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Books After Books: SVA Workshop

by stml on Nov 02, 2012

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Slides for the introduction to a four-day workshop at the School fo Visual Arts, New York.

Slides for the introduction to a four-day workshop at the School fo Visual Arts, New York.

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Manuel Schmalstieg, artist. designer. publisher. I really hope someone recorded your introduction... 6 months ago
Are you sure you want to

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Career: Snowbooks, blog, myspace, second life. Small, nimble.\n
Bookkake: POD, interest in new technologies (doesn’t always have to mean online). POD revolutionising print by applying ideas from the network to existing infrastructure.\n
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Enhanced Editions. Possibilities of the iPhone, where publishers themselves were afraid to go. Audio. Extending the possibilities of the ebook.\n
Twitter: form of the book. First Twitterbook. Questioning form, intention, use. What counts as ephemeral and what as permanent? Disturbing.\n
Artists’ eBooks. Testing the possibilities of the ebook and particularly the epub format. Limited, but interesting. Examples.\n
SXSW book. Form of the book again. A book for a week, that moves through these different stages. Has one use for a week, then becomes a souvenir of that time. Books are souvenirs of themselves. This is very key, and I’ll come back to it.\n
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Wikihistoriography: most recent project, too long to go into here, but it’s about how our perception of history and of historical processes can be shaped by technology, and what we should be doing and thinking about that.\n
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The reasons for this were and remain interesting, I think - they’re still the one’s you hear now. People didn’t like reading off a screen, people liked the shape and size of books, you couldn’t read them in the bath, they didn’t smell right. All these are refutable and have actually been refuted: people read off screens all the time, people are discovering ereaders in huge numbers, you can’t drop a book in the bath either, really, you’re just less upset when you do. You can read ebooks better in bed, because they can be backlit. I’m not going to get into the smell thing. That usually ends in shouting.\n
But there are good reasons for being uncomfortable with ebooks, and I think it’s important to know what they are. And for me, the really big point is that books are not merely physical objects, they are temporal objects: they exist in time. They have this ongoing life that isn’t bound up just with the reading of them. So the real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. And there’s a social layer that forms around this, another timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it some more. We need to look at how we address this temporal mode with ebooks.\n
Appropriation - how do you write your name in an ebook? How do you have that same sense of ownership of a book. We spend a lot of time with these individual texts - per-unit consumption time, books are real companions. We go on journeys with them. It’s important to maintain that connection.\n
This process should be more visible. It’s visible in paper books when we crack the spine and dogear chapters and fray and tear the pages and scribble in the margin. This is real metadata, this is where our experience of the book lives.\n
Souvenirs. How do we create souvenirs of ebooks. This is actually a problem for all digital media, because I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a digital souvenir. By their very nature souvenirs are discrete, tangible. They don’t exist on screens. Books, as I’ve said, are souvenirs of themselves. What you’re seeing here are another project of mine - a rubbish but potentially interesting one.\n
Or - this is probably my favourite example. History. This is a book I bought recently, a present to myself. It’s one of my favourite novels by my favourite author. First edition, Bodley Head, 1955. Quite valuable, definitely the most valuable book I own - but not just because it’s a First, but...\n
It’s an inscribed First. Brooke signed it to his friend, the reviewer and critic Olivia Manning. Her library recently came up for sale and I got this one. This is a book with its history inscribed in it, a really wonderful thing. And we can’t really do this with ebooks, just as they can’t be souvenirs of themselves, as wonderful as that is too. So what can we do, to enable this temporal mode, to make the ebook as special as the physical book?\n
The way people bookmark is fascinating. Some people think it’s the worst thing you can do, second to actually burning the thing. Other people, like me, do it a lot, but rarely return to the page. I’m trying to break myself out of that by blogging all dog-eared pages. Some people have really advanced strategies, like using the top of the page as a pointer and the bottom corner for interesting things. Some people even tear the page. Those people are definitely evil.\n
Quick diversion on people’s behaviour: book guilt. This is fascinating. ... Anyway...\n
Like marginalia. I had to get this picture off Flickr because there’s absolutely no way I’d write in a book. can’t do it. It’s terrible. But it’s also wonderful. Bookmarking and annotating are the primary ways in which we assert our ownership, our appropriation of the book. I do this a lot though: \n
Which is to keep a commonplace book, copying out chunks of books I’m reading, either short quotes or quite long passages. Copying out brings a different understanding of the text. It’s good, but it’s also a form of editing, and curation.\n
And I’ve found myself doing this more and more and more as I read increasingly electronically, first on my old Nokia, and then the iPhone, and now on the iPad. The facility of electronic bookmarking that doesn’t deface the text. Here it is in iBooks. One swipe, bam. That bit’s from Walter Benjamin: “For centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of writers faced many thousands of times that number of readers. Then, towards the end of the last century, there came a change.” He’s talking about the end of the eighteenth century of course; can you imagine what he would have send about the internet? I miss Benjamin.\n
iBooks also lets you take notes - marginalia. These are horrible, but it’s a start.\n
Here’s the Kindle. Not only can you highlight like you can on the iPad, but they’ve put in the the tiniest little nod to socialising the reading experience... \n
That. That’s it. I mean, it’s nice, but it’s useless. It tells you precisely nothing, because anyone can go through a book and pick out the 10 or 20 averagely most high-information-content sentences, and sure enough, these will be the ones everyone picks. The quotes everyone picks are not interesting. The quotes a few people - critics, teachers, friends, even the author themselves - pick out: those are interesting.\n
This is pretty amazing too. This is real future stuff, appropriate, as I’m reading William Gibson. I’ve been reading it on my phone, so when I next pick up my iPad, it asks if I want to skip to where I got to on my phone. Brilliant. Yes. Thank you.\n
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bkkeepr - here’s one I tried\n
possibilities. More of this.\n
other examples - everyread, bookglutton etc.\n
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This is the arena of selling books before: shops, covers, importance thereof.\n
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same in kindle store\n
even though, when you get moby dick on your kindle...\n
there’s no cover, and this is the first page\n
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two use cases for navigation: checking back somewhere else, and lending a book to a friend\n
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1 Like

Manuel Schmalstieg, artist. designer. publisher. Tags books reading book 2.0 hypertext annotation 6 months ago

Books After Books: SVA Workshop Presentation Transcript

Photo by seq on Flickr | http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/92272728@N00/1535261777/ | Used under Creative Commons
Photo by D-Koupf on Flickr | http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/28933686@N08/3344933003/ | Used under Creative Commons
2 Problems
Problem 1
Covers
Texthttp://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/16/wikileaks-iraq-visualisation
“Literary Organism”Stefanie Posavecitsbeenreal.co.uk
Exploring ways of visuallyrepresenting sentences by usingtheir punctuation to createcircular diagrams. Each word isrepresented by a line, and thethickness of the lines (and thespace between the lines)radiating outwards from thecenter point provides a recordof the pauses and empasiscreated by the punctuation.
BRIEF 1 Cover Design Communicating content meaningfullyacross a range of formats and platforms
Problem 2
Navigation
BRIEF 2 NavigationFinding your way across multiple locations in a book