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In this Discussion
- 1234 July 2011
- Death July 2011
- distant_shoe August 2011
- Dr_William_Hayward July 2011
- ed_chigliak July 2011
- foghorn July 2011
- joey July 2011
- Leland July 2011
- lml__0_0__lml September 2011
- Loose_Thread September 2011
- Marcus July 2011
- Matthew September 2011
- MirandaJuly September 2011
- swamp_knobbler_mahan September 2011
- the_owls July 2011
- ThickeningAgent July 2011
- YoursTruly September 2011
Future of Books
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303661904576454353768550280.html
Say what you will about huge corporate bookstores, but they are/were the only bookstores left in a lot of places. Also they made publishers a lot of money which then made them more willing to help out lesser known authors. What happens next? Libraries are hurting. B&N is probably going the way of Borders in a few years. Portland may become the only city with any legit bookstores still standing. No more dusty shelves and coffee and hiding in an old chair hidden behind a wall of books anymore? Bummerfest.
Say what you will about huge corporate bookstores, but they are/were the only bookstores left in a lot of places. Also they made publishers a lot of money which then made them more willing to help out lesser known authors. What happens next? Libraries are hurting. B&N is probably going the way of Borders in a few years. Portland may become the only city with any legit bookstores still standing. No more dusty shelves and coffee and hiding in an old chair hidden behind a wall of books anymore? Bummerfest.
Comments
http://brybeebanana.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-will-miss-my-dear-friend-my-bookstore.html?m=1
so true Lip_Glossary
talk about feeling as old as Alan Forkner
I will mourn the going of books for all the rest of my days
Maybe this just means "the end of 1,000,000 crumby Encylopedia Britannicas in every book store." In other words, people won't print books just because that is what's done.
In this other terrible way, my thought is "less competition for me as a book collector."
I really don't know about that. I'm just sharing this with you because I accept your judgement.
I feel the small scale presses will come into their own as producers of niche goods.
Maybe I am just really naive and I just can't believe that digital stuff will replace the tactility of a real book. I recall a passage in Octavia Butler's "Clay's Ark," set in the future: a young girl finds old magazines in a closet somewhere. It seems so inefficient and antiquated, byt she remarks that the prints on paper are somehow more satisfying to behold. I guess that is the future of us.
I also can't help but imagine an ancient scribe fretting over the future of clay-and-chisel.
When my grandmother, a future PhD-holding junior high English/Art/French teacher, was a little girl in Detroit, her family built a new house. Her dad built her a secret reading room just for her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In some ways, that idea encapsulates the eternal longing for books that I expect to have. It's not just books we're talking about, obviously.... it's the idea of curling up on a week-end with a book, in front of a window, absorbing the outside weather. Or the pleasure of intense focus while we sit at a desk reading. Or the fellowship that occurs in a library or book store. The fetishization of our book stack. Seeing a stranger read a book you know.
It's weird to think of books that exist almost as pure spirit (what my lizard brain thinks of a Kindle) rather than smelly, scratchy piles of masticated tree. But then I remember falling in love with my first computer, body and soul, and even though it wasn't an organic object of affection it sure felt like 100% real love to me. I guess we find ways to bond with any thing, obviously. The sound of a modem calling out to another modem has absolutely touched my very soul.
What is weird about the Kindle is............ does every book come printed in the same font? Like, "KindleFont" or something?
I should really stop posting things here when I first wake up. My self editor doesn't usually wake up til an hour after I do.
Books are such natural candidates for object fetishization. I think the mass market paperback is doomed, but cool, smaller presses just gotta survive. The print-on-demand technology will get cheaper, and when we come to a day when it doesn't cost much more to have the object instead of the pure information, the emotions we have for our "reading material" will prolly keep print alive.
(Otherwise, I'm building my reading room and never coming back.)
the places we acquire our books may change, and the physical format in which we ingest those words may change, but i assume that once we've made it through we'll realize that the words, stories, and information are still as wonderful as ever. at least that is what i am hoping.
that said, i love the combination of books and the internet at the same time. I am currently reading The Big Roads which is a history of the roads and the highway system in the US, and I am augmenting the reading with Google Maps- allowing me to look at and explore the exact roads which are being discussed. I have found Google Maps, and Wikipedia for that matter, absolutely wonderful companions to history or geography based non-fiction. THE FUTURE!!!
