Jorge Luis Borges writes:
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…. As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf…held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable….
We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf…there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it, and he is analogous to a god… Many wandered in search of Him.
It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe….
–Labyrinths, “The Library of Babel”
Andy McCourt, a columnist with printing industry magazine Print21, left a comment on an earlier post to share their experience with the Espresso Book Machine print-on-demand gadget. Mr. McCourt is in the habit of applying critical analysis to his enthusiasms. In a post titled, “May the Ox Be With You,” he looks forward to 2009, the Year of the Ox, by reviewing his preditictions for 2008, the Year of the Rat. Some of those were off-target, but his fifth prediction rated 10 points out of 10: digital paper is indeed making great strides forward, tempting us with visions of that long-sought book of all books.
Here is the demo of the Plastic Logic Reader which McCourt links to. Don’t miss the point at about 3:30 in the demo, where they smack the screen with a shoe, or later around 5:20, where Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta mentions that the device works with an “open format!”
Will e-readers like this one (and others from iRex, Sony, Polymer Vision, and Amazon) be as disruptive and transformative as the Espresso Book Machine? In some ways, I think so — but they will continue a transformation that has already begun in music, reference works, and news: flexible, remixable, & potentially democratized delivery of “content.” In this case, the content is text, and the digital delivery system is designed to imitate the printed page, but does that make a difference for those of us who already read the newspaper (or an aggregation of several “papers”) on our laptops? Not so much.
The crucial difference, I think, becomes clear when we realize that the text/content that we read and the paper/screens we read from are not the only elements at issue; that there is an important tension between the bound nature of books and the unbound nature of digital media. The editorial package itself matters. Perhaps the two approaches will eventually meet in the middle, but for the moment, e-readers are trying to give print-like qualities to essentially unbundled digital products, while POD technologies like the Espresso Book Machine attempt to give digital advantages to the quintessentially bundled item, the printed book.
A book is essentially whole, unitary — a little world of human thought, word, & spirit, chosen, shaped, and bound within its covers. Books are bundles; a book is what is bound together. For what makes a book more than its binding? (That books may be remixed and rebundled does not invalidate the point. An anthology has its own sort of unity. Nor does this definition necessarily require that books take physical printed form, only that there be some mechanism — glue, stitching, standardized file format like ePub, or whatever — that binds the content into a relatively enduring unit.)
Andrew Golis notes that “All text is not created Equal” :
You produce a different product online. Hyperlinks, tone, form (shorter post that assume readers have read previous posts, etc.). It makes for a fundamentally different product that simply doesn’t translate back onto the printed page….
All of which is just to say that what we?re dealing with is not just a transition in medium. We’re in the process of not just radically re-organizing the media business, but media culture.
By this reckoning, some texts that seem the most “bookish” (dictionaries, encyclopedias) don’t really need to be books, and others that might look similar to books when printed (journals, magazines, newspapers), turn out to be far different items when unbundled online. Might not his insights work both ways? Are there not texts, and ways of writing, that are naturally suited to a bound format? Or if the binding makes the book, then what is it that makes us want to bind certain texts together? If, in our “editorial” wisdom or best “publisher’s” judgment, we see value in making a unit out of a set of texts, then we want that value to be preserved; binding preserves that value in a “book.” Such a book may or may not stand the test of time, but is this not what a “book” must be in our brave new media culture?
Which brings us back to the Esspresso Book Machine and the idea of Print on Demand. The printed, bound book takes that editorial decision and gives it the force of physical fact. The book in printed form takes that bundled whole and makes it present to our senses in ways that e-readers cannot match. The EBM gives any editor — amateur or professional — the power to make his or her ideas physically present in the world as real, particular objects. When those really present, particular bound objects are freed by the web from the constraints of shipping, given the flexibility of digital manipulation, and opened up to amateur control — when any possible printed book can be made whenever it is wanted, wherever it is wanted, by whoever wants it — then we are indeed facing a print-culture revolution.
Watching the Cubs from Bahgdad
I’ve never been in a war, or even close. For reasons of both generational timing and family culture, our family has included preachers, teachers, doctors, artists & engineers, but few soldiers. My father served briefly as an army paramedic stationed in Georgia, but saw no action outside fighting off some fire ants and picking up after an accidental helicopter crash. My uncles served briefly before I was born, so I never saw them in uniform. My mother’s father signed up for the end of the Great War, but was sidelined while still in training by the 1918 flu pandemic.
I was born in a university hospital in 1967, and in the absence of real military personnel, my childhood consciousness of soldiers (beyond the cartoon villains of World War II) was formed in the cultural echoes of Vietnam and the My Lai Massacre. Military service seemed to me to be something to be avoided, a potential moral failure, connected with American arrogance, dishonor, and injustice towards the world around us. If you truly wanted to serve the country and do good (and I did!), you should go to the city and work for the poor (which I did, for ten years). Speaking of the Vietnam War in his 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King, Jr., said:
This past January, listening on the radio to Dr. King’s brilliant (and still relevant!) outline of the tragic historical and moral circumstances of the United States’ involvement in that conflict, I realized how deeply the specific criticisms of that particular time (and the pain of them, more than their call to high American ideals) shaped me, without my ever having been involved in any real sense.
Because of course that tarnished era was ending. By the time we were in Jr. High, Vietnam was too old to be news, too recent to be history, and too painful to be explained to kids.1 America was finding other distractions. “We were the uncalled generation,” says my brother David, born two years after me. “No one asked us to do anything but buy stuff and watch TV. We were left to salvage an identity for ourselves from the rubble of the Sixties’ culture wars.”
For Nicole, things were different. Her Grandpa Joe received a Purple Heart in the African Campaign in World War II, and the memory of his service has been honored and treasured by his descendants. Her father and all his brothers served in the military (one of them as a career chef), including among them time in Vietnam, Korea, and Germany. No one died. In 1967, she was born on a military base in California, like her father before her. She grew up seeing military service as almost a matter of course, the honorable thing for young men to do for their country when they got out of high school. For her, military service was not traumatic, but a connection with honor and duty and family.
Now we have kids of our own. They’re doing choir and Scouting and little league–and their uncles are going to war. Chris, my brother-in-law’s older brother, died in Afghanistan. Phil, who we just invited over for turkey dinner, may spend Thanksgiving in Tajikistan. Yesterday, our young Scouts planted flags on veterans’ graves and walked in a prairie restoration on the University campus; today we paddled kayaks at Brat Fest; and tomorrow Nicole will train for the Chicago Marathon before joining us on the parade route to watch the marching vets & Scouts & marching bands. Maybe catch the Cubs vs Pirates game in the evening.
About a week ago on Twitter, @TheCubsInHaiku shared an Email From Iraq:
Here is what Memorial Day means to me today: it means remembering the connections we have to those who are elsewhere, remembering that the small things we enjoy here at home exist in a larger system of past and present service, sacrifice and justice. It means both honoring the work, risk, and loss our soldiers are required to bear, and taking responsibility for our decision to require it of them. It means striving to understand the work & sacrifices of soldiers in partnership with the work & sacrifice of builders, programmers, engineers, teachers, storytellers, musicians, journalists, politicians, peacemakers, and parents. It means recognizing the countries and peoples with whom our soldiers interact, examining carefully the economic, cultural, and spiritual relationships we have with them, and repenting when we see we have been in the wrong. It means listening to all the different voices of our histories, so that the sacrifices we’ve made may be truly honorable, and truly honored.