Sorry to quote myself, but it's only so I can then disagree with myself. <br><br>I ended my response to Rick's msg this way:<br><br>----<br><br>So, for now I think I'm sticking with the notion that ebooks will make
pbooks obsolete. That doesn't mean books go away. Rather, they will
generally be seen as less useful, less convenient, and less affordable
than pbooks, and the value of pbooks will increasingly be in what we've
traditionally taken as extrinsic to their value: the canonical cover
rather than the "contents" (in coward-quotes because the Web by its
nature is ecstatic)...
<br><br>-----<br><br>I was thinking that I didn't want to end with the "books become theater" analogy because theater has been marginalized but it hasn't become obsolete. I was thinking that matters will be different with pbooks. We will use ebooks to do what we used to use pbooks for; pbooks won't do what pbooks do as well as ebooks will. That's what I mean by "obsolete." And I still agree with myself about that. But, thanks to this thread, I think I've been taking too functional a view of books. As Paul and Aaron say, their cultural and social significances are likely not simply to be stripped but will transform in ways we -- well, I -- can't predict. So, thanks.
<br><br>Nevertheless, if f I play the stock market, I'd short books. <br><br>-- David W.<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 6, 2007 2:37 AM, Aaron Beebe <<a href="mailto:aaron@brawnandfervor.com">aaron@brawnandfervor.com
</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div link="blue" vlink="blue" lang="EN-US">
<div>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">This is a very interesting topic.<span> </span>And I think it also points to one of the
common fallacies that the "new media" community shares with other forward
thinking groups as far as the concepts of "obsolescence", "death", and
"progress".<span> </span>Our relationship with media
changes in all kinds of directions.<span>
</span>Media don't really have a lifespan that's unidirectional – i.e. they're
born, they live, then they die.<span> </span></span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">I think the example of live theater is a
great one.<span> </span>We've seen that the
definition of "live theater" has changed over time (<span><span>greek</span></span> tragedy, <span>brutalist</span> performance
art, Lyric Opera, various forms of traditional dance, <span>buskering</span>,
magic, vaudeville, cyclorama, "happenings", parades).<span> </span>Its utility changes over time, it doesn't
just "die".<span> </span>Today I think we're seeing a
kind of resurgence in live theater – something that falls outside the rhetoric
of "living" or "dying".<span> </span>So as far as
paper books are concerned, I hope we see a continuing evolution of form and use
for a long time to come.<span> </span>As long as
there is a utility, even an <span>artisinal</span> one, for
printed material on real, analog surfaces, we'll be able to talk about printed
books.<span> </span>In fact, like theater, I hope
that electronic mass production allows us to <span>reimagine</span>
books as a physical experience in a way.<span>
</span>As a unique, lived experience, perhaps.<span>
</span><span>Like visiting a tourist site instead of looking at
photos or films.</span><span> </span>Or like seeing a
<span>supercelebrity</span> in a <span><span>broadway</span></span> show instead of on a screen.<span> </span></span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<div>
<p><font color="navy" face="Courier New" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">Aaron
Beebe</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Courier New" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">Curator</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Courier New" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">The
Coney Island Museum</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Courier New" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;"><a href="http://www.coneyisland.com" target="_blank">www.coneyisland.com</a></span></font></p>
</div>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<div style="border-style: none none none solid; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color blue; border-width: medium medium medium 1.5pt; padding: 0in 0in 0in 4pt;"><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">
<p><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Tahoma;">-----Original Message-----<br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b>
<a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a>] <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">
On Behalf Of </span></b>David Weinberger<br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Wednesday, December 05, 2007
9:28 PM<br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> <a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc@mailman.thing.net</a><br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [iDC] Media dies more
slowly than some would like</span></font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What a lovely,
thoughtful, rich essay! Rick I think is pointing the way -- in theory and in
practice -- toward a new relationship with books. I wish we could make him King
of Publishing and Emperor of the Libraries...um, in a completely bottom up way,
of course. <br>
<br>
In my view, ebooks are not going to wipe pbooks off the face of the earth.
