[iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like

Wed Dec 5 15:57:32 UTC 2007

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.

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.

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.

So, what the benefits of paper books are that will keep them from becoming
obsolete?

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.

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.

What are the other benefits of pbooks? How many of those benefits are
sustainable? How many are not replicable with ebooks?

- 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.

- 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?

- The installed base. It'll be a loooong time before all books are available
electronically, where loooong = functionally never.

- Books as historic artifacts. Gutenberg's not going to be running off any
more copies.

- Readability of paper, even in bright sun, etc. But surely we will invent a
paper quality display at some point in human history. Please?

- 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.

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.

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.

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)...

Thank you so much for this posting, Rick.

Best,

David Weinberger

On Dec 5, 2007 1:04 AM, Rick Prelinger <rick at archive.org> wrote:

> 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,
>  lecture frequently on archival access, and write curricula for cinema
> studies students on archival tracks.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> And then there are books.
>
> 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 (http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-nov19-07.html#book).
>  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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.)
>
> 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
>  ng instability.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> Rick
>
>
> --
>
> Rick Prelinger
> Prelinger Archives    http://www.prelinger.com
> P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622 USA
> footage at panix.com
>
> Prelinger Library:  http://www.prelingerlibrary.org
>
> NEW: Prelinger Library Digital Collections
> http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library
>
>
>
>
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-- 
David Weinberger
Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center
blog: www.JohoTheBlog.com
new book: www.EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com
mail: self at evident.com
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