Frank van Amerongen (1950) is managing director and publisher at ThiemeMeulenhoff, one of the mayor educational publishing houses in the Netherlands. In his early professional years he was a teacher in primary education and also an author for textbooks and translator of non-fiction reference books for young children. In the early eighties he started his career as a publisher. He was a nonfiction publisher at Tirion publishers for a short time, but his roots are deep into the educational publishing field, both for the primary and de secondary school market. Frank is the concept engineer behind many well known teaching methods published by amongst others Malmberg, where he worked for almost 10 years, and ThiemeMeulenhoff.

Frank van Amerongen @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

The gap between the teachers and pupils
One of the main topics of this talk by Frank van Amerong was about the gap between teachers and pupils when it comes to using Information and Communication Technology. The world of the teachers and pupils is totally different. This can not only be attributed to the way in which both use technology but this gap exists also because the educational system itself is changing. He stresses that this gap is only increasing in the future.

The main issues with the educational system
He went on to outline the main issues with the Dutch educational system and innovation, which are as follows. First of all, the results are not as good as they used to be, the skills that we use in the 21st century are not fully integrated in the educational system yet. The delivered content in the book is not as good as discovering or experiencing the content itself. Additionally, research has shown that boys and girls are different, their learning skills and the way that they obtain knowledge is inherently different. Van Amerongen states that our educational system is not addressing this difference. The educational system is based primarily on text but the pupils today no longer read. Van Amerongen states that another issues is that we know a lot about our brain and how we learn but not all of this knowledge is applied in education. Other issues in the Dutch educational system are that in the future there will be a lack of teachers and that there is no urge to pay more for education.

The future of educational publishing
To make the problems even bigger, new internet possibilities are increasing by the day. The educational publishers still publish books because that is what the teachers want. But what we need to do is gather information about who is using our content, it is all about profiling, sharable content and it is also about the delivering device itself. This device, according to van Amerong, will be different in the future. School book content can be distributed in whatever way that is demanded. Frank van Amerong stressed here that the content of the book is not confined to the book itself, something that was addressed multiple times at this conference. What he sees as schoolbooks are also, for instance, a smartboard with the learning material displayed on it (a picture, video or text). Or possibly Augmented Reality in the near future, that can be seen as a school book as well. Furthermore, Frank van Amerong, stressed that the publishing industry will not be the basic content providers in the future.

The publishing industry is not going to be a major content source for learners, but will be the broker and system integrator between teachers, students and content.

To conclude: from content supplier to service provider
To conclude, a shift can be seen from content supplier to service provider when it comes to educational publishers. The digital revolution, according to Frank van Amerong, is really about shift from providing content to providing a service. Van Amerong stated that “the publishing industry is not going to be a major content source for learners, but will be the broker and system integrator between teachers, students and content”. In the future, the books are no longer the issue, but the learning management systems are. The gap between the teachers and the learners will continue to grow and how are we going to deal with this issue? He concluded with the statement that educational publishing will be an industry that is oriented towards providing a service. The publishers as well as the teachers should “support learning environments to help the community of learners to communicate, create, publish, collaborate, teach and learn from each other.”

PDF of presentation available here: Reinventing Educational Publishing 

Roosje Klap works and lives in Amsterdam where she was trained at the Rietveld Academy. She works as a designer in her studio and as a teacher graphic design, currently at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. She is also a member selection committee Fonds BKVB (Dutch Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture). Roosje Klap is not only a person but also a studio with four other people that create visual communication, mainly graphic design. The studio researches the experimental boundaries of custom fit design, collaborative yet peculiar and mainly work for an international clientèle in the cultural field: museums, galleries, art publishers and artists. Clients include The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, the Mondrian Foundation, The Audax Textile Museum, SKOR, The Royal Dutch Mint, and for publishers like Valiz, Nieuw Amsterdam, Pels&Kemper, Revolver en JRP Ringier. Recent projects lead to collaborations with Krist Gruijthuijsen & Koen Brams, Jan Rothuizen, het Tropenmuseum, Premsela and Mister Motley.

