User:Laurier Rochon/notes/theunboundbook notes

THE UNBOUND BOOK - MAY 20th 2011

• before reading the book > reading/literacy as a craft
• the e-book is more than just a representation of text in a new medium
• the battle of books, the battle of the book business
• last comments are from : JOOST KIRCZ

SESSION 1 : what is a book?

• author -> text -> book -> reader -> receiver
• public readings > no text or book. the reader takes on the author's voice
• film : Farenheit 451

Arianne B.

• e-book publishing - how do you compete with a publisher like Apple?
• e-books are more ecologicaly friendly (Google uses lots of energy) (this is cutting corners...)
• having research about tech takes time. making laws takes time.
• "the digital revolution is not headed towards where we were told it was heading" (where is this? isn't this what we want?)
• "no one is interested in hearing the effects of this revolution"
• "digital immigrants are more proficient in performing a search than their kids, the digital natives" (???)
• Nicholas Carr : pulling quotes way out of context? (The Atlantic)
• Which proprety of physical books should be kept in thinking of digital books?
• "Multimedia should dissapear from / The editing of books should not be allowed"
• "Paper is durable, cheap, etc."
• Irreplacable properties : books are extensions of our memory. Apparently this is not feasible by digital books.
• "Smell, taste, form, etc."

Alan Liu : This is not a book

• "The end of the end of the book" Essay
• Collex / Open Journal Systems / PReE
• books are not books - they always need to be compared?
• books and e-books - 'long, permanent form of attention, permanent standard, authoritative'
• mbooks - media books - created and understood as media, not as a book
• "Books and scrolls : navigating the bible" Essay
• The bible was very hypertextual, irregular, non-linear and interactive (for any service, need bookmarks to move to different places)
• "When was linearity?" Essay
• digital book = metaphor for physical book - physical book is a metaphor for a book
• "Strange rain" iPad app
• what's important : not the future of books, but the future of long form attentions
• to do so, new methodological methods - some kind of telescope to look into the past & future
• "network archeology" / "media archeology"
• SNAC (social networks and archival contexts)
• RoSE - A research-oriented social environment
• "Agrippa" William Gibson (1992)
• The book is not a book (physical, e-book, m-book, etc.), it's the long form of attention. This is usually collective and plays over time.
• authority is moving into 'context' - if the context is clear, then things can be understood in relation to that context.

Miha Kovac, University of Ljubljana - What is a book?

• moving from a socialist structure for his publishing house into a market oriented structure
• a book is a technology - organize and store complex textual/visual info
• main historical embodiments : scroll, codex and digital file
• printed books - the physicality affects the size of the book : too thin and too thick are not printed
• printed texts are easier to preserve (???) - he is talking about the form, not the content...

- 'the cloud' - data centers are more secure, decentralized and numerous (soon) than libraries and bookstores - in a fingersnap, I can duplicate a book 10, 100, 1M times.

• having your physical book is part of your identity, it has a physical presence
• the storing of book content changes the way we think...pbook vs ebook
• linear reading / books professions / fixity and preservability

SESSION II : the unbinding of the book

Florian Cramer

• unbound vs boundless
• http://www.aaaaarg.org vs kindle
• e-books are very linear - developing apps for books is very hard to keep up to date technically
• the book has become much more stable because of the web, through the web - ex : the phonebook
• print books are slowly becoming objects of decoration - because of their physical attributes, not the content
• big disconnect between the embodiment and the content. e-books are becoming the cheap paperbacks from before

Gary Hall - coventry university

• Liquid, living books
• A writer writes texts, not books
• what are the options for the authors vs publishers
• 'perhaps we need to unbind modernity' and think differently

Bernhard Rieder - University van Amsterdam

• The book as data object
• what kind or arrangement for discovering and reading?
• what is the 'computational potential' of millions of books?
• exploring full-text metadata / connecting by means of data / capturing and inferring from user practices
• books become information (in 451 people become books - so people become information?)
• the algorithms are very predictable
• these databases have institutional effects
• translation : having large statistical pools of data VS decyphering the underlying structure (meaning - i.e. Chomsky)
• http://www.thepoliticsofsystems.net
• books : random-access media - user-driven media (the users are in control of the media)
• a book as a place
• socialbook - all in the browser - social reading (with comments)
• engage with authors in real-time or asynchronously 'in the book'

Anne Mangen, Ph. D. - University of Stavanger

• why bother with print?
• the role of the hands - fingers,etc. in reading
• ergonomical affordances : books <> e-books <> computer
• "people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read hypertext"
• multilinearity/hypertexts /education/ - where do video games come in? wii/kinect/joysticks & layout-wise much more complex than books
• books - good spatial representation / games -> people can move characters in pixel-perfect positions for years
• "sense the progress in your hands" - "human hand-eye coordination can be taken into consideration in optimal ways"

Ray Siemens INKE http://www.hci-book.org

• Electronic Textual Cultures Lab - University of Victoria
• imiatating the book is doomed to fail - they have to reference the full system in which they live, not just the 'page'.
• reading is a device-specific activity - a whole system feeds into the 'hardware' we have in front of us

Robert Max Steenkist - the book in Later America

• one of the major problems seems to be about trying to mimick books - we are not even close. We must think of this as its own media.