BTW- did you know that a designer working on the early interstate freeway system wanted to call it the "Steadyflow System" ??!!
I think people will have a very small and intimate collection of physical books and a chronological electronic library based on the lifestream idea, searchable. Maybe we will all be living in shipping containers with a fiber optic connection, like a William Gibson novel, light in physical possessions.
Today printing has beautiful resolution and color, but you can see the revenge of lofi with studies that people prefer mp3's to uncompressed music. The real question is how thinking will change.
(Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is an interesting visual on book collecting)
Don't tease me!
WHATS WRONG WITH ME
you should ask your friend McDoogan if she liked it.
What is the difference between a "reading room" and a "study"?
I know all media is in the transition to more digital formats, but it all just seems less engaging to me or maybe a different kind of engaging? I don't think I am alone in having the problem that if something is on a screen I have a really hard time sinking into it mentally. I used to spend a lot more time with records and CDs. I used to call people instead of just texting them. I used to be a lot more tolerant of artistic flaws and flaws in people and friendships because it was harder to meet them and art and music used to not be so easily available. The pluses have been discussed a lot. In a super broad sense there is just generally more information that people are exposed to, and in theory that makes people more knowledgeable. I kinda think it makes people less tolerant of flaws though, and I think flaws are some of the most interesting...things. I am being vague. I guess I'm trying to get at the depth of information, people, art, music, writing. It's not that I think that these things are becoming shallower per se, but I think that there are maybe different categories of depth and a certain kind is dying. I wish I could explain my thoughts better.
There is a book called "Fortress of Solitude" by Jonathen Letham. I bought the book on a recommend and read the first 100 pages and just absolutely hated it. On page 101 the book totally changes and becomes great, and I think a big reason I pushed through was because I put in that effort to go to the bookstore, browse through books, have a conversation with an employee, and fork over 15 bucks. I'm not sure if it was a digital format that I spent 3 minutes downloading off the internet on an amazon recommend and only forked over 6 bucks or something...I'm not sure if I would have kept going, and I would have never experienced that reward and that is sad to me for some reason. I could have read a book that was good the whole way. I could have downloaded a bunch of books and perused until I found one that was perfect, and probably have been way happier with it. I think this applies to a lot of things. I'm not sure what I'm getting at.
also ZA, I got sick of Gibson and feel like he really faltered there for a while (also I discovered I relate much more to Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling) but his past two books Pattern Recognition and Zero History are so so good!
it's interesting to look at music and the web and undergrounds, when you can find out anything about anything instantly, is something lost? how will/has underground music change/d? I know a lot of weirdo kids out in the boonies are NOT committing suicide because they can find other like-minded people on the nets, but does the lack of effort required to learn about subcultures detract from their future growth? My friends and I have been talking about this a ton over the past decade.
Incidentally, there are also digital accidents. I have had a lot of them as a web designer and developer throughout the years. The web is pretty fluid so it allows for a lot of mistakes and unintended consequences, especially in terms of coding.
I really love and appreciate both analog and digital mediums of communication and expression. Every older generation always complains about the new shit, and the youth, and the kids and the stuff that's "lost", but perhaps we're just entering that older phase of our lives?
Good stories and compelling experiences will never die.
AT first I was resistant, but now I finding that I actually read way more now that I discovered iBooks on my phone. I always have it with me, which allows me to fit reading in to small moments in my "on-the-go lifestyle."
I would always forget whatever book I am reading but I never forget my phone.
I guess this goes more for literature though (or, to be more honest, young adult science fiction). I still consume the shit out of zines and other publications that function as art objects.
http://www.nieves.ch/catalogue/app.html
@KmikeyM GOOD ONE.
I assume artists give the okay to distribute online--did any abstain?
I am not sure if any artists opt out, or what happens in situations where the artist is deceased.
I purchased the app and have enjoyed a book or two.
