwin, most human language translation doesn’t really work. Translation is an art, not a science: Waley’s is the most famous example, his “Madly Singing In The Mountains” being a phrase only a Bloomsbury gentleman like him ever would utter, never the 9th c. Chinese poet from whom Waley translated it, altho it fits the old Chinese poet perfectly.

So use GoogleTranslate, yes: but that is often more transliteration than it is translation — much as GoogleSearch is “data” search & retrieval but not yet really  “information” search & retrieval, as no less than Larry Page has told his troops.

The sites overseas offer English Versions, but these brave attempts usually are truncated, filled with howlers, and usually they are superficial dead-ends leading to sites filled from level II on down with strange-looking foreign stuff. When you run into that, however, think of all the Mongolians, Ethiopians, Burmese and residents of Bergerac who don’t even find level I homepages in their languages on our anglophone sites… much less instruction manuals… imagine troubleshooting using only a manual printed in Mongolian…

Best thing to do, then, is to partner with a foreign language native-speaker, online — easy enough to locate one, nowadays — you write to her/him in English, s/he writes to you in French — you’ll miss lots of nuances if you don’t, and French is nothing if not a language of nuance… ditto Chinese & Tamil & most…

 

by AKumbier -

Zines!

Zine Collection at Wellesley College(A guest post by Alana Kumbier, Library & Technology Services, Wellesley College)

I spent last Sunday afternoon at the Washington Street Art Center in Somerville, celebrating the arrival of spring with a roomful of artists and zine-makers. I had my doubts about whether this small, local event — the Spring Zine Thing — could compete with the lure of the outdoors on one of the season’s first hot, sunny days. When I walked up to the Center and saw folks waiting around for the doors to open, I realized I’d underestimated the appeal of zines, and of zine-fair camaraderie. I spent the afternoon chatting with other zine- and comics-makers, watching readers connect with zines, meeting people from neighborhood organizations and businesses, trading design and binding tips, and, best of all, making zines. The event’s organizers, Megan Mary Creamer and Marissa Falco had stocked a corner table with supplies — paper, scissors, letraset transfers, pens, crayons, glue sticks, a long-arm stapler, and a typewriter — for on-the-fly zine-making. In another corner, a group of participants worked on zines they’d started at Ladyfest Boston. At other tables, artists sketched the scene and worked on collages. When we packed up our zines and headed out the door at closing time, the room was still full, and there were several clusters of friends hanging out, relaxing and chatting in the Art Center parking lot. The Spring Zine Thing made local interest in zines visible, and emphasized the vibrant nature of the community supporting them.

Observing what happened at the Spring Zine Thing, noting the influx of new volunteer librarians at the Papercut Zine Library in Cambridge, and looking forward to the Somerville Arts Council’s zine-themed Salon, I want to say that zines are making a comeback (at least in Boston & its suburbs). But they never really went away.

Because I live in a bigger city, have internet access, and a wider social network than I did in the mid-late 1990s, I know more zinesters now than I did during my initial foray into zine culture. Some of these folks have been making zines for decades. Others, like me, made them in high school, college, or early adulthood, took a break, and and are returning to zines in their mid-thirties. Others are just starting out, eager to connect with radical histories and communities. More than a few of us are professional educators, graphic designers, and librarians, with access to institutional resources, faculty collaborators, and pedagogical spaces for teaching and learning about zines. Because zines don’t require much in terms of supplies, instructional time, or classroom (or other) space, it’s relatively easy to make them at home, on campus, or in the community. Zine libraries and archives require much more of an investment, but they, too, can be scaled to meet the needs of a particular community — and can operate in and outside of conventional institutions (i.e., academic or public libraries).

In the past year, I’ve collaborated with faculty, students, and staff at my institution, Wellesley College, on a variety of zine-based projects and events. We’ve incorporated zine projects in introductory and upper-level women’s and gender studies courses, offered zine workshops to students in the library’s Book Arts Lab, and this spring, student organizations collaborated on hosting a feminist zine fair. As a research and instruction librarian, I spend a good deal of my day in the realm of the digital: helping students and faculty use online tools and resources; developing strategies for teaching and learning in hybrid material-digital environments; creating online research guides; and troubleshooting problems with e-books, or our learning management system, or citation tools like Zotero and EndNote. Zine projects, organized around self-published, material texts, disrupt this digital-immersion in some delightful ways.

