The Future of the Book of the Future
Photograph by Anita Brown, 2008
One of my favorite discussion lists is book_arts-l, which serves the worldwide community of book artists, bookbinders, conservators, curators and other book people. Most of the threads are usually about technical matters, such as how long you can keep wheat paste, how to remove odors from old or damp books, and so on, but from time to time the nature of the book itself as an object rather than a reading experience comes under very thoughtful consideration.
For the past few days, the main topic has been the relevance of the book in the Internet age. You can see the full thread in the April archive .
The principal problem with digital books is technological obsolescence. I wrote a little about this in my book, “Mortality and Mercy on the Internet’s Pynchon-L@Waste.Org Discussion List,” published by Intangible Assets Manufacturing in 1997. Electronic media depend on reading devices that have changed with bewildering speed. Try accessing a wire recording, or even a document saved on a 5.25″ floppy. I have a complete book that I translated in 1989 on a 5.25″ floppy. I will need to pay to have it restored if I should need it again. The disk itself may not even be good any more.
We live on an island in the lagoon formed by the main island of Cancun, to which it is attached by a causeway. We have the day-to-day effects of salt air and humidity to deal with. We’ve been through a few hurricanes. Wilma blew out our front and back windows and the door. It looked as if we’d been through a car wash. Although we live on the top floor, the front room smelled of rotting seaweed so strongly that it had to be repainted.
Very fortunately, one room was spared, and that’s where we had stored everything before being evacuated to the mainland. Almost everything in that room survived, but the computers had to be pretty much rebuilt. The hard drives made it through fine, but the unsealed surfaces inside the cases were covered with a fine layer of dried condensation that couldn’t be cleaned off.
Our son Eli and his girlfriend Damaris in front of her house the morning Hurricane Wilma lifted. The water came to the door but did not enter. Photograph by Jules Siegel.
Lineland had been archived on a ZIP cartridge. Remember ZIP cartridges? Um. I no longer had a ZIP drive. Then when I found someone who did, the cartridge was dead. Fortunately, I had for once in my life prudently backed up my ZIP cartridges to CDs. A couple of years ago, Lineland went out of print and the rights reverted to me. Oh, goody! I decided to re-publish it myself in a Lulu.com edition. Wait a minute. It was set in PageMaker 6.5. InDesign opens those files. Easy, right? Wrong. It was set in Bembo with Bembo SC and Bembo Expert Set. I don’t use those faces any more. I use Minion for all my book work. Well, you know what happened. All the line endings and other stuff changed.
Ok. Get Bembo Std, an OpenType face that has replaced Bembo whatever. Good try. Less naughty changes, but enough to make problems. All the ligatures that were painstakingly formatted in Bembo Expert have reverted to plain text — instead of finally, there’s Winally; repeat for all other ligatures. Try search and replace. Seems I have to learn GREP to get them all because of the different variations too tedious to explain here. Maybe I don’t have to learn GREP. I just have to write a set of search terms and execute find and replace correction by correction so that I can fix any bad hits manually. Bad language ensues. Reinstall original Bembo whatevers. No joy. The line endings are still bad because ID justifies differently from PM 6.5.
Find old PM 6.5 installation CDs. Whew. They are still functional. Install PM 6.5, but now guess what? The links to the images are broken. Find images, update all links. Hmm. Some images are missing, principally the cover, and a couple inside. Scan cover image. Give up on inside images and just use embedded previews, which turn out to print well enough, if not with the quality to which I am accustomed. Still one minor problem. The last six pages and the index are gone. Gone. Grr. Scan and OCR last six pages and Index. Redo pages. Voilá! I have a second edition of “Mortality and Mercy on the Internet’s Pynchon-L@Waste.Org Discussion List” on sale .
It’s a pretty close match with the first edition, but not exact. There are spelling errors in the OCRd text that slipped all the way through multiple proofreadings…
The hell with it. That’s the book that is. Maybe some day I will fix everything and make it perfect again. Maybe not. But perhaps you now better appreciate why books are pretty much perfect the way they are. You open a book and read it.
As a reward for staying with me through this saga, here are the last six pages of Lineland, “The Future of the Book of the Future,” which deal with the issues that have been discussed so well in book_arts-l. Seeing ahead ten years isn’t much of a feat of futurology, but I think you’ll agree that I got it all right (except for the spelling, which used to be right, but isn’t any more because it got carelessly digitized).
While I have your attention, allow me to point you at at some pictures of the work that I exhibited at Franklin Furnace in 1978. These books have had a lot of life during the past thirty years and they show it, but the scars and stains of age are beautiful, I think.
Thanks for reading this far. If not, go to the top and begin again. My beloved bride, the beauteous Anita Brown is a bit impatient to be out taking pictures in the brilliantly clear Cancun morning sunshine, so I will say goodbye without checking any of this for errors. I’m sure you will understand.