Content is king!
future of printed media
magazines get so rare that 2 people have to read 1 at once
Or, clothes. Who needs clothes anymore because of the internet?
But the friction is lacking.
We don't get to feel a presence as much and it's even possible to spend a lot of physical time with people without truly "feeling" them.
Reading a book online or with a kindle doesn't mean you read it less than if you had read an actual paper copy. Listening to music on a computer doesn't mean you are not listening to it.
But I think that the easiest it becomes for humans to carry media/distractions on their person, the more excuses we have to be absent minded and the less meaningful our average interactions become. I hang out with people who text as we sit face to face all the time now and it's not even weird anymore.
I don't think records are going to die. I don't think books are going to die. They might just become more of an obsession for a diminishing group of collectors who wish to go really deep with everything. It's the same with friends. I need a deeper bond with people and the stuff they make, but that is just part of my personality.
My hunch is that the primary definition of a book stays "a bound paper thing with pages" for another 300 years, even if most of them are dusty antiques by then. Yes, it will also mean a long, fixed, narrative text file, but that will be a secondary definition.
Yes, people have been publishing books on the internet for years and yes these books are real books even if they haven't been printed out. Yes, yes. yes.
Still.
The internet makes stuff more important.
Borders is business, real estate mostly, not books.
Did you know that for the first 200 or 300 years of book-making nearly all books lost money and were paid for by their authors?* The idea of a lucrative popular market for imaginative or important books, the idea of a large (literate) general readership, is kind of confined to the previous century.
That's what I heard anyway.
* This is dumb. I was thinking like, since Gutenberg. But, duh.... there were loads of books before moveable type. Hand copied ones and ones printed from wood carvings, etc. Still, not much about the money back then.
http://readingstack.tumblr.com/
Share what you are reading, what someone else is reading, cool books, dumb books, libraries, dentist office magazines, kindle books, rare books, stacks of books, batman comics, or whatever else means "book" to you and near you!
books for hundreds of years after their creation were actually pricelessly valuable. It took many people MONTHS to make a single one (kill a sheep, skin it, prepare its skin in a variety of chemical baths and scrape it periodically in certain ways, etc. etc., until it becomes "paper-thin." Then you dry it. Now it is parchment! Then cut it into pages that fit together. Then some dude sits down and his Life's Work for the next however many months is hand-copying/writing whatever text it is---a Bible, mostly--including elaborate illustrations or "illuminations," colored with hand-ground dyes and REAL GOLD pounded into impossibly thin sheets and affixed in place with weird animal glues. They also put gold around the edge of each page, if it was a really special book. Then somebody else took the pages and hand-sewed all the pages together, and then made a cover out of leather and wood and sewed that to the pages. Then it was ready for presentation to some King). You really couldn't own a book unless you were royalty or the Pope. A super wealthy nobleman might have a "library" of like twenty books and be considered a fucking multi-biblionaire. "I've never imagined so many books were in the whole world!" etc.
Gutenberg changed this but even so books were considered amazing rarities for a long time after. And actually the printing press was conceived of largely as a took of political propaganda, so that people with ideas could quickly produce pamphlets (Gutenberg is, like, why we were able to have a Protestant Reformation, if you can imagine!!!). This is also why various popes/kings were always trying to shut it down, right? Or am I just remembering that scene from the Charles Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame. Anyway it wouldn't be for another 300 years or so that "authors" started thinking of their writings as a "product" that could be "Sold." (A book as an object rather than, like, a play to be performed (Shakespeare) that only happens to be written down in book form). For this we largely have the 19th century to thank (professionalization of arts that used to be more like crafts or servitude---"concert music" with a paying public rather than noblemen paying composers to live in their houses and write them birthday party music on demand), and capitalism, and the rise of the middle class that had the money and desire to buy these newly-cheap but still not "cheap-cheap" books by the dozen.
Also, the size of our modern books is still essentially based on the size of medieval sheep, because even after they stopped making parchment and switched to paper, it was like all the tools and machines were already sized to deal with sheepskin, so even though technically they could then have made paper any size they wanted, they just left it at the same sizes (folio, quarto, etc.) because it was easier.
