Author: Kali Braden

This weeks blog question intrigued me! If I could go back to any time when would I go? If I could tell the people one really important thing about the future of books and reading, what would I tell them? There are so many interesting places in time and would I wish to speak to the population or a particular author? Would I tell Jane Austin what an inspiration she would become? Would I tell Shakespeare how far his influence would reach and that he should demand more money? I am joking, but in terms of when I would go I think I would travel back to the 1890s.

In 1894 Octave Uzanne published “The End of Books” in Scribner’s Magazine. In this article the end of books is discussed as the result of the new technology and innovations. Uzanne believed that the book as a codex with “collections of paper, printed, sewed and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work”, would be radically altered. He believed that print could easily become replaced by phonography. On the basis that reading is tiring and man is lazy, he hypothesized people it will opt for telegraphy which requires no physical effort or strain to listen to. If I went back I would tell them that no matter the technological inventions and innovation whether the telegraph, radio or computers (though those weren’t invented yet) books will always have a place in time. Those technological innovations are still important but so are books and thus they should still be respected and hold regard.

I would also tell them to protect their books! While the late 1800s and early 1900s is quite young to the Rare Book and Manuscript world, however as time goes on these books will become older and possibly rarer and what makes a book rare or valuable is not always age. If there is a level of provenance or a limited print run or a disaster then a book may become rare or unique or valuable. If they protect their books more will likely survive and those which do survive will be in a better condition. Also ask them to keep a log of their libraries as it is an important component or evidence of reader history.

In a less altruistic manner I would also find my distant relatives and ask them to gather first additions of some of my favourite books. These include Dracula, The Importance of Being Ernest, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the series, Around the World in 80 Days and The Call of the Wild – to name a few. I would ask these family members to get the authors to sign them and then keep them very safe! Away from food, fire, and mild and in a dry and safe place. They can be passed through the generations and left to me.

Reference

Uzanne, Octave. “The End of Books.” Scribner’s Magazine 26 (July-December 1894): 221-31.

Last year while doing a project for the workshop Introduction to Scholarly Communication my team created guidelines for Archiving Tweets of Political Events using Archive-It. Working on this project we encountered interesting issues surrounding copyright ownership and access. The issues of copyright and ownership were related to the push by libraries to archive publicly available web content to prevent its easy loss (Antracoli et al., 2014). The harvesting, archiving, and curation of social media, particularly Tweets, is a new issue and their copyright and ownership dimensions have yet to be tested in court (Small, Kasianovitz, Blanford, & Celaya, 2012). We made our recommendations based on ample research and our opinions.

We learned there is a great deal of debate around copyright and ownership issues related to Twitter and Tweets. Some argued that users who choose to make their Twitter accounts public cannot object to the reuse or collection of their Tweets, as users have the option to privatize their account.  At the same time, if a Twitter user’s tweet is indeed used, the user may view Tweets as a means for personal expression and therefore may wish to be credited for this expression (Small et al., 2012). There are three arguments against Tweets as being copyright material in Canada in the United States. First, the short length of one hundred and forty characters makes Tweets possibly ineligible for copyright protection (Reinberg, 2009; Small et al., 2012). In addition, much of what is posted on Twitter is the statement of common-knowledge facts or their impression, which are not copyrightable. Furthermore, many tweet comments are written in a similar manner, making copyright difficult to discern. Those scholars who argue for Tweets as copyrightable believe that some Tweets represent originality, as defined under copyright, or that a collection of Tweets as a whole potentially meets the minimum necessary for copyright protection (Reinberg, 2009).

We decided that no matter the outcome of the copyright decision if the tweets were used in an academic library they could be circumvented by the Twitter Terms of Service and/or the Fair Dealing exemption of copyright law in Canada. According to Twitter’s Terms of Service, posting Tweets grants Twitter “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)” (Twitter, Inc., 2016b). By this standard, Twitter owns every Tweet, but public Tweets are also useable for educational means. Under the Copyright Act’s Fair Dealing exception, an individual is able to use copyright material for research, private study, education, satire, parody, criticism, review, or news reporting. Through the Political Tweets Librarian, academic libraries can harvest publicly available Tweets and their use for research, study, and other educational purposes falls clearly under the Fair Dealing exception of Canadian copyright law.

