User:Laurier Rochon/notes/theunboundbook notes

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

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 unbounding of the book

Florian Cramer

  • unbound vs boundless
  • 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)
  • 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.