The biblioblogosphere is all twittery about the new Kindle thing from Amazon.
I’m not. Looks like the same old, same old to me. I don’t see what’s changed about the gadget or the legal and social environment that’s going to make this thing a success.
Wake me if I turn out to be wrong.
(Also, four hundred smackers? Um, no.)
Affordances. The word you and you and some other people are looking for is “affordances.”
What’s an affordance? Well, try this on for size: “an aspect of an object which makes it obvious how the object is to be used.” Close enough, though virtual “objects” also have affordances. I tend to turn the word inside-out a little, Humpty-Dumpty fashion, using it to mean “properties of an object that lend themselves to particular uses.”
Opening up a can of ex-medievalist-fu here… very early in the history of the Western printing press, bookmakers discovered that printing had affordances that manuscript copying didn’t. Pages being identical across copies was the big kahuna: that allowed for innovations such as running heads and indexes. (Tables of contents already existed, but as you can imagine, they were a bit obnoxious to prepare on a manuscript and so weren’t exactly common. Most of the ones I’ve seen were chapter-level, rather than for the entire work.)
The reverse also obtained. Nobody illuminated print books; nobody could, just too many of them. Crude woodcuts became the order of the day instead, and even those were so expensive to produce that printers ripped them off from each other by tracing. (Oh, hush. No copyright then. And yet somehow creators still created… go figure.) Other manuscript commonplaces, such as glosses and marginalia, were difficult to impossible in the print-book world.
Tinkerers being tinkerers, however, printing added to its arsenal of tricks. More and better fonts. Processes that allowed for color. Large-sheet printing for maps and such. And as time passed, these tricks added up to a praxis that, while sharing many goals and practices with the copyist’s praxis, differed significantly and irrevocably from it. In a way, printers didn’t really start innovating until they emerged cautiously from under the manuscript’s long shadow.
And eventually we got printed books every bit as useful and beautiful as manuscripts.
So with ebooks, etexts, whatever you want to call ’em (pace Mark Lindner). The affordances are different, and we’re finding out what we can do that we couldn’t before. Current tools and processes are crude, and tied much too closely to the printed page.
Despite the bruising I took my first time through ebooks, I still very much believe the ebook trajectory has been and will continue to be similar. If that makes me a wild-eyed heretic preaching the downfall of the sacrosanct book—okay, I’ll cop to that. Outside of comics and graphic novels, I don’t know too many hand-letterers—and even in comics, a lot of creators are turning to electronic type.
I’m not scared. I’m not upset. I’m excited, and always have been. New affordances are fun, and so is working on analogues to the old affordances. That, that enjoyment, is why my kind get called wild-eyed heretics, you see. We’re not supposed to play with these things; we’re supposed to scorn them because they’re imperfect compared to their predecessors.
Well, duh. If the inquisitors can’t see why that’s both challenge and opportunity…
The Ithaka folks put out a really sharp report on the state of university presses and libraries vis-a-vis scholarly publishing last week. This is excellent stuff; I highly recommend it. A few random thoughts on it:
Some provosts need to unpack their heads from their you-know-wheres. “Don’t change, university presses, we love you just the way you are—but don’t expect us to fund you unless you change, because you’re relics of a bygone age!” Yeah, that’s a winner. I bet uni-press people are rolling their eyes right out of their heads at that one.
The hits at institutional repositories are so good I’m going to quote them in the Roach Motel article. Yes, we are dusty university attics. No, I don’t like it either. However… we’re not as well-funded as the uni presses think we are. Nor I don’t understand why some of these folks aren’t working with us, neither. Heaven forbid we should solve some of their preservation problems or give their backlist new distribution channels or rescue their out-of-print works or anything. But siloing and Not Invented Here is the heart of the difficulty, isn’t it?
I still have personal difficulty with all of this marketing-speak that presses are so concerned about. Monographs, okay, I get it a little—but what do they actually do other than send out review copies hither and yon? (David’s book barely even got that much, and as uni-press books go, it’s a marketing dream.) Journal marketing I don’t get at all, especially in an open-access environment. To whom are they marketing, and is it for eyeballs or sales?
That last question, I think, is a highly salient one. As I read the language coming from uni-press folks, their marketing is geared toward marketing for sales, and they’re still thinking about electronic publishing in terms of making money directly from it. I believe that’s retrograde thinking that they need to move past. If you’re going to be a cost center, be a cost center—that means don’t sell stuff when you can avoid it, people, because when you do the green eyeshades come after you!
I don’t mind the print-on-demand-for-pay models so much, but I do think trying to make direct money off e-publishing, especially of low-demand monographs, is a pipe dream. Bite the bullet and go open-access. The argument you then take to university brass is a cost-containment one: “This stuff needs to get published. It can get published at zero marginal cost and at the same time take advantage of greater reach from data-mining and web crawling, or it can get published in print at huge marginal cost and languish in warehouses because libraries can’t afford to buy it, or it can get published online with totally unnecessary (and possibly not recoupable) marginal costs of building and maintaining secure datacenters and fulfillment operations, or it can not get published at all and torpedo careers. You tell me what makes the most sense.”
Anyway, once everyone gets over the idea of marketing for dollars, a lot of innovation can be spurred in the marketing-for-eyeballs department; that’s what the Internet revolution is all about, if you ask me. I’d like to see it happen, myself, and I don’t mind in the least admitting that a uni-press person may well be better at it than I am.
As for dealing with faculty as authors, I think there’s some miscommunication and distortion happening. The library folks who want to get into publishing (rarae aves with a publishing background such as myself aside) do indeed tend to be the systems types, behind-the-scenes folks who don’t interact with faculty much. Thus the impression that librarians don’t grok the faculty-massage aspects of publishing.
The thing is, we systems types aren’t the whole of librarianship. If you were to ask bibliographers or specialized reference folk, I believe you’d get a much different picture of faculty interaction patterns. We know more than we’re given credit for, we librarians; we just divide up the knowledge in sometimes-odd ways.
Me, I’m just as happy leaving the authors to the uni-press people. Authors are bloody insane, faculty journal editors are just as bad if not worse, and I’m all about avoiding insanity when possible. But there’s a difference between “librarians may not want to deal with that part of the process” and “librarians can’t deal with that part of the process,” and I’d like that difference respected.
I’m chewing my fingernails to the elbow waiting for Information Tomorrow to come out. Rereading my chapter, I wrote a lot of things that Ithaka is writing and Brian Rosenblum is saying and so on and so forth— but honestly, it’s irritating as all hell that I wrote them a full year ago now and nobody gets to read them but me!
Fix that, university presses. Fix that, and we have a winner!
The OEBPS FAQ started my career. No, it really did.
Back in the day, a wee conversion peasant got annoyed at the repetitive questions about markup and conversion thronging the main ebook listserv, and decided to write a FAQ. So she did, and said FAQ brought her to the attention of luminaries such as Allen Renear, luminaries who did things like running working groups.
So she landed on the OEBPS working group, and lived there a few years, only departing when the OEBF stabbed the working group in the back. (“We’re now a trade organization,” they said. “We’ve done the technical-standards thing, and we don’t need to do it any more.” Earlier this year, lo and behold, the OEBF’s successor organization reconstituted its technical working group. Most of the Old Guard, including the formerly-wee-conversion-peasant, were invited back. Most, including the f-w-c-p, did not accept.)
By the time she left, she had gotten well and truly browned-off by publisher inertia, ebook marketing hype, and the abysmal markup and preservation practices all over the e-publishing industry. Gosh, she said, somebody somewhere must be doing markup and preservation right!
And the rest is history. Or something.