When I teach a women’s and gender studies class about zines, I’m able to engage students in conversations that rarely fit into a conventional research instruction session. Though most of the students are unfamiliar with zines, they immediately understand the potential of the medium: how it authorizes its creators to pursue questions they’re passionate about, to offer analyses based on research and critique, to write for a community of other zine makers, and to create something tangible to share with their peers. We talk about feminist knowledge production practices, the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing, intellectual property concerns, and the political, cultural, documentary, and educational work that zines do in the world. We get into debates about zines vs. blogs as feminist activist tools — and challenge the assumption that a person might make or read in one medium but not the other. We talk about the Queer Zine Archive Project and the People of Color Zine Project, and consider how online archives extend the life of these ephemeral objects, making old zines accessible to readers (like my students) who weren’t around to read them, and offering spaces for archiving and sharing new zines.

When students come to the library to make zines in the Book Arts Lab, they discover one of our campus treasures: a workshop full of printing presses, wood and metal type, bookbinding tools and many other (less-spectacular) supplies for zine-making. And they meet our book arts director, Katherine McCanless Ruffin, who can serve as a teacher and guide for future adventures in self-publishing. Most importantly, when students make zines with us, they claim the library as a space for making and creating knowledge, texts, and community.

As they produce their zines at the end of the semester, I’m proud that our students join a constellation of zine-makers, radical librarians, teachers and archivists, feminist scholars, and community arts organizers dedicated to this form of knowledge articulation, material-cultural production, creative work, and political action. And that they get their hands on some scrap paper, markers, glitter and glue in the process.

by Polson -

What happened to all the e-books?

Back in Cambridge, I can’t get through a seven-minute subway ride to work without seeing a dozen e-readers in action. To be honest, I think I see just as many commuters reading mobile devices as I do printed books. True, this could be the exception, since I live and work in one of those most literate and tech-savvy cities in the country. (Wish it were that I could place myself in one of those demographics!) At the same time, though, friends and family across the country have been talking about their Nooks, Kindles, and iPads. Some of them, perhaps due to the convenience of these devices, or perhaps due to their novelty, are reading now more than ever.

Bookstore on Rue Mouffetard
Bookstore on Rue Mouffetard

But I’m not at home right now. Instead, during my three-minute walk to the bakery here in Paris, I pass a comic book store, a traditional bookstore, and two small publishers. Despite the drastic changes to reading and publishing practices effected by digital technology, independent, brick-and-mortar bastions of the book still abound in this city. I’ve been here for over two weeks now. I’ve passed dozens of cafes, ridden the subway dozens of times, and only twice have I seen a tablet computer. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath for the unlikely sighting of a Nook or a Kindle.

Maybe Parisians are more prudent about using expensive electronic devices in public. Maybe they’re a little more attached to the traditional printed book than are their American counterparts. Then again, maybe I’m just not as observant as others who have been watching this trend. Whatever the reason, after a short ride on the subway or a morning coffee at a cafe, you certainly wouldn’t think the book is experiencing the same identity crisis in Paris as it is back home.

by Dr. Paul Dijstelberge -

Of e-Books and old books – or what the 21th century can learn from the 15th.

To know the future we have to understand the past. And of course there is also history repeating itself.

Gustave Flaubert would have loved these two sayings and he would certainly have used them for his dictionary of received ideas. Flaubert himself noted down a cliche that has some relevance for this lecture. It goes

photography: will make painting obsolete.

Karl Marx used the one about history for one of his funnier quips: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a comedy.

Still, there is truth in both sayings. History – or humanity – certainly has a tendency to repeat itself and we can only recognize these repetitions and learn something if we have some knowledge of the past.

At the moment we are in the middle of one of the greatest sea-changes the world of information has gone through. Therefore I want to take a look at what happened during an earlier era and share some ideas with you about the lessons of history.

What can we learn from the 15th century change from manuscript to printed book? Does it tell us something about the fate of the printed book itself? What lessons might the early heroes of printing have for the internet publishers of our days – and of course for us bookhistorians who are going through such interesting times. I will say something about design but more about the financial circumstances that influence design. During my research for this paper I came to the conclusion that these circumstances are perhaps more important than changes in design we see on the page – and may expect to see on the screen of our digital books.

I consider the codex a far more important, interesting and influential invention than the computer or the internet. The codex has now reached a venerable age of more than 17 centuries. About a hundred generations have used it’s unique features.

There is a difference between a codex and a pile of papers held together by a pin or glue. The uniformity of the size of the pages defines the accessibility of a book. Quick and random acces to information, that is what the codex is about.

