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

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

Just a few days before the Unbound Book Conference will take place, the Amsterdam Art / Book fair will be held as well. The Amsterdam Art/Book Fair gives special attention to art and design academies involved in publishing. This first conference will take place on the 14 & 15 of May 2011, presenting a high end international selection of art publications:

The fair aims to reflect on the emerging practices and new development in art, through a selection of publishers from 16 countries. Printed matter and digital media edited by independent publishers and artists, magazines and institutions, art schools and graphic design studios are featured in this first edition. (Source)

The program consists of two afternoons with presentations of artists,designers and publishers. The common language will be English and several speakers will be present to sign their recent publications. On the closing day, saturday 14 may, there will be a after show party. Six schools will present their recent publications and limited editions: Geneva University of Art and Design, Jan Van Eyck Academie, Rietveld Academie / Graphic Design, Rietveld Academie / DOGtime Press, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten & Werkplaats Typografie.

The Amsterdam Art/Book Fair is initiated and organised by Delphine Bedel (Monospace Press) and Yannick Bouillis (Shashin/Offprint), and is hosted by the Flemish Cultural Centre De Brakke Grond. The entrance to the conference is free. For more information: www.amsterdamartbookfair.com.
Or: www.delphinebedel.com & www.offprintparis.com.

Amsterdam Art/Book Fair 2011
Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 May
De Brakke Grond
Amsterdam, NL