Dropping the third-person… the OEBPS FAQ lived on my ex-employer’s website for a while because I was stupid enough to let it become a work-for-hire. (The word “pottage” springs irresistibly to mind. I was stupid when I was wee, yes indeedy I was.) When my ex-employer dropped it from their site, I took a small legal chance and picked it back up for my own professional website. Which is now fallow, waiting for me to get enough of a round tuit to put things back up. The ex-employer no longer exists, and I doubt the entity that bought it has any kind of paper trail establishing the OEBPS FAQ as their intellectual property. So it’s pretty much mine again.
Problem being, the OEBPS FAQ is a museum piece. I don’t need it up on the new textartisan.com. I’d kill it entirely, except that the wretched thing is cited in the scholarly record. It needs to be archived somewhere, is what it needs.
Oh. Duh. Yeah. I run an institutional repository, don’t I? I can put my own stuff in it, even.
So I did. Unfortunately, DSpace’s HTML ingest is too stupid to handle external CSS correctly, so it looks like the wrath of $DEITY, but it’s there. Chalk one up for the scholarly record, I guess… and note to self: my DSpace-ingest massager needs to deal with the CSS problem.
I’m wrong so often that every once in a while I like to point out when the clock stops at my part of the dial.
So.
I said this about the Google digitization project. And then additional evidence emerged.
And now Jessamyn confirms it with a link over here.
I’ll be blunt. The digital files that Google is going to produce are crap, not ebooks. They’re not one-tenth as readable as even a bare-bones Project Gutenberg ASCII. They substitute for a properly-designed ebook (never mind a print book) in roughly the same way that a moldy bottle of off-brand spaghetti sauce substitutes for a six-course meal at a five-star Italian restaurant.
Could publishers please grow the you-know-what up now? And perhaps develop a wee bit of appreciation for text artisanry?
My lovely old Open eBook Forum is no more.
Bah. Phooey. Go on, guys, kick me in the shins again for my two years of hard work.
Eh, well. They haven’t been relevant for ages, and they’ll continue their irrelevance under their new name. I suppose I shouldn’t get exercised about it.
So I’m all like, hey, what a cool book they’re reading! I want to read it too! Let’s see if the library has it.
Ooo, they’ve got it as an eBook! Yay! From NetLibrary. Boo. Oh, well, maybe OCLC finally fixed that brain-dead page-based interface, such that one can finally read a connected text as, well, a connected text.
Oh. I see. OCLC hasn’t fixed the brain-dead page-based interface.
Screw it. I’m not fighting with NetLibrary’s idiotic ideas about on-screen reading. I’ll have the p-book sent to the SLIS library.
$DEITY have mercy, no wonder people hate eBooks.
(Oh, and the actual design of the text on the “page”? I could do better after my first six months at Impressions. There’s no excuse for that, people, it’s just CSS! And text artisanry. Which NetLibrary never had, and OCLC apparently hasn’t given them.)
Bummer. Can’t check the p-book out from the library; it’s on closed reserve. You know what? Rather than use the clicky-clicky-clicky NetLibrary interface? I’ll wait. I’ll wait for it.
You know, I have a hard enough time evangelizing e-text. It just galls me when stupid design decisions and unwillingness to give text artisanry its due make my pitch that much more of a hard-sell.
Free Range Librarian reproduces a rip-roarin’ anti-Google rant:
The “deal” that research libraries have struck, behind closed doors (in good corporate style) with Google threatens to erase the lines between commerce and the remaining public sphere of human thought and creativity as embodied in the collected and organized products of print culture and this arrangement makes their immense collections both a global prop for the colonization of some of the last nooks and crannys of human endeavor by the quest for profit and a monument to the inescapability of and seamless domination by the profit motive. In the end, which one can already see around the corner approaching with the ever-escalating speed of the circulation of capital, it will create a situation in which culture is entirely held hostage by commercial interests whose life-cycles are driven by motives and influences which have nothing to do with the past and present aims of libraries (aims which will be twisted to suit the omni-commercialization of digitized information access a la Google).
I looked really hard for actual content in this rant, something solid that would give me pause. I didn’t find anything. I really did look.
For one thing, he obviously missed the bit where Google is giving the resulting electronic files back to the libraries for whatever uses they see fit. Google isn’t locking up jack squat, isn’t holding anything hostage. Believe me, I’m sensitive to this, because of experience. I don’t call Versaware evil for nothing; I was there. They were evil. This deal with Google? Not evil that I can see.
For another, apocalyptic much, dude? If we let the moneyed philistines in the library temple, all of human culture will be destroyed, I tell you, destroyed!
I’m sorry, I think there are many worse threats right now to the fabric of culture than a digitization deal with Google that leaves the resulting data in the hands of librarians who presumably know what to do with it. (Has Rosenzweig met any of the Michigan folks? I have. They’re dead smart. I’m quite willing to make the assumption they looked at this deal from every angle I have and a few I haven’t thought of, and still liked it. If Rosenzweig has a reason to think otherwise, I’d be happy to hear.)
Reality check? Digitization costs money. Google has it. We don’t. This can not get done at all, or can get done by Google. Google can spend its money on something evil, or they can spend it doing digitization. We object to the latter choices why exactly? Because Google dirties whatever it touches? Come on, grow up. Because, seriously, who else is going to do this? Publishers? Publishers are so freaking clueless they can’t even digitize their frontlists. Libraries? I say again, we have no money.
Reality check two? We leave digitization to the moneyed interests one way or another. Database aggregators (who all too often do a truly craptastic job of it). Publishers (ditto). Grants. If Google had handed the money over to the universities, would that solve Rosenzweig’s angst? (I bet it would, even though it’s the same damn money. My guess is that his real problem is feeling useless because somebody’s doing text digitization who isn’t a librarian. To which I say, I didn’t learn to do it as a librarian. Join the real world where lots of people are doing it, a few as effectively or more so than librarians.)
Reality check three? Speaking from a labor perspective, if we did take something like this on? We’d outsource the bulk of the work to the Philippines and India. You know that, I know that, we all know that. I dunno what Google’s up to, but my guess is that a lot more of the work will be done domestically, given that it involves new processes and procedures. Doesn’t that matter? (Does to me.)
Reality check four? We, cultural institutions such as libraries and museums, have been locking up and discarding as much culture as any commercial institution you care to name. Or hasn’t Rosenzweig been watching the museums charging out the nose for reproduction of images? Or hasn’t he noticed academic libraries shutting out the public? Or academic librarians arguing, $DEITY help us all, against open-access scholarly publishing on weird quasi-moral (and certainly moralistic) grounds?
I don’t object to the process of looking gift horses in the mouth. In fact, I have a few questions of my own. Is Google going to share any of its development and process innovations with the libraries? If not, then the libraries may well be getting a raw-ish sort of deal. Is Google going to add links to library bibliographic records for items it digitizes? It had better. (I mean, how not? But I don’t know.) Is Google going to pony up some endowment cash for the long-term maintenance of the libraries’ electronic collections? Google certainly should, because maintenance and preservation cost a good deal more than initial digitization.
But, see, these strike me as real questions. Rosenzweig’s? Sound like empty posturing. We can do better than that, I think. And we should.
Having lived through the ebook boomlet and the evil that was Versaware and pre-OCLC NetLibrary, my first question on hearing that Google’s going to digitize a bunch of library books was “Who retains the files and rights to use them?”
Points for Google, however; I guess at least sometimes they mean it when they say their motto is “Don’t be evil.” Per the abovelinked article, “The university will also be given a copy of each file to use as they see fit.” Bravo. I wholeheartedly approve of that.
(Of course, Google may have intended to be evil until the librarians talked them out of it. Thank heaven librarians are smarter about these things than publishers.)
My guess is there will be decidedly mixed reviews in libraryland. Didn’t we collectively think we’d be leading the way into our rightful future as the guardians and disseminators of digital text?
Well, I think we’re looking at the future, and I am not sure it is us.