Assuming maximum success for ebooks, my guess is that pbooks will continue
roughly as live theater has -- a special experience within the main stream of
TV and movies. But, that would mean that pbooks have become pretty much
obsolete: They still have value but generally we don't need them to do what we
traditionally have done with books. <br>
<br>
Rick writes: "In fact, the obsolescence of physical books isn't a
technical or philosophical issue; it's preeminently a business and marketing
issue." That's an important point. But it's also more complex than that
(as Rick acknowledges by talking about preeminence), since the marketing issue
includes publicizing the perceived benefits of ebooks, and that takes us back
to the features enabled by the technology. Tech isn't determinative, but it
does have something to do with it.<br>
<br>
So, what the benefits of paper books are that will keep them from becoming
obsolete? <br>
<br>
Grafton points mainly to the needs of a handful of scholars to consult multiple
editions of original sources and to his-- it seems to me -- fetishistic love of
leather-bound books spread out on shiny wood surfaces. Rick points to some
other benefits. <br>
<br>
In particular, Rick finds collections of pbooks far more conducive to fruitful
browsing. We've all had experiences that accord with that. But I think that the
failure to provide rich, evocative, satisfying browsing experiences for ebooks
is temporary. We -- the market -- will invent new ways of browsing ebooks that
have the potential to be far more satisfying. There are already tons of
experiments, including Amazon, LibraryThing, and, arguably, the Web itself.
Already, much as I like bookstores, I am happily surprised by books more
frequently at Amazon...and our local bookstore (Brookline Booksmith) is
fantastic. <br>
<br>
What are the other benefits of pbooks? How many of those benefits are
sustainable? How many are not replicable with ebooks?<br>
<br>
- The smell and feel of knowledge encased in leather? Not replicable. But, I'm
thinking it's not all that sustainable except, ultimately, for the market of
collectors. <br>
<br>
- Durability of paper. But won't digital media become more durable as we figure
out that we really do need to preserve our culture's works longer than a rev
cycle of Microsoft Word? <br>
<br>
- The installed base. It'll be a loooong time before all books are available
electronically, where loooong = functionally never. <br>
<br>
- Books as historic artifacts. Gutenberg's not going to be running off any more
copies.<br>
<br>
- Readability of paper, even in bright sun, etc. But surely we will invent a
paper quality display at some point in human history. Please? <br>
<br>
- The ability to lend pbooks (friend to friend or via libraries), whereas
ebooks have DRM coming out their wazoos. Absolutely, but that's just a (poor)
business decision.<br>
<br>
What are the benefits of pbooks that will keep plibraries from going the way of
going the way of live theater? And I don't mean that rhetorically. <br>
<br>
I know that Rick is asking a deeper question that that. But, I think there is
some evidence that the Net is breaking the spine of books, and that therefore
pbooks are going to affect the shape of ebooks less than Rick suggests. E.g.,
much of the value of Wikipedia (oy, yes, the Wikipedia example again) and of
blogs (nooo! not blogs!) obviously come from how they get past the limitations
of paper. It's important to ask, as Rick does, about the ways in which pbooks
will shape ebooks, but I think most of the shaping is going in the other
direction, even though Kindle highlights its own commitment to the sacred
rectangle of the page. <br>
<br>
So, for now I think I'm sticking with the notion that ebooks will make pbooks
obsolete. That doesn't mean books go away. Rather, they will generally be seen
as less useful, less convenient, and less affordable than pbooks, and the value
of pbooks will increasingly be in what we've traditionally taken as extrinsic
to their value: the canonical cover rather than the "contents" (in
coward-quotes because the Web by its nature is ecstatic)... <br>
<br>
Thank you so much for this posting, Rick.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
David Weinberger</span></font></p>
<div>
<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">On Dec 5, 2007 1:04 AM, Rick Prelinger <<a href="mailto:rick@archive.org" target="_blank">rick@archive.org</a>> wrote: </span></font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Trebor's kind invitation to kindle a thread has filled me with
trepidation, largely because my experience in the areas germane to this list
has been preeminently practical rather than theoretical. I've been a
moving image archivist since the early 1980s and have been trying to go into
archival recovery for almost ten years, but the thrill and rewards of putting
films online for free has kept me hooked on archives and goaded me into
thinking about meta-archival issues. I was a new media author in the
laserdisc and CD-ROM days and published fifteen discs in collaboration with