Creating such a book in the middle ages was everything but easy.

For a medieval codex you would have to slaughter ten or twelve pigs or sheep and have vellum made of their skins. After that you had to find that rarest of species: a man or woman who could write down a text for you. Early medieval society was hardly organized and places where you could have a book made or actually see a book where few. Monasteries were scarce and wide apart.

Secular reading – for instruction or pleasure – belonged to the city. To be able to live in a city and do something else than menial work, you would have to be able to read. Once you could read you probably wanted to read more than bookkeepers records. You wanted to read books. Religious books, scholarly books, adventures and poetry.

And soon an industry came into existence that catered for this new market of readers. Scriptoria in great cities like Florence where well organized companies that produced high-quality manuscripts for a decent price.

Then, halfway the 15th century came the printing press – invented by the Man of the Millennium, Gutenberg. More than 29.000 titles were printed up to 1500 are known today. If we put the number of copies of an edition on the arbitrary number of 300 this would mean that at least 9.000.000 books were made and sold during the first 40 years after Gutenberg.

It is clear that here we have a genuine information revolution. At the same time it is a rather curious revolution! What everybody knows, but hardly anybody seems to realize, is that printers played a relative small part in the making of a book. In the days of Gutenberg the typesetters and printers realized far less than half of the value of a copy.

The materials of which books were made, claimed the major part, even when paper was about ten times less expensive that vellum. So the actual printing of a book may have been 50 times less costly than writing it down by hand, but the printers could only claim about 20% of all work done on a single copy. The rest was done – or supposed to be done – by rubricators, illuminators and bookbinders.

In the 15th century a paper copy of a printed book would be half as expensive as a handwritten one. It will be clear that the prime importance of Gutenbergs printing press lies in being a catalyst. Printers printed editions and editions had to be sold.

Gutenbergs artificial writing machine was certainly not meant to be a prime mover that made knowledge available to the masses and revolutionized the world. That kind of book emerged almost half a century later and was created by a totally different kind of man. The 40 years between Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius brought us the modern book.

The birth of the book as we know it is the result of typical capitalist development with its system of trial and error, fuelled by greed. It is important to remember that, while the price of a single copy of a book might be halved, the total investment needed to produce that copy as part of an edition would rise more than twohundredfold. The return of investment would be slow as it might take years to sell an edition. And before work on that edition could start, there would be an initial investment in the equipment of a printing house and the hiring of an expensive specialist workforce.

It was only in the 16th that being a publisher or even a printer became a sure way to riches. In the early days the infrastructure to sell 500 copies of a book was non-existent. Early printers seem to have thought and act like the makers of manuscripts. The first printing press in Italy was up in the mountains and days away from Rome. It was rather difficult to print in Subiaco and still expect to sell a lot of books in little time. So Sweynheim and Pannartz moved their bussiness to Rome. And even then life was difficult. To be able to sell books printers and publishers had to create a close knit community that was parochial and international at the same time.

The advent of the printed book made rubricating and illuminating a booming business and that is perhaps the reason why the quality of manuscripts detoriated so much in the last decennia of the fiftheenth century. It was only in the fiftheen-seventies that printers started to experiment with printed initials and woodcuts, thus streamlining the production and reducing the costs of a single copy with at least another 20%.

Aldus Manutius established his firm in the great merchant city of Venice, had sound financial backers and reduced the size and thus the price of books. But he hardly if ever used the woodcut initials that would have reduced the price of his books even more, although he did so in his most famous publication: the Hypnerotomachia.

It seems clear that most 15th century printers did not realize the real potency of the printing press and indeed saw it as a form of artificial writing. There was no break with the past. They saw their activities in no different light than the makers of manuscripts.

Even today paid writers exist who ply their trade on the streetcorners in Mexico or India. They write letters but also newspapers. The investment for such a trade is small. You have to know how to write, which may take some years to learn and that is it. I will come back to these writers later on when I will discuss the impact of the internet on the publishing industry.

Many books have been written about how the layout of the page had to be reconstructed to conquer the oceans of information that suddenly became available. Pages had to be numbered. The paragraph had to be invented, just as notes and bibliographical references. Running titles. And most important of all: the title-page.

Most of these innovations come together in the work of Erhard Ratdolt, the Augsburg and Venetian printer already mentioned. He was an early adapter: he used a title-page, printed in color and so on. I especially mention the way he placed woodcut illustrations in the margins in one of the most beautiful and well-structured books ever published: his first edition of Euclid that dates from 1482.

