Posts Tagged ‘book history’
More reflections on the history of predicting the book’s demise.
“The Book” has been dying for a long time. Although I don’t have any actual data to back this up, I sense that the cultural propensity to predict the the book’s demise is directly proportional to the amount of attention we pay to the adoption of digital technologies. More simply: the more computers we see, the more we thinks books are dying. And arguing (not for, in most cases, but the fact of) the death of the book has become so commonplace as to not even warrant more than a passing glance in popular media. I’ll spare you the bibliography of pop-references, but a quick look at the NYT archives, Wired magazine, Time, or any other publication related to books, writing, or publishing will offer a clear example of what someone looks like planning their own funeral. (Yeah, I’m planning on seeing Get Low at some point this week.) Okay. We get it. Books are dying. Or the book is already dead. Amazon, B&N, and Apple certainly are certainly making a lot of noise about it, too.
So this has been going on a long time. And it’s related to my dissertation. My first impulse (albeit it’s an OCD-informed impulse) was to do a little work to locate the first major publication arguing that the book is dying. But that’s no where near my dissertation. Instead, I thought I’d just start with one that’s pretty well known (read: sometimes referenced even today) and one that also captures the first wave of the-sky-falling-the-book-is-dying histrionics of the early nineties. Enter: Raymond Kurzweil.
In a three-part series for Library Journal in 1992, Kurzweil argues that the book-as-codex is going away. Not necessarily anytime soon, but probably sooner than people realize. Sounds familiar, right? But this was a time before the Kindle, the Nook, the iPad, or GoogleBooks. Instead of looking around at the evidence that paper-books were dying, Kurzweil had to look backwards in order to make claims about the future. History informs the future. Sure. Nothing new. But I find his approach to be a bit less direct than this. And one from which book historians might learn something, even if it might be a cautionary tale. Read the rest of this entry »
Blog-to-Book Tools: TnP? Preservation? Portability?
So is that all there is to say about it? Nope. There are three reasons I’m paying attention to this tool. I’m a blogger. I’m a humanities scholar. I care about the future of the book.
As a blogger, this is a great tool. The more tools we have at our disposal, the better. I can’t wait for people to start using Anthologize for all sorts of things it wasn’t intended for. I’ve already fielded questions about this “sort” of technology at the Louisville Conference on Lit this past February. I was giving a paper on Barthes, Blogging, and Authorship. The most interesting question: Am I going to turn [my] blog into a book eventually? (I don’t want to mis-represent the context of the question. He was asking because he wanted to turn his own blog into a book, not because he wanted to read mine as a book.) I told him that I thought that would be a nice tool, but I didn’t really see the use or necessity. But that was because I hadn’t really thought about it. But I have since. Why would I want to make a book out of my blog? Read the rest of this entry »
The @ Symbol as a Material Object (Opens the Door for a Cautionary Tale)
It’s been a week since “MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design … acquired the @ symbol into its collection.” I know, right? WTF? First of all… the @ symbol? And second… MoMA? The “acquisition” was announced a week ago on MoMA’s site, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I really don’t know what to make of it. Part of me thinks that it’s a serious “art joke” in the spirit of some of Duchamp’s most irreverent work (think “In Advance of a Broken Arm” and his “Urinal” pieces, for instance). But another part of me suspects that MoMA takes itself (and its incredibly valuable collection) waaaaay too seriously for that. So is Paola Antonelli serious? It doesn’t really matter to me because this move sort of makes sense. I hate to say it, but there’s really a dearth of intelligent commentary on this move so far out there on the interWebs. Most blog entries consist of a lot of quotation, and then little more than this-is-really-smart-or-really-weird sort of comments. Almost no analysis, though. The best I’ve seen is, surprising, at PCMag.com. (Check out Mark Hachman’s article.)
I’m not an art critic, and I’m not one who can speak to the history of industrial design. This situation makes me wish I were. But what I can do is think through the relevance of this move (if there is any) to the book’s history and the book’s futures. Read the rest of this entry »