Few different things about that. One, who the hell cares who does it as long as it’s done right? I so don’t hold with dog-in-the-manger. We don’t have the money to do this kind of thing. Google does. QED.
Of course, a valuable question nobody seems to be asking is what Google is going to do with digitization expertise once they have it. Since they’re not glomming onto the files or the IP rights thereto as did Versaware the Unutterably Evil, they must be hoping to learn something from it. If there’s a plausible argument that they’re going to be evil in future with what they learn, then we might indeed do well to tell them to go soak their corporate head. But for once, I don’t have a conspiracy theory to offer. Anybody else got any?
Two, who honestly thinks Google is going to keep this up in perpetuity? Anyone? Anyone? I didn’t think so. Google’s going for the big scores. They’ll leave plenty for us. Guaranteed.
Three, it strikes me as possible Google’s bitten off more than it can chew; text digitization has this horrible habit of sounding easier than it is. Wait a year and see. Before we lament the demise of our digitization expertise and experience, let’s check its pulse, hm?
In the meantime—I’m cautiously optimistic about this. We’ll see how it goes.
An old book, a modest old book, warped red cloth covers curving protectively around the brittle pages, with a retiring polka-dotted border and no title, no external identification at all save for the stickers added to the spine by a librarian or archivist:
I was careful with it, when it was handed me by the Digital Content Group man; he watched me rather narrowly at first, but seemed satisfied by the way I treated it. I have been around old books since I was a child, borrowed them, bought them, read them. I know how to handle them. I respect those unadorned covers with the fraying corners. They have done their work well.
But the book is old, published in 1882. The verso of the title page proclaims in purple dye-stamped lettering that the Wisconsin Historical Society received the book December 17, 1895. Its pages were cut fairly neatly, which is a blessing, since not all books were so kindly treated. Even so, the pages are grey, and their top edges are starting to ravel and crumble.
Ireland under the Land Act proclaims the title page in a well-spaced all-caps serif, the rest of the page in restrained, modest variants on all-caps and small-caps, save for the regal touch of “London” in faux-blackletter, and the brief, mild italic copyright statement. The printer’s mark, in contrast, is a wild, whimsical W-shaped flower-ark built on a serif C, presumably for the publisher Chatto & Windus.
Law books are given to these weird little touches, I have found. When I was proofreading the Hispanic Seminary’s transcription of an old Aragonese fuero years ago, I was captivated by the bizarre cartoons in the margins, of people and beasts and half-people-half-beasts shooting arrows and throwing stones at each other. Scribes get bored, and doodle. I expect some of my old DTDs or (horrors!) SGML instances hold some less-than-wholly-temperate comments relating to problems with the data modeling or the transcription.
Someone with more sensitive fingers than I have might be able to read this book blindfolded, the printing has so dented the pages. Not smooth, these pages, not at all, not around the edges and not on the printed surface. Do people who whinge about the “feel of the paper book” have any idea about this? I doubt it.
My job? Proofreading the OCR and sharpening up the existing TEI markup for the electronic edition of this book. Not a difficult job; it’s got some tables (including one gigantic one that will take me some hours to capture correctly), but it’s nothing I didn’t do for Liberty Fund, a few jobs back. (I can browse their library and see my own work there—not directly, more’s the pity, but transformed into HTML. It’s my work, though. I like seeing my own work.)
I’m rescuing this book. I’m renewing it. Materially, it is a modest thing; it exists for the sake of the words, and the words are what I am recasting anew. So the old red covers don’t have to endure the touch of many hands, and the pages don’t have to risk crumbling altogether as they are turned. I preserve the words, and the intent of the artisans who put the words on the pages, as best I know how. This is, stripped to its essentials, what I do. I rescue the souls of modest old books for new readers and new uses.
And it irks the life out of me, turns me purple and speechless with fury, when people (more often than not, librarians!) loftily proclaim that I do this because I have no respect for the physical codex.
Respect goes two ways.