[iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like
Aaron Beebe
aaron at brawnandfervor.com
Thu Dec 6 07:37:53 UTC 2007
This is a very interesting topic. 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". Our relationship with media changes in all
kinds of directions. Media don't really have a lifespan that's
unidirectional - i.e. they're born, they live, then they die.
I think the example of live theater is a great one. We've seen that the
definition of "live theater" has changed over time (greek tragedy,
brutalist performance art, Lyric Opera, various forms of traditional
dance, buskering, magic, vaudeville, cyclorama, "happenings", parades).
Its utility changes over time, it doesn't just "die". Today I think
we're seeing a kind of resurgence in live theater - something that falls
outside the rhetoric of "living" or "dying". 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. As long as there is a utility, even an artisinal
one, for printed material on real, analog surfaces, we'll be able to
talk about printed books. In fact, like theater, I hope that electronic
mass production allows us to reimagine books as a physical experience in
a way. As a unique, lived experience, perhaps. Like visiting a tourist
site instead of looking at photos or films. Or like seeing a
supercelebrity in a broadway show instead of on a screen.
Aaron Beebe
Curator
The Coney Island Museum
www.coneyisland.com
-----Original Message-----
From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net
[mailto:idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] On Behalf Of David Weinberger
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 9:28 PM
To: idc at mailman.thing.net
Subject: Re: [iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like
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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blog: www.JohoTheBlog.com
new book: www.EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com
mail: self at evident.com
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