<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Charlie et al,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for the invitation to comment on your post on 'the book to come' and also the thoughts you contributed to the 'Media dies more slowly than some would think' thread, especially the quote from Derrida. Exploring a variety of modes and means of communication has been a core part of my own and, by extension, Proboscis' work since at least 1994 - and the boundaries between print and digital publishing a fertile ground for playful experiments. In all our work we find that the most successful forms of engagement with other people are those that are flexible and that do not confine creation and sharing to singular modes or methods. I think the binary oppositions between print and digital are unhelpful most of the time, and the appearance, and discussion, of Amazon's Kindle seems like its 1998 all over again, when the death of print and the book was heralded with tiresome frequency.</div><div><br></div><div>For me the interesting angle is about authorship - who chooses or is able to participate in the creation of culture, how they get to share their creations and what value systems they become part of. In the bad old days of analogue distribution it was not just technically difficult to break into publishing, filmmaking and other forms of media, but there was a stranglehold on the channels of distribution which effectively cut out most people from participating beyond their immediate circle of acquaintance. I believe that it is the many-to-many model of sharing enabled by network technologies that fundamentally underpins a paradigm shift in authorship, not what media are employed. In our recent work Proboscis has been pursuing a hybrid approach - creating media that can move between the digital and the tangible (e.g. the Diffusion Shareables) and building tools to enable others to make and share their own (the Diffusion Generator) - for us the 'book to come' is precisely these kinds of hybrids and the collective, collaborative nature their production and sharing engenders. </div><div><br></div><div>I'm not convinced by premises which suggest that our love of books and the physical are merely 'fetishistic' attachments, instead I would suggest that objects themselves are also imbued with kinds of information that are valuable in addition to the 'content' that they might contain - things which we learn through touch as well as sight. Digital technologies also offer other kinds of experiences beyond the 'content', and forms of dexterity play a significant role there too. Desire is one of the most powerful motivations behind human action - creative people continue to find pleasure and meaning in skills involving not just intellectual stimulation but manual skills and other sensory perceptions. This is not nostalgia - it is about the nature of individual enquiry into what it means to communicate with others, how we express ourselves and our relation to the physical world. Humans are tactile creatures for whom touch is not just a 'pleasure' but also a conveyor of knowledge and information. </div><div><br></div><div>One of the weaknesses of the so-called 'knowledge economy' is that it rarely, if ever, acknowledges a place for 'experiential' knowledge (such as the manual knowledge of people who fabricate things) in its calculations. The 'network effect' of digital technologies means that we no longer have to accept singular modes of communication (broadcast to the margins), but also it means that we are free to explore multi-modal forms to communicate different things in different ways and on different levels. These do not all have to be digital or interactive, in fact I would say that now more than ever the re-discovery of techniques and media from the analogue age enables us to use them in surprising ways because they no longer bear the brunt of being the only media of communication, as they once were. I think that the book to come will continue to be an adventure in tactile and sensory communication as much as in what it contains.</div><div><br></div><div>best wishes,</div><div>Giles</div><div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</div><div>Giles Lane</div><div>Proboscis</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">a: </span>1st floor</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>|</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#333333"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666">24 rosebery avenue</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>|<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666">london</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>|</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>ec1r 4sx</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>|</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>uk</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">t</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666">: 020 7837 9344<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">|</font><span class="Apple-converted-space"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"> </font></span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">m</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666">: 07711 069 569<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">|</font><span class="Apple-converted-space"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"> </font></span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">skype</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#666666">: gileslane</font></div><div><a href="http://proboscis.org.uk">http://proboscis.org.uk</a></div></span></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div></span> </div><br></div></body></html>