Voyager, hoping to free historical film from the traps of academicism and
nostalgia. And for the past several years I've been an amateur outsider
librarian, co-founder of a private research library open to the public in San
Francisco, a large physical collection that is rapidly developing an online
analogue. In truth I'd also have to admit to being an independent
scholar: I've done a Vectors residency, <br>
lecture frequently on archival access, and write curricula for cinema
studies students on archival tracks.<br>
<br>
Those of us who have spent time in and around what people call "new
media" (I'm happier calling it "emerging media," because I don't
know what "new" means any more) have seen technologies come and go,
often before their potential can be realized. When a technology dies its
relics inure to media primitivists who quietly work with them, often in a
localized or artisanal way. I'm thinking of my friends in Detroit who
resolutely only listen to music that's on 8-track tapes, the immortal
Pixelvision underground, or the performative-projection artists in San
Francisco. Many technologies that were once touted as revolutionary or at
the very least disruptively problematic revert to being quaint antiques,
perhaps even becoming part of a quietly hissing steampunk infrastructure. <br>
<br>
But some media forms are not going away fast, despite what everyone seems to
think. Radio broadcasting (if you accept San Jose 1909 as its place and
date of inception) is 98 years old. The pipes it passes through change
and the business models governing its production and distribution evolve, but
it works today much as it has worked since the early 1920s. Radio has not
become quaint, and it encompasses both artisanal, local practice and
monopolistically-controlled mass medium. <br>
<br>
And then there are books.<br>
<br>
I'm a librarian two or three days a week, and I love books, though I don't feel
at all nostalgic about them, nor about libraries, musty paper or handwritten
marginalia. I'm not romantically infatuated with books (see David
Weinberger's excellent critique of Anthony Grafton's recent New Yorker piece at
( <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-nov19-07.html#book" target="_blank">http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-nov19-07.html#book</a>).
But I think David's characterization of books as fetishistic objects and
of libraries as nostalgic repositories is well-articulated but unfounded.
Recent experience reveals to me no inherent reason why ebooks should
render printed books obsolete. <br>
<br>
Three years ago my spouse and I opened up an appropriation-friendly private
research library in downtown San Francisco with the help of sixty friends who
came and spent eight days shelving the collection (much of which had been
deaccessioned by other libraries). We had no idea who would use it, and
in fact hardly anyone came during the first three months. And then
suddenly we were mobbed -- by art classes, independent scholars, artists
looking for text and images to reuse, and the simply curious. Even though
we were three blocks from the (much larger) public library, people chose to
come and use our materials. Since then we have had over 3000 visitors. <br>
<br>
What we learned was that browsing and reading have endured and appear to be
robust; that the younger and more digitally-oriented users bond to print with
passion; that our visitors prefer the serendipity and discovery enabled by
navigating a space of physical objects over the simulation of discovery offered
by online resources; that query-based collections (as most online libraries
are) inhibit randomness, discovery and surprise; and that while people use
databases or Google to answer specific questions, they come to us to find what
they are not looking for and leave fulfilled and happy. All of this was
quite unanticipated and a great surprise. It is, of course, empirical and
anecdotal, but it's led us to believe that the assertion that physical books
are on the point of obsolescence is faith-based and self-fulfilling. <br>
<br>
There is absolutely no evidence that ebooks will replace printed books unless
we want them to. In fact, the obsolescence of physical books isn't a
technical or philosophical issue; it's preeminently a business and marketing
issue. Will the publishing industry try to force readers to buy and use
text digitally? The potential economies of digital distribution would
argue that this is likely to occur. If it does, this is not a judgment
upon print's relevance, nor is it the fulfillment of an anti-nostalgic drive.
It's just business. Ebooks won't disrupt the publishing ecosystem;
they're arising out of an attempt to remake business models. Similarly,
the recording industry moved from analog vinyl to digital CDs in an attempt to
migrate to what it thought would be a read-only medium and to raise the price
of music. The unintended consequence -- that it became easy to copy bits,
was disruptive. But the technology was deployed to update business models.