Why did changes that were clearly great innovations not find their way immediately and sometime took ages to get accepted. Why did not all printers started to use woodcut initials right after they were invented – why did it take almost a century for such a simple but effective innovation to be generally accepted?

I have a few assertions that may play a role in the discussion of the digital age.

The first one goes like this: what we see as typographical innovation is often a ressurection of something older. Most typographical inventions of the 15th century are in fact reinventions.

My second obervation is that almost all real innovations come from outsiders. The power of tradition is very strong, especially in the field of printing and publishing were innovation is stultyfied by the conservatism of the trade and the consumers.

What does this mean for the future of publishing and more specifically for the future of design? I love the term Information Architecture as it covers perfectly what modern design is really about.

It will be clear that the internet and searchmachines have changed the way we look at information and how we use it. Will we need footnotes when all books have been digitized? I can imagine a searchmachine that analyzes texts in depth: a researchmachine. Now information is anchored to a page but digitized it can have any form – especially as we do not need to refer to a given page any more.

On the other hand the way we organize and read texts will not change. Writing and reading is about rhetorics and expectations and these are deep undercurrents that were probably hotwired into the human brain long before we were able to notice them.

Digital information will always be expressed in books and these books will be more beautiful and better made. More people than ever before are active as designers, of typefaces and of books. They are counted in tens of thousands where there used to be hundreds. Of course beauty and taste have nothing to do with numbers. But more practitioners create more choices for a public that has become more critical in its appraisal.

I think that a few years from now there will be less books than there are now, but they will be better edited, better designed and better printed. Part, perhaps even the greater part, of the mass market will go digital. This will make books less interesting to the kind of publisher or bookseller that now fill the great chains of bookstores with endless and depressing repetitions of soulless and bad designed books. The independent bookseller will rise again and so will the independent publisher. I think that this is the future, an interesting and humane future and certainly our future as bookhistorians.

paul dijstelberge Amsterdam – Netherlands

 

by EBoeckeler -

Angels & Books

(A guest blog by Erika Boeckeler, Northeastern University)

“An angel..vnderstondyth and knowyth sodaynly wythout collacion of one thynge to a nother.”

-Bartholomew de Glanville, De Proprietatibus Rerum (13th c, translated 1495) ii. xviii. 43

Somehow any quotation about angels evokes the most lovely romantic notions: fluttery wings, a breath of air, purity, beauty as knowledge and knowledge as beauty, the color white or the rainbow wings of painted Renaissance angels or just a sparkling light of the “Let there be light” variety…

What I love about this quotation is that it describes a fantasy of angelic epiphany that evokes all those notions. We cherish those moments in which we suddenly, instantaneously just know and understand, with a knowledge so pure that we flutter free from the weight of the world’s thingyness.

But the word I want to focus on in this quotation is collation. The Oxford English Dictionary, which lists this quotation as an early example of the word, defines collation as “the action of bringing together and comparing; comparison,” with the more specific definition given as the “textual comparison of different copies of a document; critical comparison of manuscripts or editions with a view to ascertain the correct text, or the perfect condition of a particular copy.” Angels don’t need to collate–they already have the perfect text–but we mortals do. The practice of collation seems a fitting way to think about what we’re doing as we experience the once and future history of the book.

I owe my knowledge of this quotation to the bibliographer Carter Hailey, inventor of a collating machine called Hailey’s COMET (see below) and whom I met in person during a seminar on the first printed version of Hamlet last weekend at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. Hailey’s paper for the seminar describes two kinds of collation that bibliographers–people who meticulously describe books–perform: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal collation involves the comparison of multiples copies from the same printed edition of a given work. You may wonder why anyone would need to do this; aren’t all books in an edition exactly alike? In fact, early modern books from a single print run may differ wildly from each other! Corrections would be made while the book was in press, but paper and labor were expensive so pages with mistakes would be bound up with other pages further along in the run. The three main printed versions of Hamlet contain hundreds of differences within each, including one that calls the title character “Hamlee.” While that example may be merely surprising, others can be more substantial and radically alter the way we understand a passage.

What I’m interested in exploring here is the second kind of collation: vertical collation involves comparing different manuscripts and/or different printed editions across time. In the case of Hamlet, this involved noticing that successive readers encountered a play with characters first named Corambis and then Polonius, Ofelia then Ophelia, Rossencraft and Gilderstone then Rosencraus and Guyldensterne then Rosencrance and Guildenstein, Gertrard then Gertrude. Would the real Hamlee please stand up?