Reference

Antracoli, A., Duckworth, S., Silva, J., & Yarmey, K. (2014). Capture all the URLs: First steps in web archiving. Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice, 2(2), 155-170. doi: 10.5195/palrap.2014.67

Reinberg, C. (2009). Are tweets copyright-protected? WIPO Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2009/04/article_0005.html

Small, H., Kasianovitz, K., Blanford, R., & Celaya, I. (2012). What your Tweets tell us about you: Identity, ownership and privacy of Twitter data. International Journal of Digital Curation, 174-197. Retrieved from http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/214http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/214

Twitter, Inc. (2016b). Terms of Service. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/tos?lang=en

For my final paper I am thinking of examining the future of children’s books and ebooks. When I was a preschool teacher we had paper and board books, audiobooks (some of which had follow along picture books) and two iPads within the classroom. The students interacted with each object differently. They would sit and read or look at the pictures in the picture and board books, listen to the audio books and look at the accompanying picture books and play games on the iPad. In an ever digitizing world full of busy parents, young children are being continuously exposed to and becoming increasingly proficient in using smart phones and iPads. Many of the students in the class were more experienced in using iPads then both teachers. At one point a student downloaded angry birds and neither teacher could figure out how to fix it and had to ask the student to do so.

Children as young as two and a half using advanced technology is becoming common place. As children’s books have often been an area full of creativity and  experimenting with formats it makes sense that we will see new and innovative ebooks being created for children. In my paper I will try to uncover the possibilities available to creating ebooks for children and the manner in which they will help to develop children cognitively. Take The Hungry Caterpillar for example what was available originally as a paper book and board book can be found online in a pdf slideshow, youtube of people reading the book and audiobooks. Though it is not yet available as an ebook, with questions and challenges for counting, identifying color and fruits and vegetables and sorting this ebook has the potential to do a lot for the cognitive development of children.

Links to the very hungry caterpillar:

http://www.penguin.com/static/pages/features/hungrycaterpillar/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkYmvxP0AJI

The John Lennon song Working Class Hero features tonal changes at 0:10 and 0:30 sec (within the clip), which indicate the addition of a separate piece of music recorded in John Lennon’s home. In this release of the song the container and method of recording comes through in the poor transition between the two pieces of music due to poor editing and producing choices.

With personal recording becoming so easy and relatively cheap to do that it can be done on an app or an iPad musician and singers are able to produce and disperse music at an exceptionally fast rate, any where, any time. With good quality music production software and the potential for what can be created this method of music production is exploding.

Though new software creates great music quality does it mean the songs being recorded are any better? Without a professional eye it is much easier for amateurs to make production mistakes and a great deal of the art and finesse is lost (Pixelsound, 2016). I would argue that the digitization and ease of personal production of music can be likened to the movement from manuscripts to the industrialization of the printing press. As music production and books are modernized the craftsmanship is lost and with quick creation careless errors increase.

However I would also argue that these mistakes and mishaps are not all negative. From printing mistakes special issues are created and book history is made. Eventually these become sought after rare books for collections and can become apart of reader history. Can the same not be said for this issue of Working Class Hero. Songs can be endlessly re-recorded  and released and phones allow for live capturing of a song at concerts. This means a hundred versions of the same song can be found on the internet. The little eccentricities in a song make make it unique and can become apart of the songs history.

Furthermore the format in which a song is held- vinyl, CD or mp3- can impact the users experience with the song and that user may feel differently about the song in each format. The graininess of a song on vinyl may impact the user differently from a clear digital format. In this way the container of the song can make it more or less desirable and influence the listener.

Link to the segment of the song that features the tonal shift and other examples of producing mistakes at:

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/08/23/10-recording-bloopers-that-made-the-album/

Reference:

Pixelsound. (2016). How technology has changed the music recording  world…Forever. Retrieved from http://www.pixelsound.com/how-technology-has-changed-the-music-recording-world-forever.html

There are several items which I read distinctly on screen and on paper formats. I tend to read for pleasure on paper, therefore books and magazines will take this format. I read websites, emails, the news and journal articles on a screen. The main factors influencing my choice of formats are Convenience, Quality of Reading, and Emotional Influence.

For ease of use and availability I tend to read emails and the news on a screen. I do not feel the need to print them as typically one read through is enough and as I have a smart phone they can be referred back to later if I have forgotten something. Finding and buying a newspaper is inconvenient so I tend to opt to check the news through the CBC app. The app is much more portable and can be checked at a moments notice while waiting in line or commuting. I also tend to read journal articles on my laptop. This is not how I prefer to read them but to print the many articles I must read each week for school is very expensive and far heavier then finding them on my laptop.