<br>
<br>
It's true that Google is the first and last resort for many students and
information seekers. It's true that university libraries are less used
than they were. And this is one powerful reason why ebooks may multiply
-- even the richest university libraries cannot function at a loss, and it
costs dearly to accession, catalog, shelve and circulate printed materials.
Stanford is building a new engineering library that will be bookless.
The strongest argument for doing so is reduced labor cost. Why have
large libraries welcomed Google as a partner despite the problematic
contractual provisions? <br>
<br>
Digital text promises new functionalities to which I look forward; that's why
we are scanning 8,000 of our public domain items in partnership with the Internet
Archive. If networked annotation, textual mashups and open, sharable
textual datasets leave the lab and go mainstream, it won't be because physical
books are outmoded, but because copyright owners perceive a market. (In
the nonprofit and academic worlds, we can try to help monkeywrench this by
leveraging public domain works to build new services and hoping that an
accessible, shared public domain forces copyright holders to move in the same
direction. But right now the opposite is happening, as Microsoft and
Google build separate enclosed gardens of public domain books they're paying to
scan.) <br>
<br>
I also await convincing evidence that networked annotation will scale. It
flourishes in many small instances, but it also flounders due to lack of
interest and specificity. Again, many annotation projects haven't escaped
the labs in which they were created. Others, like the annotations
attached to our films online at the Internet Archive, are characterized by a
few peaks of insight and lucidity rising out of a landscape of noise.
Though many scholars and teachers make heavy use of the online films,
they don't annotate or discuss them online, I think because the overall
discourse is heavily fan-oriented and focused on likes and dislikes. And
I am not convinced that hyperlinking will turn into a mainstream activity,
unless it is forced upon people as part of standards-based education. We
construct a image of the future book based on features we perceive and desire
today; this means we eternalize the present. But we cannot build castles
out of today's bricks without riski <br>
ng instability.<br>
<br>
The publishing industry, like the recording industry, is its own worst enemy.
Instead of taking a deliberative and receptive attitude towards
technology, they are allowing their actions to be dictated by blind, often
unthinking fear. They would do best by being customer-centered and
ensuring that readers could obtain texts in whatever formats they chose with
minimal difficulty. In my gentrified San Francisco supermarket I recently
counted over 70 varieties of olive oil. Why is the publishing industry
all hung up over the evolution of digital text, and why do we reify the
assertion that print has to die out? Can't both exist and flourish, along
with audiobooks, large-type books and other formats that may emerge? <br>
<br>
I cite our admittedly subjective personal experience because it indicates to me
that not only are books not going away, contrary to what David Weinberger
believes, but that they are engaging people in new ways as we move towards a
digital culture. I'd venture to say that physical books will start to
look and function differently in a digital context, and that the form and shape
of ebooks will be influenced by the persistence of physical objects which, after
all, practically define persistence. How exactly this will happen might
be a good subject for discussion. <br>
<br>
Rick<br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
<br>
Rick Prelinger<br>
Prelinger Archives <a href="http://www.prelinger.com" target="_blank">http://www.prelinger.com</a><br>
P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622 USA<br>
<a href="mailto:footage@panix.com" target="_blank">footage@panix.com</a><br>
<br>
Prelinger Library: <a href="http://www.prelingerlibrary.org" target="_blank">http://www.prelingerlibrary.org</a><br>
<br>
NEW: Prelinger Library Digital Collections<br>
<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library" target="_blank">http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br>
<br clear="all">
<br>
-- <br>
David Weinberger<br>
Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center<br>
blog: <a href="http://www.JohoTheBlog.com" target="_blank">www.JohoTheBlog.com</a><br>
new book: <a href="http://www.EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com" target="_blank">www.EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com</a><br>
mail: <a href="mailto:self@evident.com" target="_blank">self@evident.com</a> </span></font></p></div></div>
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<br>mail: <a href="mailto:self@evident.com">self@evident.com</a>