Working across time in ways that readers rarely or never did, collators bring invisible histories of books to light. Bibliographer and mad scientist inventor of another collation machine, Randall McCleod, reads Renaissance books that were never printed –the faint indent contours of type never inked- and books hiding within other books –-the traces or ink from one page in a book dried upon the pages of another. Sometimes the findings of collators spawn heated debates in the halls of academic academies, sometimes they spur actual revolutions. The great religious schism of seventeenth century Russia in which thousands died was caused by–yes!–an act of collation: someone discovered that fundamental religious texts had radically altered over centuries of copying and recopying.

In a future of the book study, the work of vertical collation is inevitable. In some ways, our non-angelic brains are constantly collating–measuring the experience of one book form against another. Books now are becoming less weighty thynges or not even thynges at all; collation technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated and scholars are performing more sophisticated kinds of reading with them. Collation may morph into a different kind of work altogether.

Collation in the twentieth century has been intimately associated with technologies. Here are a few collation machines:

A fifteenth century collator from the first European bestseller, Sebastian Brandt's _Ship of Fools_ (1494).
The Hinman Collator, invented by Charles Hinman in the late 1940's to collate Shakespeare's texts. It's gigantic.
The McLeod Portable Collator, designed by Randall McLeod in the early 1980's. The picture features McLeod himself.
Hailey's COMET, an even more portable collator designed by Carter Hailey in the 1990's. Image courtesy of Carter Hailey.
by Julia Panko -

The Tactility of Books

– guest post by Julia Panko (University of California, Santa Barbara)

In the past several years, the concept of “touch” has become a strategic marketing point for digital devices, from the iPod to the Kindle. But how might “touch” matter as we think about the print book? How might tactility impact the book’s role as an information storage medium and reading platform?

Page scan from Google Books, capturing an image of the scanner’s fingertips touching the page:

Personal archives

When a reader touches a book, she leaves physical traces—fingerprints, crumbs of food, bent pages, pencil markings, etc. We touch digital devices when we read from them, of course, but these surfaces tend to be more resistant than paper to acquiring such traces. The haptic “data” that readers leave in books has forensic value: it can reveal information about a reader’s body, reading habits, emotional attachments, or favorite brand of coffee.

The three-dimensionality of the book also allows it to function as an archival space. A reader might accidentally leave a bookmark or a pressed flower between the pages. Or he might choose to keep significant objects in a book, such as photographs or letters. Print books are storage media in the sense that they contain textual information, but in cases like these, they also become material archives.

Social networks

As books circulate among readers, acquiring annotations or simply traces of wear, they become sites of social exchange. As Virginia Woolf put it, “We like to feel . . . that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers. . .”

Many annotations in books are social in nature. Readers might argue or agree with the author in the margins:

“The frame of mind in which a reader can address a book as though it were another human subject, and present, is one we must all recognize. It can be compared to the more often discussed dramatic illusion, our voluntary and habitual submission to the conventions of the stage. It is not that we are actually hallucinating, believing the actors to be the persons they represent, and us invisibly in their company. Nor does any reader believe the writer of the book to be speaking the words in it, and available for conversation. That fact does not prevent us from cherishing the illusion of intimacy, much as we do in the theater” – H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

Alternately, we might write an inscription in a book that we plan to gift to a friend or scribble notes in a library book. I have vivid memories of discovering a lively discussion in a library copy of an Agatha Christie mystery years ago: several readers had recorded their speculations about the murderer’s identity at various stages in the story, inspiring later readers to debunk these guesses and offer alternate theories. The book became a tactile record of a community’s interpretive debates.

Aesthetic artifacts

Our awareness of tactility also factors into our appreciation of books as aesthetic objects. When Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, he spoke of the importance of his book’s design: “Those of you who’ve seen my book—whatever you may think of its contents—will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.”

As we speculate about the future of the book, we must admit that it cannot compete with computers and e-book readers when it comes to sheer storage capacity. The register of touch, however, reminds us that information storage is not the book’s only affordance. Our experience of books as material objects is also meaningful.

Books produce tactile, visual, and even olfactory effects.

The range of sensuous experiences that books provide is perhaps one of the reasons that so many readers describe feeling emotionally attached to—touched by—their books.