Roosje Klap @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

On the last day of the Unbound book conference, Roosje Klap talked about the importance of empathy as a phenomenon and how it ties people to the book.

Roosje Klap started with outlining some of the work that she has been doing along with the studio researchers that she works with, they are experimenting with the boundaries of custom fit design. These works can be found on her website. On of the works that was highlighted is the ‘Binnen was buiten’, which represented a ‘droste effect’. The design is a metaphor of the research that the writer of the book did in which piles and piles of images and other small notes were found. Another work that was highlighted was ‘Zachte Atlas van Amsterdam’. This design emphasizes the problem that small drawings usually disappear in the middle of a spread. When designers are making the screen design on the computer they forget that the actual bound book has a center that cannot display the picture. Roosje Klap, questioned whether these kind of problems will disappear with ebooks.

Findings in digital design
Roosje Klap had some interesting remarks on the ebook and digital design, emphasizing the advantages of the ebook and issues in digital design. She found something in digital design that, according to her, is really important which is the fact that you have to chunk your text. The readers decide very quick if they like something or not and therefore you have to limit the use of words in the design. Also, the use of introductions provide more clarity when the user reads the text. Other findings were that adjusting the text size and navigation elements on every page is crucial.

When it comes to the ebook, you can add many layers of context. It is first of all interactive, you can look at a movie and play the movie while reading the text. These are elements that you cannot add to the bound book. Other advantages of the digital book are that they are quickly made, they are searchable, and you can add links to the digital books that refer to additional information or can be used for navigational purposes. Furthermore, the speed of publishing has increased with the development of new technology and even the purchase of a digital books happens quickly and with ease.

With unbound books, we are likely to add McDonalds-like generics to design.

The end of the bound book?
However, this does not mean the end of the bound book. Here you see something interesting happening that you don’t see with the unbound book. The bound book has cultural differences that the unbound book does not have. For instance in Germany, the bigger the book is, the better. In Sweden, books that are heavy are seen as more important. Moreover, the book is judged by its cover, it is questionable if the same thing happens with the ebooks. With the unbound book we run the risk of ‘McDonaldization’, creating a generic book.

Furthermore, several elements are not easily transferred to the ebook, for instance tactility, substance, rigidity, shade, color, stiffness, heaviness, paper grammage, time and place, occasion, and memory. She concludes that the ebook nowadays relies more heavily on the design than on the empathic qualities. Not only the design of the pages but also the design of the device itself is what counts for the ebook. Moreover, with the ebook “we loose the individuality and cultural heritage of a ‘normal’ book”, she states. Her concluding remarks of the presentation are that if we can add more empathy in the design of ebooks and if the ebook can catch up on the qualities of the bound book, we might be able to discard our nostalgia on the bound book. In this way the old fashion paper book will be a superhero.

You can view Roosje’s presentation here.

John Haltiwanger is a New Media MA graduate and an autodidactic programmer with a strong interest in typesetting and open source software. Haltiwanger collaborates with the Open Source Publishing platform and Universiteit van Amsterdam. The main focus of his presentation is generative typesetting, with his MA thesis used as an illustration. Haltiwanger argues for liberating humanities from proprietary control of tools such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Suite by implementing open source tools within academia. A man standing behind his beliefs, for his presentation he uses an open source version of Prezi (an alternative to PowerPoint) – Sozi.

John Haltiwanger @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

“It’s not who or what you are, it’s where you’re at” (reference to Rakim’s “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”) opens the third presentation in the Open Publishing Tools panel on Day 1 of the Unbound Book Conference. Haltiwanger starts by mentioning LaTeX and LyX, common libre tools which can be successfully used for typesetting documents such as theses and argued for their superior typographical and referencing management advantages. However, he also mentions that extensive stylistic customization in these tools can pose major problems and that such realization lead him to exploring other options and discovering ConTeXt.