Quality of reading is very important in my choice of reading on a screen versus paper. When I read off of a screen I have the tendency to skim rather than read deeply and I am far easier to distract and I am not alone. Many articles have been published with the results that readers who read off a screen over paper will skim and their comprehension will suffer (Rosenwald, 2015).

For this reason though I read articles on my laptop I will print my study notes and papers for proof reading. This allows me to concentrate on what is available without email notices popping up or distracting websites a click away.

The most important factor that influences my format choices is emotional influence. Aside from quality of reading, emotional influence also impacts my choice to study my notes on paper versus on a screen. Flipping pages while I study provides me with a sense of accomplishment and progress that I do not feel when I scroll. This is the same feeling I have when I am struggling through a text chapter in hard cover versus digital. This of accomplishment has been explained as a sensory offload that is supported by visual progress (Flood, 2014).

Though convenience is an important factor it does not always outweigh emotional impact. As I travel a lot on weekends for a time I switched to a Kobo reader because it is smaller and much lighter for packing. However while reading the kobo on the bus I found I could not read for as long and I would be more interested in what other people are doing then the story. Another aspect of emotional influence comes from my lack of luck with technology. I have dowloaded viruses at the most inconvenient of times and had accidents with three laptops resulting in a loss of all my notes. These incidents have cause me to develop a lack of trust in technology, trusting the tangibility of a book. I think I fear buying ebooks and having my Kobo die either by breaking or the soft or hardware becoming obsolete.  Needless to say I have switched back to paper books.

Emotional influence also influences my choice to read through pleasure on paper through nostalgia. I think most people who love books appreciate the smell of a new book and the feeling of a book in your hands. That is something one just does not experience on a laptop, iPad or eBook. Most of my reading happens on vacation or before sleeping. As a masters student I spend all day looking at a screen, doing work and reading a paper book allows me to disconnect from technology. I find I fall asleep faster and sleep better when I have the opportunity to read a paper book before falling asleep. This phenomenon has been examined in several studies that have found the light emitted by the reader causes the reader to become less sleepy and may take almost 10 minutes longer to fall asleep. Furthermore eReaders can cause less REM sleep and reduce reader alertness the next day (Flood, 2014).

References

Flood, Alison. (2014). Ebooks at night won’t help you sleep tight, US study finds. The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/23/ebooks-affect-sleep-alertness-harvard-study

Flood, Alison. (2014). Readers absorb less on Kindles then on paper, study finds. The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation

Rosenwald, Michael. (2015). Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes you read that right. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-digital-natives-prefer-reading-in-print-yes-you-read-that-right/2015/02/22/8596ca86-b871-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html

When considering the future of the page as I haven’t experienced many ebooks- especially innovative or unique ones- what first came to mind were apps. Apps are continuously being invented and their immense numbers require the apps to be innovative or exciting to capture user attention. One app in particular that I will be discussing is the Uber app. When the user opens the Uber app an interactive map appears which tracks the user’s location through GPS. The user is able to request a pick up and drop off location after selecting the type of car or the user may select Uber eats which delivers take out. The user is then billed directly through the app.

When reading Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor’s article (2004),  “Introduction to The Future of the Page” several interesting points of the components of a page that are similarly reflected in the Uber app.The article states that the page became the most important place for displaying information and determined intellectual authority, logical arguments and useful information (Stoicheff, & Taylor, 2004). Cell phones and iPads have become so much a part of our everyday and for many the main source of news and communication it can be argued that they have achieved the same attributes. The Uber app for many is a regular source of transportation and a very useful tool.  Their article also states that the rectangular shape, format and layout of the page has become so familiar to us that we do not even notice it (Stoicheff, & Taylor, 2004). I believe that this can be applied further to applications on a cell phone or iPad whose screens are so familiar we have begun to not notice their format and even the layout of most cell phones follows that same rectangular shape. Stoicheff and Andrew (2004) reflect that the book is never fully encountered except as an expectation, recollection or when closed. The same can be said for the Uber app. The user can only be experienced one page at a time and the user may never see the backend of the program.

While it may be argued that the architecture of the page has not changed significantly  since it’s early years, I believe this has shifted with the creation of the digital page. As stated by Stoicheff and Andrew (2004), “the advent of the digital page has created a writing space of tremendous flexibility and ease of use”. The Uber app demonstrates flexibility with it’s interactive, non- static nature and by displaying live maps along with text.

Reference:

Stoicheff, Peter and Andrew Taylor. Introduction to The Future of the Page. University of Toronto Press, 2004. 3-25.

