Robert Max Steenkist is a professor of publishing studies at Universidad de los Andes. He was the last speaker of the session Ascent of E-readers.

Robert Max Steenkist @ the unbound book conference – photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Robert Steenkist started his talk with an introduction on the book in Latin America. He informed: “In Latin America we do not read.” Robert explains that there are in fact many publishers in Latin America. The publishing activities in Colombia are concentrated in the cities. 7 publishers publish half of the titles and 400 publishers produce the rest. Books are very expensive in Latin America because they have to be imported.

How are new technologies helping this?

Robert continues his presentation with some facts about new media in Latin America. He shows that many people maintain a blog while many people do not have a computer or access to internet. For this reason cell phones are very popular in Latin America. Steenkist illustrates the strong activity in the new media field in Latin America by using the example of the Colombian politician Atanas Mockus. In 2010, The politician had the most followers on Twitter and Facebook and his name was the fifth most typed name on Twitter worldwide.

The main problems with the publishing industry in Latin America are that the laws protect books and big publishers. Although the government treats the book as a democratic tool for development, they do not provide access to books. Robert affirms that this is a strange policy. He explains how Latin America does not have a best seller culture. The nature of the industry is based on the theory of Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’. Diversity is very important for the publishing industry. ‘Bibliodiversity’ is a political tool for independent publishers so that they can stand against the big publishers. Bibliodiversity is very important according to Robert since books play an important role in preserving knowledge which would otherwise be lost forever. The governments promote bibliodiversity by stimulating free circulation and providing support to less popular authors against the powerful multinationals. However Robert notes that the governments do not include new media in these strategies.

PDF of presentation available here: Unbound Book Presentation.

‘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

Storytelling is the conveying of narratives, an idea as old as human history itself. The origins of narration are difficult to grasp, and because this phenomenon plays such a prominent role in most of our lives, no one is able to imagine a life without it. Storytelling is an essential condition in order to communicate.

Basically, what the media does is bring stories to a public. What I find interesting is how the media presents and publishes news (stories), mediated through multiple channels. Another important domain that provides this function is education, the environment in which children spend most of their time.

As printed literature subsides and new technologies take over with the release of e-readers, the iPad and other tablets presented as alternatives for printed literature, how will information provision within education develop? What will be our future reading, writing and learning solutions?

An interesting project is The Yoza Project, initiated by Steve Vosloo and originally known as m4Lit (mobile phones for literacy). Vosloo believes that mobile phones, games and digital media are the future of Africa’s education. The project was launched in 2009 as a pilot initiative to explore whether teens in South Africa will read stories on their mobile phones. He believes mobile solutions are tools for change in South Africa and bases his ideas on the success of M-novels in Japan, which became such a trend that the best m-novels came out in print as well.

“Bottom line: Throughout the year I have said, and still say, that the cellphone is a powerful learning and communication tool. Instead of viewing it as a distraction and a hindrance to education, I believe it should be viewed as an essential part of the solution. It is the e-reader of Africa, a device onto which we can quickly and easily publish content to a wide audience, as well as through which young people are given a voice. The high-levels of engagement on Yoza has shown that participatory culture is alive and well in Africa, although here it is via MXit comments and not Youtube videos.” (On stevevosloo.com)

Learning by use of mobile solutions is called mlearning: “Any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies.” (In Guidelines for learning in a mobile environment)

Technological and social divides are often intertwined. When both divides are bridged, technological progress plus meaningful use of these tools may result in social change. Yoza is available on MXit in South Africa and Kenya and is said to be the bridge between non-profit organisations, governments, corporates and (young!) people. See the reports page for the latest project statistics and previous reports.

Yoza shows us the entire concept of ‘bookness’ needs reinvention. And the rise of other mlearning projects contribute to the question of how we will (and should) publish and provide education in the future – questions which will also be addressed during the coming Unbound Book Conference.

TEDx Soweto: Steve Vosloo is the fellow for 21st Century Learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation.