Open Publishing Tools
Digital Enclosures
What is a Book?
The Unbound Book
Ascent of E-readers
Future Publishing Industries
Books by Design
Horizons of Education and Authoring
Authors’ earnings from copyright and non-copyright sources:
A survey of 25,000 British and German writers by Martin Kretschmer and Philip Hardwick.
The Soft Edge (Paul Levinson 1998) The Soft Edge is a one-of-a-kind history of the information revolution. In his lucid and direct style, Paul Levinson, historian and philosopher of media and communications, gives us more than just a history of information technologies. The Soft Edge is a book about theories on the evolution of technology, the effects that human choice has on this (r)evolution, and what’s in store for us in the future.
Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008). Examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media.
Over leven, lezen en schrijven: de bandbreedte van boekgeschiedenis Arianne Baggerman’s Inaugural Lecture (http://dare.uva.nl/record/375389)
“I work here, but I am cool.” Interview with Alan Liu by Geert Lovink (2006).
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future Robert Darnton (2009). The era of the printed book is at a crossroad. E-readers are flooding the market, books are available to read on cell phones, and companies such as Google, Amazon, and Apple are competing to command near monopolistic positions as sellers and dispensers of digital information. Already, more books have been scanned and digitized than were housed in the great library in Alexandria. Is the printed book resilient enough to survive the digital revolution, or will it become obsolete? In this lasting collection of essays, Robert Darnton—an intellectual pioneer in the field of this history of the book—lends unique authority to the life, role, and legacy of the book in society.
Never Mind the Web, Here Comes the Book by Dr. Miha Kovač (2008). Examines the role of the printed book in contemporary societies, its demographics and its relation to the other media. It analyzes the differences among various national book industries throughout Europe and the USA, and the reasons and impact of the differences. Both the effect of digital technologies and the reasons why e-books did not substitute the printed book, as predicted in mid-nineties, are explored.
The Late Age of Print Ted Striphas (2009). Ted Striphas argues that, although the production and propagation of books have undoubtedly entered a new phase, printed works are still very much a part of our everyday lives. With examples from trade journals, news media, films, advertisements, and a host of other commercial and scholarly materials, Striphas tells a story of modern publishing that proves, even in a rapidly digitizing world, books are anything but dead.
Creation Driven Marketing: Integrating metadata into the production process. Joost Kircz. New Library World, Vol. 108, Issue 11/12, p. 552-560, 2007.
Angst About the Future of the Book at Edinburgh’s Book Fest Morgan Currie (Masters of Media 2010)
E-gadget or E-reader? Joost Kircz. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community 21:1-2 (2010) pp.107-114. “What is a book? In general his conclusion, which I share, is that the book is a social invention for an authoritative exchange of ideas. The book embodies a comprehensive story, be it an educational textbook, a scientific treatise or a novel. Essentially a book is a communicative device created for cover-to-cover consumption; it is an object in itself.”
My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles (2005). We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.
E-readers are for reading. Joost Kircz. Conference Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age. Textual Methodologies and Exemplars. Koninklijke Bibliotheek Den Haag, 15 December 2010. To be published.
Google and God’s Mind Michael Gorman (Los Angeles Times, 2004).
Merchants of Culture John Thompson (2010). The world of book publishing is going through turbulent times. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the 21st century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book in the digital age.
Scan This Book! Kevin Kelley (New York Times Magazine 2006) “Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music. ”
Preserving the Dynamic Text: Research Libraries and Mass Digitization. Morgan Currie. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community 21: 3-4 (2010) pp. 74-85(12).
Open Source Publishing – interview with Femke Snelting by Matthew Fuller Open Source Publishing is a recently founded graphic design agency that uses only Free Software tools. Closely affiliated with the Brussels based digital culture foundation Constant, OSP aims to test the possibilities and realities of doing graphic design using an expanding range of Free Software tools.
Interview Dirk van Weelden (in Dutch) “Schrijven met een omweg” “Het wants to be a writer that is a storyteller in the first place”
HORIZONS OF EDUCATION AND AUTHORING
Digitize This Book! by Gary Hall (2008). Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself.
The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information Allen Liu (2004). Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of a new technological cool?