Haltiwanger exemplifies the possibilities enabled by tools such as ConTeXt with his own Master thesis whose case study was its own typesetting. What follows is a discussion of the technicalities of producing the thesis using generative typesetting, such as the necessity of setting it in both HTML and PDF and being dependent on automation. Later he explains how people began to start applying the visually semantic developments found in email communications (such as ALL CAPS to indicate shouting or underscores for _emphasis_) to enable a precursor format for generating HTML (an example being Markdown) and concludes that in terms of informational impact and widespread use, MediaWiki has been the most successful visually semantic format. However, he doesn’t see wikis as particularly fruitful in producing essays because of their fragility and not fully flowing visual semanticization. On the other hand, the relative popularity of wikis within the humanities proves that it is not so difficult for people to comprehend and work with visually semantic textuality.

The core of Haltiwanger’s discourse on generative typesetting is unraveled within the introduction of Subtext, a tool he is designing. Its most distinguishing characteristic is transformability of both the semantics and procedures of dealing with them. In result, the same semantics can be interpreted in multiple ways and a file can be easily made into a PDF for screen or for print; an HTML version or ePub can also be generated. Thus, he believes that the Next Great Format does not pose threat to Subtext. While Microsoft Word privileges the human and HTML privileges the computer, Haltiwanger envisions Subtext as introducing a productive balance of agency between these two, while at the same time bringing out the best in the text itself. An effect of this balance is that tools for distributed source code development could be applied in a generative typesetting.

Some controversies during the Q&A session are driven by Haltiwanger’s suggestion that the contribution of these developer tools could possibly revolutionize the class room in academic humanities’ workflows, collaborative homework and peer review situations. While the server knows who each individual contributor is, it does not need to give this information to others and therefore enables for more just grading or collaborative work. While Haltiwanger imagines the tool to allow teachers to have new ways of having their stylistic wishes respected and for new ways of grading and reviewing, some of the audience members voice their concerns that he suggests machines (the server) grade human contributions based on the quantity and not the quality of input. Haltiwanger acknowledges those doubts with a clarification that this was not his suggestion and that by keeping the interface of the tools flexible, anything can be imagined: live anonymous peer review, conversations occurring without the power dynamics of names and granular grading of group writing are just the tip of the iceberg.

The conclusion of Haltiwanger’s presentation is that while current generative typesetting workflows are still too complex for a widespread implementation, Subtext as a F/LOSS tool is capable of reflecting the relative simplicity of humanities’ workflow. People need to care about open source tools in academia and give up the embodied comforts of the current proprietary workflow. Humanities writing can be successfully liberated from proprietary control through merging the toolsets of distributed programming and reconfiguring them for one’s own specific needs. While rather technical, Haltiwanger’s presentation is inspiring: although still a distant vision, a widespread implementation of open source tools within academia would no doubt enable many new possibilities.

View Presentation here: http://drippingdigital.com/conf/unbound-book/textual-liberation.svg
Text document of notes here

Femke Snelting is an artist and designer who works with the interdisciplinary and international graphic design collective Open Source Publishing based in Brussels. During her presentation Snelting addresses the possibilities and realities of design, illustration and typography using a range of F/LOSS (free/libre/open-source software) tools. While modifying and expanding their toolbox, OSP uses solely open software since 2006 to investigate its potential in a professional design environment.

Femke Snelting @ The Unbound Book conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Femke Snelting is the second speaker during the first panel (Open Publishing Tools) on Day 1 of the Unbound Book Conference. She explains how while growing tired of being tied to Macs with Adobe software, the founding members of OSP decided to move away from the suite and explore the rich landscape of other softwares. Switching to Linux and F/LOSS tools freed them from proprietary software and changed their ways of thinking about their practice. Amongst other activities, they started throwing “print parties” (where participants designed a book) in order to spread awareness of other options within a wider public.