Each time you read a book you are reading something the size of which is based on how many pages of that size you could get from the skin of a medieval sheep--a sheep much smaller than a modern sheep, also.
"THE MORE YOU KNOW!"
caveat: some of this may be bullshit as it is cobbled together from many bits and pieces I have learned over the years. The part about the medieval sheep is definitely true though.
In medieval times there were like four universities in the world, and you went there and either became a priest, a doctor, or a lawyer, that's it. And what "school" entailed was a master standing in front of a classroom (everyone wearing enormous robes and cowls because of massive cathedral-like environment being insanely cold, thus origins of weird modern academic regalia (caps/gowns)), simply READING ALOUD from one of the books the university owned, and all the students carefully copying it down word-for-word. Once he was done reading the book, you had your own copy (for keeping!) and had thus learned that subject (St. Augustine's Confessions or whatever, some weird book about the gnome that lives inside all free men's stomachs).
Books were so precious that the universities' books were CHAINED TO THE LECTERNS so that no one could steal them. The master in question had to just go to class and pull the relevant book up on the lectern and read it while it was still chained there. You can see this chain in many medieval illustrations.
This is why so many of our historical source documents have such funny marginalia, like the equivalent of "School Sux" or like "Do you like me, check this box," that have to be explained by modern scholars. "This appears to be a joke at the expense of the priest in charge of teaching pneumatic notation."
This guy Anonymous 4 is a major source for our current understanding of Renaissance polyphony, for example. But his famous manuscript is just the thing he wrote in class, to get his college degree--it's basically his class notes. It's not a "book" in any modern sense of the word! And now this totally unknown guy's class notes are one of the only documents describing this incredibly rich period of music surrounding the cathedral at Notre Dame.
When I learned this I was briefly paralyzed, imagining my own class notes somehow becoming the foundation for all knowledge of whatever thing I was writing about, 1,000 years in the future. My class notes are like "Martin Luther: 'fuck you guys, people are starving to death!' Pope: 'Ah Marty why must you thwart me so'" or like how boring I found Vivaldi in concerto class. "Vivaldi: 'hmm I have five minutes to poop something out of my butt CAN IT BE DONE"
Imagine scholars in 1,000 years basing their historical opinions on that drivel!
Of course paper is cheap nowadays, probably Anonymous 4 was not taking such liberties.
Still, I bet he'd be mortified if he knew.
I'd give you Tuesdays off... just checking...
This book history is such a gift and wonderful conversation. Is there such an academic field as book-ology? I'd do that.
This was a small, personal text that evolved from monastic practices into a sort of hybrid religious supplement-day planner. At first just rich people had them, and they would be incredibly ornate with gold and even gems embedded (!?!) inside, but the practice trickled down over time to the middle/merchant class, etc. Those ones were obvs. not fancy. Medieval.
It was almost like a farmers almanac, but religious?
There would be a calendar of months, maybe some psalms, list of saint's days, and some prayers that were meant to be attended to a specific hours of the day. They were personalized, depending on how rich you were, with your family's coat of arms or maybe some bits of text in your own language if you didn't speak latin!
Also, rich people had the full texts written out, and poor people had long words abbreviated, because they took up more vellum and thus made a more expensive book.
Sometimes there would be extra random stuff like an alphabet or paintings of the family who the book was for, and sometimes people wrote in them like they did bibles later on- recording births and deaths and marriages.
"zodiac man" illustrates the alignment on the body of the signs of the Zodiac.
SOMETIMES THEY GOT FREAKY
Totally like a farmer's almanac but religious.
Do some of them have like blank pages in the front for "notes?" I can't remember.
I love when they get trippy. Google image search "Hildegard Bingen Illuminations" and you will see some SHIT
those are inspired by celestial visions, though, like actual ones, so that explains that.
Also yes I will live in your house and write you birthday music and take Tuesdays off to write my own "real" music and yell at my wife who is raising our 13 children
I'm glad I live in an era with modern conveniences and skateboarding and indoor plumbing and hot tubs and punk rock and rap music and veggie hot dogs, though.
This iMac is also the size of a medieval sheep, that's what Apple based it on, I heard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells