We librarians cannot stand by and do nothing while some publishers deepen the digital divide. We cannot wait passively while some publishers deny access to our cultural record. We must speak out on behalf of today’s – and tomorrow’s – readers. The library community demands meaningful change and creative solutions that serve libraries and our readers who rightfully expect the same access to ebooks as they have to printed books.

Complete text.

Barnes & Noble is the last of the chain stores, and it seems to be a toss up whether it too will go out of business or mutate into some sort of book-less Internet cafe thing. Meanwhile, Amazon has cast its gaze on a new object of interest: the publishers themselves, what CEO Jeff Bezos refers to as the middleman in the book selling business. Shiver.

Just three publishers control 90% of the K-12 textbook market in the U.S., and they’ve each signed agreements with Apple.

Link to PopSci article.

How to make a textbook cover out of a brown paper bag.

The implications for publishing seem . . . well, if not exactly clear, then super intriguing. For all the distinctions being drawn between print and electronic publications, along comes a technology that points toward a both-and option: our print text can also be our e-text. Imagine a serif-rich font printed with the new ink and in which the interconnected letters become logic gates within the flow of the text. The text becomes language made of language, and each book, chapter, or research article becomes a little working machine. Maybe the operating system is contained within the spine.

What might we do with such intelligent text? For one thing, the text could constitute the program for performing keyword searches on itself — every proper noun, term, and phrase would know its own name. For another thing, the text could constitute the programming for animating elements of itself — figures that come to life when the reader turns the page, for instance, or words that literally glow with significance.

Beyond imitating web pages, such a new kind of publishing could take full advantage of the medium through interaction, a kind of publishing for the makers culture. An essay about diabetes, for instance, could include a lab-on-a-chip test of one’s blood-sugar level on a diagrammatic surface in the book’s appendix. A book about photography could present editing techniques demonstrated by the book itself. A book about environmentalism could include chapter-by-chapter tests for air, soil, and water quality. A book about dance could dance.

The new circuit pen can also draw antennas, which suggests that the text could generate its own Wi-Fi network to transmit and retrieve information as the need arises. Not only might such publications have access to the resources of the internet — every book a netbook — but such books might even chat among themselves. Public libraries become cluster-based supercomputers that change with each acquisition and with each book lent.

Your private library generates an image of you, suggests the book that will make you both that much closer to complete. Your brilliant tattoos begin to blink.

Link to the Physorg article.

Link to the research article appearing in Advanced Materials.

Photo by: Bok Yeop Ahn

Last week, Lisa Bayer passed along a link to a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Tushar Rae about the issue of citation standards for e-books: since e-text reflows based on a user’s preference settings, what’s the best way to list page numbers in our citations of such text? William Rankin, director of educational innovation at Abilene Christian University, gets the last lines of the article:

Citations have always been symbolic . . . I don’t think I need symbolic anymore. I want an actual link.

Right on.

Doesn’t page numbering seem like a problem unique to this moment in history? Push the calendar forward 10 years or so, and everything will be digitized and interconnected, and these problems will all be discussed in the past tense. Implicit in this is the passing of the page as an organizing principle.

Among the UIP journals that I manage, the Journal of American Ethnic History has the most interesting citation problems. Articles with standard citations are rare, and more common are ones that require a large measure of improvisation to account for archival sources, some of which were established before the electric grid. Fortunate for me, other professionals compose, copy edit, and proofread these citations, but it’s fascinating to manage the consensus-building process that brings it all together. These special citations point to locations in space, not text. “In this city, in this building, in this room, in this carton, in this folder, in this document, is this anti-war petition” sort of thing. On long days, I’m tempted to replace CMS with GPS.

The Rae article prompts us to imagine what might replace the page in the evolution of academic research. My first guess is the panel—a digital plane of any size encoded with text, graphics, video, user comments, blinking lights, and whatever else comes along. Research panels could be developed like cities, and citations of panels could replace page numbers with vertical and horizontal coordinates similar to those used on street maps, making the cited text into little niche neighborhoods within an article’s overall city plan. Hyperlinks finally living up to their prefixes by seeming like forms of teleportation. // More: Layout templates based on the principles of landscape architecture. Research panels that grow metropolitan in size and spawn suburbs of ancillary data sets. Museums presenting collections of fine research prints that visitors might stand before and ponder. Meta-analyses that deconstruct a text like a monster marching through SimCity.

Perhaps scholarship of the future will jetison spatial design entirely and take the form of hyperdimensional objects, the shape of which changes as their authors change, and the form of which is not defined by the protocols of the hypertext markup language—scholarship as a ghostly weft passing through living thoughts that transform as we grow and age. “Encountering the text” will give way to haunting the thought-form, and knowledge will seem unmistakably organic, interactive, and awe-inspiring. // Every new idea will hold out the possibility of literally changing everything we know. // The totemic image of this new age might be the mycelial mat—the living network of underground fungal fibers that form symbiotic chemical communication networks across whole forests and do much to define the shape and health of the forest ecology.