She mentiones the possibility of a dialogue between OSP and libre software developers as one of the main advantages of switching from proprietary to open: “If we depend on the software, we need to be able to make it better”. She follows this stance with a story of experiencing technical problems with rendering PDF files while using Scribus (open source program for professional page layout). The problems were addressed in an e-mail correspondence between OSP and Scribus and in result OSP members became active members of the Scribus community. Snelting asserts that such involvement would have never been possible, had OSP been using Adobe packages.

OSP actively develops fonts and Snelting mentions univers else which is notable for being reproduced from the original univers font through custom software developed by OSP (which generates fonts from scanned sources). Linking to this, Snelting also mentions a project based on scanning a book, generating a font from its typeface and producing a PDF (the project is still unnamed but will make its debut at Verbindingen/Jonctions 13 this Fall in Brussels).

Femke Snelting’s presentation proves that open source tools can be used as a viable publishing model. Open Source Publishing’s book Verbindingen/Jonctions 10: Tracks in electr(on)ic fields is a Fernand Baudin 2009 prize-winning publication which was designed and typeset using only F/LOSS software. Pierre Huyghebaert and Femke Snelting collaborated on it using ConTeXt, Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus.

‘The Ascent of E-readers‘, the third session of the day, kicked off with Anne Mangen, Ph.D., an Associate professor in literacy and reading research and a reading specialist at The Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Her research interests mainly lie in the impact of digital technology on reading, writing and pedagogical methods. She is particularly concerned with cross-disciplinary approaches to reading, writing and comprehension, focusing on multisensory, embodied aspects.

Anne Mangen @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Anne is primarily concerned with questioning the role of haptics in the reading experience and whether the use of hands engages the brain in ways that play a constitutive role in the reading process; what DOES the clicking do or add to the reading experience?She is particularly interested in evaluating and theorizing the impact that physical and technological affordances have on the phenomenological experience of immersion in narrative storyworlds and longer linear texts, as compared with reading a narrative by leafing through pages of a book. At the heart of her passionate talk are questions of what these physical/technological affordances do with the reading process cognitively, phenomenologically and perceptually, and how we experience a text differently when we handle it with an e-reader, mouse and screen as compared with the print medium. The talk reflects on these questions and related concerns using findings that address different aspects of reading from a host of empirical studies she surveys (though a large portion of findings range from a time before the experience of the digital reading and writing landscape substantially evolved to what it is today).

An Embodied Process
By investigating the role of gestures of readers and the way they use their hands for interacting, pointing, directing and sustaining attention, new media is also changing the role of the hands. For Anne, what is evolving as a fascinating, interesting and relevant paradigm for studying reading (and how reading changes with digitization of text), is the paradigm of embodied cognition – a cross-disciplinary paradigm evolving from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, and a wide-range of social sciences. She elaborates how it’s important to see and be aware of how reading is an embodied process and activity by observing and identifying the way we use our hands differently with digital devices — the way we click, read, handle or touch screen, and write – and what affordances and impacts this has on reading. In this way, sensory processes play crucial roles, particularly for pedagogy and reading instruction.

Referring to a study on the use of hands in shaping the brain, language, and human culture, Anne discusses findings that show how the human hand and brain became an integrated system for perception, cognition and action through a process of co-evolution. Thus, what we think of as human intelligence becomes embedded in the hand just as it is in the brain.

Redefining Reading
With all the talk about redefining the book — bound and unbound – Anne wants to shift the conversation to redefine reading, and to highlight those perspectives of reading as a skill and process that haven’t been duly dealt with, in her opinion, as becoming both apparent and important. She reminds us that reading is multisensory (not only visual) and is embodied (not only cognitively).

The Ergonomics of Reading
‘Reading digitally also changes the ergonomic affordances provided by the interface, since a book on the computer or e-book “invites” us to do something different with it than a printed book, and so reading by clicking with the computer mouse versus turning the pages of a book changes our perception and impacts reading directly.’ Various reading devices – an e-reader, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, etc. — by way of their affordances, all invite us to do different things with our hands. Anne describes how this subsequently affects our perceptual processes and sensorimotor actions, and thus influences reading processes, comprehension processes, aesthetic experiences, and by implication then, reading.’

As an embodied cognition, ergonomics of reading devices become crucial to understand how reading is changing, for better or worse.

Print vs. Digital Reading Technologies
Anne then reflects on the fundamental differences between print & digital sensorimotor affordances. ‘Whereas print is tangible, fixed and imprinted on a physical substrate, digital is intangible, with the content and storage medium separated, and with a temporary visible display that is unstable; elements that could play a crucial role for children when they are beginning to learn how to read. In this way different relationships emerge between something that is printed and something that is digital, and it becomes necessary to ask how the intangibility of the text impacts reading on different levels, different kinds of text, and for different reading purposes.

The Multifunctionality of the Digital or the Physical Structure of Print?
The multifunctional character inherent to digital text on digital devices is that it has no status of external memory, Anne
points out. You cannot point to the iPad or Kindle to prompt its memory of where you read something – it contains thousands of additional materials. Conversely, in a printed book you can tell from the spine or cover, which serves as an eternal aid to memory. This role of intangibility leads Anne to further stress the role of body in perception and the phenomenology of the intangible. The emergent claim is that the nature of the digital technology has implications for our sensorimotor, perceptual and cognitive processes and experience of reading and comprehension for certain lengths of text. This is in part because the reconstruction of text is not only based on content, gist, meaning and story, but on the composition, layout and physical structure of a text.

Hypertext
Anne then shifts to hypertext and presents findings from empirical research selected over the course of the last two decades. Some claims that emerge from these studies:

• despite the ubiquity of hypertext people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read hypertext
• writing in word processors interferes with the ability of the writer to form a sufficient mental representation (global perspective) of the text. (Eklundh 1992)
• scrolling disrupts the user’s sense of physical structure and consequently disrupts their ability to form a global perspective of the text (Eklundh 1992; Piolat et al. 1997)
• spatial mental representations of text are known to be useful for reading comprehension (Piolat et al. 1997)

Sense of Text.
Jumping from digital hypertext, Anne argues that a physical sense of the text becomes important to the way we mentally reconstruct the text as an entity, as something in a certain pattern or way. Spatial mental representation of text based on layout is known to be useful for reading comprehension, and this can be understood by the affordances of paper, which allow tactile clues to sense with your fingers the progress of a book, or to layer papers, for example.

To conclude, Anne reemphasizes the aspects of haptic affordances, insisting that the most lasting reading technology has been one we can comfortably hold in our hands, where the human hand-eye coordination is taken into consideration in optimal ways. Though people are increasingly willing to read periodicals in digital format, Anne points out that the experience of reading [intangible] text is different, less efficient and less focused. In the end, for her, materiality of reading matters, and is one of the key differences between reading print and digital – a distinctive aspect of new reading technologies she claims will have a huge impact on the way people learn how to read and comprehend.

For more, visit the Reading Centre of the University of Stavanger in Norway.

PDF of Anne Mangen’s presentation available here: Mangen Presentation.

The second session of day 1 of the Unbound Book conference – also titled The Unbound Book - was moderated by Geert Lovink, and discussions of what a book becomes once it’s online and connected to information and people dominated the talks. Bernhard Rieder, Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam and Assistant Professor at the Hypermedia department at Paris VIII University, compelled the audience to think about what it means for the contemporary book to be meshed in digital structures from an information science meets media studies point of view. A refreshing talk not about the death of books but more about the new relationships and representations that digitization awards.

Bernhard Reader @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Perhaps not at the top of discussions surrounding e-readers and digital publishing but an equally important aspect is the transformation of the book into a data object – the focus of Bernhard’s talk. His interests lie in looking at the book in the age of the database, and by reflecting on the last fifteen years — which has seen the emergence of digital book collections holding very large databases of titles — two aspects of interest emerge for him: 1) the arrangement for discovering and reading devices that these large scale databases of books encourage and 2) the “computational potential”, or the value of the data, of millions of scanned books.

With the rise of online and digital book culture coming face-to-face with data culture, it becomes worthy to look at e-books and digital publishing structurally. The power of digitization brings on the power of the database. And with the database comes powerful changes to our relationships and treatment of books, where the digital book function and form is being “unbound”.

What does this mean?

Books are being scaled and various statistical properties of them can be analyzed for other purposes. We see this reflected in online book sites where a wealth of ratings, reviews and lists of most popular, best and worst books permeate. Using the example of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Bernhard shows us that Amazon’s text stats allows for different indexing of statistical properties of books — readability, complexity, number of words and fun facts (*The Hunchback of Notre Dame has 81,598 words). So thanks to the database you know just how many words per ounce a book contains and can you decide which printed book is right for you.

As Bernhard explains, historically institutions (ranging from family, school and library to bookstores, market forces and affordances) have always contributed to structuring the universe of books, shaping what we read and how we read it.  ’The book in the age of the database adds a contemporary wave of new embedded practices and logistics of what do we read and how we read it’. In his view, three new practices emerge:

1) Exploring full text and metadata. This refers to the statistical projections of the whole text that allow various explorations of the catalogue’s content such as Google’s “common terms and phrases” or Amazon’s “key phrases” feature, both of which link to relevant passages of the book.

2) Connecting by means of data. Specific to the ‘database condition’ emerges the possibilities of interconnecting books through data, and the connecting to and from books to other data, like the Web and Google Scholar, to name just a few. In other words, using Google’s database you can have a popular passage extracted, and then be able to link to other citations that cover the same topic or provide a different perspective.

3) Capturing and inferring. Perhaps the most important new embedded practice to materialize out of the database is the actual use of the data – of capturing user gestures and practices (word positions, metadata, and user data such as tagging or clicking, number of citations, reads, sales, reviews, and where in a passage a user decided to stop reading), and then using that data to create individual navigational experiences and opportunities, aka the personalization of reading.

Systems that digitize books, like Amazon and Google, transform books into information, and then unbind and rebind it again as an interactive, social and semantic interface.

Bernhard proceeds to elaborate that such transformations allow the discovery of a book through all different representations that the database affords (as mentioned above). He strongly believes that more than anything else those database technologies are increasingly steering online our opportunities for navigation, how the age of personalization [for reading] is coming about, and how it will be shaped for the future. ‘What we see online very much depends on what you may have already read and what you’ve clicked on’. So the experience a user will have, and the books they will stumble upon, becomes highly dependent on the competence of the user in the first place. The other important aspect to take into account when determining what a user will read is the actual role of the database technology and how it enables different forms of embedded and technology-mediated reading — via suggestions, comments, reviews, statistics and links to how different texts relate to one another.

So what kind of book institution are we moving towards?

How we read was always a complicated and contested affair, continues Bernhard. The difference now is the database is altering and reconfiguring the structures that orient what we read and how we read it. The new tools afford the database and algorithm companies like Amazon to give customers more of what they want (low prices, vast selection, and convenience), and allow Google to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. From a commercial perspective, these initiatives can be seen as the way to sell books and ads, create a one-stop shop, and profit from network effects — but the impact perspective is yet to be assessed. According to Bernhard, it’s too early to say how the database system is actually affecting the way people read books. The larger questions — of what we should read, what we could read, and how we can read — is yet to be determined once we truly understand how the hierarchical and incentive system functions internally in the first place as a recommendation system.

Back to the original question of his talk: what does it mean to have a full database of all books ever published? What can you actually learn from so many books being scanned in a database?

Many applications are yet to be rendered feasible in the first place (much of it due to current legal constraints) but nonetheless, Bernhard points out quite a few useful applications that could emerge: the automatic translation of texts, knowledge engineering (knowing who has the best texts/concepts for a specific subject), and finally ‘culturomics’.

A great example is Google’s N-gram viewer, which uses its computational potential to see what you can actually learn from having just 4% (6 million) of the world books scanned. What the tool essentially does is take pairs (grams) of terms and looks through Google’s entire collection of digitized texts to determine the frequency of all the word combinations in the time period selected.