House of Leaves is a novel that involves several layers of character narrative, a documentary film manuscript and editorial notes all mixed together to make a unique story. Though I have not read the book, from what I have seen of the novel is further complicated by an unusual presentation, orientation and purpose of the different types on the paper. It had definitely intrigued me and I look forward to reading it in the future.

Our group has chosen to do a page from the novel that involves markup regarding the multiple character stories and comments on footnotes. For this post I have chosen two pages from within the book that present an interesting challenge to markup in terms of the orientation and break up of print. Though it is the same speaker it appears to be a quote and a reflection of the quote.

Questions about it’s markup included whether the quotes and comments on the quotes should be separated or represented separately, as the comment breaks up the flow of reading the quote. Another question about markup is whether or not to markup both pages together as the quote transcends the page. Furthermore there was the question of the sentence breaks- though they go with the theme of the quote, they break mid-sentence and don’t appear to be important to the content.

Kali

The U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission IMLS Digitization Project by the University of Virginia is an online exhibit that discovers the work, historical importance and impact of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission.  The homepage for the project is available at http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/yellowfever/. The collection consists of thousands of documents,including handwritten and typed notes, news paper articles, photographs, miscellaneous printed materials and artifacts which the University has been digitizing.

The project uses XML with TEI attributes to mark- up the resources and save them in TIFF files on CDs. The project also made digitized, transcribed and marked-up primary materials available online the website. The project provides a rather detailed history of  its journey through the digitization project as well as mistakes and challenges they faced. The project goes further to share lessons they learned and make recommendations for similar projects. More information on the digitization process is available at http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/yellowfever-new/collection-digitization-report-1999-2004/.

The the details of its use of XML is not available, but it appears to be based upon the University of Virginia Library’s TEI Encoding Guidelines. The University of Virginia Library’s TEI Encoding Guidelines available at http://dcs.library.virginia.edu/digital-stewardship-services/tei-encoding-guidelines/.

When thinking of  a digitized object that impacted my experience of with am object the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Audiobook read by Stephen Fry comes to mind. I have read the original books awhile ago but while listening to the audiobooks my experience with the story was impacted in several different ways. Firstly the reader made choices as to which words to emphasis and how to pronounce them. At times the vocal choices the reader made were different from my original interpretation, changing my perception of the meaning of the words. Secondly, Stephen Fry read the book at a faster rate then I read. Generally, I read slowly as I imagine the scenes as I go and may pause to consider something I have read. When listening to the story I was not able to imagine or pause as I normally would. Lastly the audiobook version I was listening to did not save the place where one was listening to and thus every time I returned to I had to find my place. It felt very similar to loosing your bookmark when reading a book. While frustrating it made me wonder why this was not considered in the design and interrupted the flow of the story.

Though little dressed in scholarly research, several debates exist surrounding the benefits of reading versus listening to an audiobook. While some argue that the experiences to be cognitively similar, this is dependent on the type of story and lacks the emotional connection prevalent in holding a physical artifact (Khazan, 2011). Often these formats are experienced  differently, as audiobooks are associated with multitasking and books remaining stationary and focused. User interaction with audiobooks may be reflected in the choices the creator/ reader makes. Stories can move quicker as a listener driving to work may not need to reflect on the story as those sitting on their couch. Therefore users may come to expect differences their experience with a story whether a book or and audiobook.

Kali

Bibliography:

Khazan, Olga. (2011). Is Listening to Audio Books Really the Same as Reading? Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/olgakhazan/2011/09/12/is-listening-to-audio-books-really-the-same-as-reading/#2a22090576df

The last time I remember being truly impacted by the format of a book was a couple years ago when I was still a preschool teacher. It was a a distinctly difficult rainy day, leaving the whole class was stuck inside and rather restless. I was doing a lesson on farms and farm animals and had borrowed a board-book on farms from the public library. The book was interactive, involved having children answer questions, count, look underneath and pull tabs and search for animals. My students were incredibly engaged the entire lesson, increased cognitive development on many topics and encouraged their love of reading. After the lesson many students remained in the reading area to re- read the book and other books. This made for a much more relaxed and organized environment. Therefore, the interactive format of the board- book had a very positive impact on both my day, my students’ day and their experience with learning. I do wonder how children’s books will be impacted by the increasingly digital age, when children at the age of three already know how to play games on an iPad?

If anyone wishes to know more information on the positive cognitive developments of reading on children you may find the following webpage interesting.  http://www.earlychildhoodteacher.org/blog/encouraging-preschoolers-cognitive-development-with-books-and-shared-reading/.