The largest organism in the world is a 2400-year-old mycelia in Oregon. It is 2200 acres in size. It produces honey mushrooms in the fall.

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Update: The problem of page numbering in e-books was already finding its solution coincident to the publication of the Rae article—it appears that a software fix will display standardized page numbers regardless of user preference settings. Woot.

I don’t think this diminishes my fungus proposal one bit.

Link to the Chronicle story.
Link to JAEH.

(Image: Honey Mushrooms, a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0, image from AnneTanne’s photostream)
(Image: Chataway’s Map of Winnipeg (1919), a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, image from Manitoba Historical Maps’s photostream)

This seems bound to become more apparent as books become less things to be paged through and more things to be downloaded. Kids of the future will look at images from the previous centuries and wonder why books were ever collected in the first place. Walls stacked with books will seem to them the way walls covered in animal hides might seem to us now. They will be amused by the phrase “dust jacket.” 

Normally I keep my books in the kitchen pantry, and I admit they only fit there because I’ve donated most of them to the Urbana Free Library. The landlord’s recent effort to control the building’s cockroach population forced me to move what books I have to the living room, where as of this morning they are still piled in heaps on the floor. When I want something, I have to shuffle around one of the piles until I spot some familiar bit of color.

There are many advantages to disappearing the book into The Cloud, but I suspect the really important ones have not yet materialized. We seem still to be at the stage of development in which ebooks simulate physical books — our expectations are based on how closely ebooks reproduce the reading experience we know and love.

When the full weight of computer intelligence is brought to bear on the issue, though, we might predict that the whole reading experience will transform into something more. Here’s my wants list:

1. I want the ebook to help me keep track of things — names, dates, titles. I want it to be ready to connect every important reference to prior references so that, when I run across something unfamiliar, it will remind me where I saw it first.
2. I want the author to be ready to explain things to me as I read — just a simple pop-up window in which I might get a further explanation about characters, theories, inspirations, whatever. If the author’s not up for it, then James Earl Jones.
3. I want ebooks to update themselves in useful and surprising ways — to add commentary from critics, say, or audio from the author’s book tour, or to add new studies and more data to existing studies. I want to return to a favorite ebook to find that it has grown to twice its original size.
4. I want the ebook to be a virtual reading coach. There exists a mountain of research data on reading performance, and I want it turned into applications that make me a better reader with each reading experience. I want the ebook to make me and everyone I know virtuoso readers.
5. I want eye-tracking software to be included with the ebook reader so that it knows when I’m losing my sense of attention, when I don’t quite understand something, and when I’ve likely skipped past an important detail. I want the ebook to create phenomenal reading compression for me and everyone I know.
6. I want the ebook to facilitate nonlocal conversational partnerships with people reading the same thing at the same time as me. I want the ebook to construct ad hoc wireless networks that function as classrooms and salons for such reading partnerships. I want the ebook to have all sorts of cool plug-ins that will enhance these ebook-based virtual environments.
7. I want the ebook to be the city I live in while I’m reading it.
8. I want the ebook to have extrasensory perception on my behalf. I want the ebook to use my reading choices and habits, and my learning style and interests, to suggest the next ebook I might like, the optimal location for reading it, and the best strategies for integrating what I learn.
9. I want the ebook to do for authorship what it will do for readership. I want the ebook to make ebook authorship part of our everyday lives. Here’s an ebook about today’s world news. Here’s an ebook about our trip to Santa Fe.
10. I want the ebook to remake the concept of a book so thoroughly that not only does it transcend and absorb all other media but also becomes the standard by which we describe our relationship with reality.

Okay, so we’re not there yet, but it’s easy to believe that we will be there eventually, even inevitably. Everything suggested here exists in some form already, if perhaps a form that is undeveloped or expensive. Eventually we will carry around this version of the book in the same backpack or coat pocket that we carry our analog books around in now. And in the future beyond that future, kids will think how weird it was that we once carried an item around with us in order to read.

What would you like the ebook to do?

(p.s. Not long ago, I visited a friend’s house that was packed with books — not just piles in the living room but also in the garage, the hallway, the bedrooms, the kitchen — some 50 years of collecting on display. Here was the book collector’s element — the life lived inside a homemade library, the library as landscape with its own sense of natural order, as though the whole thing was an extension of the outdoors, and we were standing inside and outside all at once. As an artistic statement, it could have been a comment about the wilderness of the mind. But that didn’t occur to me at the time. At the time, we talked about civil rights and drank lemonade.)

(Image: Library of knowledge by ShironekoEuro, a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works (2.0) image from Flickr)

Link to bookshelf walls.

Those of you who are worried about the future of print publishing–well, stop! I found, via the awesome MobyLives blog, the perfect solution to those who say you can’t travel easily with a bunch of non-digital books. Behold, the Archive II!

Read more over at Inhabit. The iPad can’t do this. Just sayin’.

Now go read the post and then, as Bookninja suggests,

You distract him, I’ll circle around behind with the truncheon and burlap sack. Start the van.

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