User:Ssstephen/Reading/Computing is Reading
E-books, Libraries and Feelies
Topography and book design in e books. What is currently possible? What should be possible?
Jonathan Franzen claims that if books are not permanent there can be no justice system or responsible self government. This seems like an outrageous claim to me, what does he mean by that? Interested to understand.
"The link between the individual book and the larger body of text": Is this an interface? What connects the book to the larger body? Is it an interspace? What is between books and libraries? What's between a webpage and a website? What's between a codex and the project Xanadu? "books are independent of libraries" how does this relate to their interspace?
Alberto Manguel, a history of reading: "rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned"
Programming languages depend on their libraries; if they change or disappear the program can become erratic or fail. Does this happen to hypertexts? These dependancies happen whenever the institution or mechanism achieves a critical mass of acceptance.
Is there an argument for discrete autonomous action? Individuality and individuals?
This paper seems to be correlating modular libraries with closed software, that doesn't seem like a necessary path to follow although it does sound like reality.
Robert Filieu ample food for stupid thought: Book as collection of postcards (is this a book or a library?)
The monster at the end of this book - sesame Street as meta fiction
design innovation is not a modernist tangent to the history of the book but rather a fundamental part of publication
"It is the nature of modular libraries to insist on the uniformity of its members" this seems to contracting the image example previously given off iTunes, which clearly shows music, movies, mobile applications, artwork. Do all modular systems insist on uniformity? a modular synthesiser insists on a shared language such as cv or audio, and usually shared physical dimension (eg 3u height in eueorack). But often rules are broken, and modules from one system can even interact with those from another. So if a shared language or methods of interaction can be used, the modules can become more free while retaining the ability to collaborate. Communication allows for the expression (and fulfilment) of needs and desires.
"people who are really serious about software should invent their own hardware" Alan Kay (inventor of the dynabook)
Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror as an example of the text in collaboration with the modular library: Netflix used additional features not usually seen (were these ever used elsewhere?) to provide a unique experience for a single episode. Are all institutions evil all the time?
Emulation is mentioned as a powerful tool against modular systems becoming redundant: Because it is a system, one emulator can let me play all Nintendo64 games
'reading’— even the reading of a first paragraph—is always reading as
Above quoted from Peter Rabinowitz. I like this term reading as. I think sweet pete means "reading as fiction" or "reading as a magazine", but there is also "reading as a machine", "reading as my mother when she was a young girl" and "reading as sport". But essentially the same thing, how much of the information is in the context, whether it is genre, format or collection (both library categories?) or other implications from systems like assumed or implied intentions of the author, or other extra-textual (extrabiblical? is this still in the text?) information. There is in fact a word for this now that I think about it. Con-text.
In their introduction to Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal assert, “Classification precedes collection.
Is this always true? The opposite seems more obvious to me, collect then classify. Is classifying things you dont have a type of desire? I name it and categorise it in order to objectify it, and ultimately collect it. This sounds a little scary. If you already own things (can people own things?) then it makes more sense to classify them. I classify all my stuff so I can know what is where, it facilitates navigation.
"People want to own their music."
Quote from Steve Jobs. True though, everyone wants to own the music. Who owns Let's Get it On? Who owns chord progressions? Culturally collected knowledge is part of a library which should be accessible to everyone and functional as a reference tool, but that doesn't mean plagiarism is ok (A. Neely, 2022). But is plagiarism ok? Sometimes in music I want you to work out the reference yourself instead of telling you, it's part of the experience. If you told me a joke, explicitly showing the reference might make it not funny anymore. Imagine Gravity's Rainbow had footnotes. Not funny anymore.
But we need to keep alive the ability for books— even in an electronic environment— to break the design rules that the library might impose on them.
I feel that danny boy is implying that this responsibility is on the shoulders of the library designer, the corporation that makes kindles, the software developers. But surely the whole idea of breaking the rules is always something that emerges from the individual? It's the individual book that makes a choice not to follow, not to fit into the library shelves. Otherwise no rules are being broken and that doesn't sound very fun. The system has changed an revolution is no longer possible sounds like an illusion to me. This makes me think of some of the actions published by Vulfpeck against Spotify.
In this model, an e- book would actually be a combination of two different elements: a general data file (say, in the EPub or some other open format) and a designed interface for reading that data file.
This sounds sort of impractical to me. Every book has a "designed interface", but not everyone wants to design an interface for their books. Also the idea that the library structure (eg Kindle) can choose to ignore this interface seems to me to completely negate the point of the interface in the first place, why would Amazon choose to use the interface in that case? There are already more flexible formats (pdf for exaxmple) that Kindles have chosen not to use. Perhaps Dano is thinking of a CSS sort of model, where two things happen: the client device can ignore the stylesheets (and make mistakes) and also media queries allow the server to suggest adaptations for different devices, and also acknowledge that reading situations are different. Sure the author or typographer might have some wild ideas about how to render the text to get the fully integrated experience with layers of meaning, but are they taking into account that one of their readers is a dog with a dot matrix printer? Doom is a great example of this done well, because you can play Doom on anything.
Pearson argues for “books beyond texts”— that is, we should separate the physical object of the book and the text that it contains
Sounds like dreaming of content without form? Is this essay maybe struggling a little with the more abstract forms of digital files? Just because something is on a computer doesn't mean it is possible to extract an essence from it and remove the structures around it. This seems completely impossible to me, and I would question whether there is even such a thing as platonic ideals (no reference given here because I made this up completely by myself).
I see no reason to insist on standardization for the designed elements of reader experience
Ok here are a few reasons of the top of my head:
- to encourage increased legibility and usability for readers with impaired reading abilities (eg NALA Guidelines).
- to avoid harm to readers who could be negatively affected by certain design choices such as those with photosensitive epilepsy (eg The Harding Test)
- to discourage design strategies that are exclusive of or cause damage to (explicitly or otherwise) a specific ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.
Again this line seems to be missing a crucial point for me, you cant separate form from content.
Once libraries lose their connection to these physical objects and the accidental life history that Manguel describes, it may be that the idea of the library itself may cease to have its same cultural meaning.
The library as a trophy. Is a trophy a tool? Some sort of status symbol that perpetuates or maybe even generates power? I understand that this is the use of some library tools but it seems to me that Dan is implying it is the main use. What about research and discovery, and sharing? He also says a (personal) library is for books you have already read. I have never added a book to my library that I have already read, and if someone gave me a book I had already read I would give it away, not add it to my library. Anyway at very least he seems to think this "idea of the library" is possibly doomed, hopefully he is right.