N-gram Bernhard showed for television, internet, radio and newspaper from 1800-2008

Looking at the results one can begin to see a whole breadth of insights emerge from rapidly quantifying cultural trends and in this way, ‘“culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.” (Michel et al., 2011)’

Bernhard concludes his talk by reaffirming how even without changing form, and without becoming part of an e-reader or e-book, the book is nonetheless caught up in large scale databases. From reading and finding a book to engaging, sharing and discussing a book, the shift towards e-readers makes the database aspect more easily put into place as it becomes something of a standard in e-publications.

Just imagine yourself finding a fascinating passage in a book and then being able to jump to all books that refer to that passage or similar concepts. It is time that the debate around e-books moves to surround aspects of the database and how it can serve us to think about and integrate things from a cultural perspective.

For more, visit Bernhard Rieder’s homepage and his excellent research blog, The Politics of Systems.

PDF of Rieder’s presentation available here: Bernard Rieder Presentation

James Bridle is an editor, publisher, writer, consultant, producer, programmer, designer. He has been working in all area’s of publishing: in marketing, publicity, editoring and production.

James Bridle @ the unbound book conference - photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Bridle starts his speech by saying that added value is a hard one to grasp when it comes to future publishing, where might publishing be going in the coming years? The concept of the book is totally unique: it’s a souvenir of its own experience, a gift that you can store and share. Bridle claims that for a long time we have mistaken the temporality of the book! You always hear the same things like “I like paper, it feels right. I like the smell!” Real things, but they are not what we really care about. They deliver us cognitive dissonance! Great interaction with the text is the biggest experience, while living in a time in which recent book technologies can entirely contain the information that we want to add to a book.

Totality of the reading experience, we can capture and contain an archive and spread it: this is social reading. Encoding of the entire reading experience: it lasts and it is shareable! The desire to share and tell others what you are reading! And also the possibility to pass books through in the future as well is an important element which is easily possible by use of social reading.

Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers according to Bridle. Nearly all music is nowadays recorded music. How does this happen to ebooks and literature nowadays? What remains of them ? The experience of them is what we must hang on to. This is where our conversations, which are based on our reading experience of literature are going!

For more information please check:
http://openbookmarks.org
http://booktwo.org/notebook/openbookmarks
http://shorttermmemoryloss.com

Elias van Hees

Alan Liu is Chair and Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program. In 2008 Liu wrote an essay which is called: When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age. Liu starts his lecture by doubting this concept of linearity (by referring to Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible” by Stallybrass (2002)—which claimed that Christian discourse was profoundly non-linear) and the concept of the book. In other words, what makes a book a book and what does not? “If the Digital book is only a virtual metaphor, is the printed book only a physical metaphor?”

Alan Liu at the Unbound Book Conference – photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

No books
The physical book is no longer uniform and authoritative as it once was: the rise of all kinds of digital possibilities like Ipads and e-readers result in a call to rethink our concept of ‘bookness’.

The following defenition of the book-concept:

“A long form of attention intended for the permanent, standard and authoritative i.e., socially repeatable and valued – communication of human thought and experience”

So, the book stands for a long form of attention, permanent standard, authoritative. One of the contemporary trends is the shortening of texts: the shrinking of books in the digitalization process.

But yes, books.
Liu wants to keep an open mind about what a book would be and keeps the answer to the question “What do we mean by the book?” open. He is convinced that: “Long forms of attention that we as a culture crave and value”.

We don’t have the instruments to find it now and it will take time to see which direction we will move as readers. Although much digital media is based on short messaging and quick updates, the long format keeps relevant and also very present in daily life. An example is a discussion on Twitter: it begun short, but on some topics the entire feed has a long format, because the discussion is broad. In this case the shortness in the first place has been counterbalanced.

To conclude, Liu refers to the ‘Agrippa’, a work of art created by novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. What is a book after all?

Elias van Hees\

PDF of Alan Liu’s presentation available here: Alan Liu: This is Not a Book