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If I had a time machine, I would like to go to the future. Events of the past have shaped where we are today, and the book as we know it has developed from these events. I am most interested in seeing what the book and methods of transferring information will look like in 50 years. Technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that the way we interact with the book may be completely different from what it is today, or it may be the same with slight changes to reflect the newest technology.

I would have many questions and comments to make once I took in what the future is like, but I would have one message to pass on to the people of the future. Marlena has brought up an very interesting perspective for this weeks post and her post has sparked my message for people in the future. The book is a means of preserving and sharing information, regardless of what form it takes. I would tell the people of the future to make sure they do not forget the true purpose of the book, and to create books in a way that they continue to hold true to this purpose.

We have looked at many forms of the book and discovered the way in which technological advancements have changed the way we interact with the book. But regardless of the form, the common root is the transfer and preservation of information. I would like to see what new forms are created for the book, and to tell people of the future to ensure the preservation and transfer of information for individuals across all walks of life.

If I had a time machine, I would travel 98 years into the future to 2114. This is the year the Future Library will be released in Oslo, Norway. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Future Library, it is a conceptual art project created by artist Katie Paterson. The idea is each year, beginning in 2014, a different author will contribute an original piece of writing to the library, to be published in the year 2114. So far, Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell are contributing authors. The manuscripts, along with printing technologies on which to print the books, are being housed in the New Public Deichmanske Library. A forest of trees was planted in 2014 to provide paper for the books. To read more about this project, you can visit the artist’s website.

I want to be able to witness the publishing of the Future Library Anthology to satiate my curiosity about a number of things:

1. Does anyone care about the project? Or is this an idea more exciting for people alive at the beginning of the 100-year period: people who will never get to see the finished product?
2. I want to know what books published (presuming they are still published) in 2114 look like, and if the printing technologies preserved in the Future Library are at all helpful. Does anyone know how to use them?
3. What did Margaret Atwood want to communicate to readers 100 years from now?

   

4. Finally, what will this project tell future scholars about cultural anxieties surrounding the future of the book in 2014? In my opinion (firmly rooted in 2016) this project reveals much about cultural anxieties surrounding the future in general. The concept of making choices and decisions which affect generations in the future resonates with those concerned with environmental sustainability. Will our current environmental crisis be of lesser or greater interest to people in 2114? When I return from my travels through time, I’ll let you know.

If I had a time machine that would allow me to skip around in time, maybe a Time Pogo Stick, I would go to the various periods of change in the format of the book and tell people to “CALM DOWN. Seriously, guys, the book is not going to die. We’re all still reading happily. Chill out.” Sadly, I don’t have a Time Pogo Stick, so I guess I won’t get to yell at all those doomsday predictors. (But, it looks like Stephanie has already done that. So, yay!) No, I only have this old, generic time machine with the panels falling off. One round trip left to make before the Time Batteries finally die. So, I’m going to have to go to the Library of Alexandria. I mean, this is my one chance!

I did a brief stint in Near and Middle Eastern Studies during undergrad. It seemed that every single class was marred by the statement that “So-and-So wrote a history of Mesopotamia, or Egypt, and was a contemporary during such-and-such important historical event. Yes, and their book was enshrined in the Library of Alexandria, where it was lost forever. We have, like, ten paragraphs of it that other contemporary historians referenced in their own works. So, yay for scholarship! *sob*”

The loss of the contents of those books, leaving massive gaps in our knowledge and understanding of history, has always haunted me. It’s not like they were just someone’s personal ramblings. They were important works, embraced by the scholarly community of the time. They were sent to the Library to be preserved and made available to everyone. They are now lost forever.

So, I would go back and say to a librarian, “Look. I know you think this place will last forever. It’s very nice, truly. But there is a whole future to come that you have no control over. The only thing you might be able to control is what is remembered. So you need to start making copies and disseminating them. Hopefully some will survive. Also, do you have these two books? You should copy them first. Wait. I’m just going to wave my magic rectangle over them for a bit. Don’t worry, I’m a librarian too.”

That’s what I think about when I think about the future of the book now: not so much the book as a concept but the information we transmit through it. As we move through different formats and contexts, we need to make sure that we’re preserving that information in ways that can also adapt. We can’t get complacent or put our trust into one form over another, one institution over all others. What I’m trying to say is that this class has taught me to trust in the future of the book. It’s the future of particular books I worry about now.

Note: Readers may have noticed I’ve been quite vague about the inciting works in this post. That is because I can’t remember what they were called or who the authors were. I didn’t save my notes for that class. That just goes to show you never know what might be important down the line.

Source: http://blogs.baylor.edu/armstrongbrowning/category/19th-century-women-writers/

I think that if I could travel back in time, the message I would focus on relaying would be around medium as a reflection of current ideological state, and as something that is flexible and should be open to interpretation. I’m specifically thinking about the roughly 19^th Century Anglo/ European audience as a useful target demographic to propagate this idea to, so as to avoid the discounting of manuscripts and letters as worthy candidates for the study of book history. This is in part inspired by one of my book history classes in which we looked at the letter writing of women in this time period and how there was often a dichotomy created between the authority of print and the less authoritative domain of handwriting or manuscript. This would be beneficial for expanding the scope of the field not just in terms of materiality, but also in terms of its socio-cultural engagement in history. The Future of the Book has shown us the flexibility of the definition of a text, and the multitudes of ways that stories can be told effectively outside of the traditional printed codex.

This particular insight might be addressed to a still developing field of book historians and scholars so that they might build up the field with a wider sense of what counts as important to the culture of books (and to consider to what degree it is valuable to draw lines of distinctions around what books are). Even as we turn our gaze towards the future, the boundaries between mediums become less clear. As Matthew Kirschenbaum notes “the tendency to elicit what is ‘new’ about new media by contrasting its radical mutability with the supposed material stolidity of older textual forms is a misplaced gesture, symptomatic of the general extent to which textual studies and digital studies have failed to communicate”(24). Perhaps, then, if we were not so rigid in our original definitions of the book, the field would not struggle to define itself and its breadth today.

Bibliography

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First-Generation Electronic Objects.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 14 (2002): 15-51. 

Alright, bear with me on the cheesy title for this post. In all seriousness, I think this cliché accurately sums up how books and bookish things have progressed throughout the ages. To this end, what I would suggest to someone in the past about the future of books and reading is that ‘the book’ will not only persist, but it will do so with remarkable similarities to books that past citizens of time have known, understood, and loved. When considering how ‘books’ have evolved, from cuneiform tablets, to papyrus scrolls, wax tablets, bound codices, pulp paperbacks, and right up to audio books, the Internet, and digital e-books, what is remarkable is not the degree of change, but the degree of similarity. What we’re dealing with here are differences in degree, not in kind.

In a world where immense changes and developments have been made in areas such as science, technology, medicine, transportation, and the like, it is pretty incredible to think that books, for the most part, look quite similar to their nearly five-hundred year old counterparts. Take for example, the fact that the codex form has persisted, despite death knells for the ‘end of the book’ tracing back over a hundred years. Octave Uzanne, in his 1894 “The End of Books,” foretold, “If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products” (223-224). Even his prophecy of “phonographic literature,” realized in the audio book, did not prove to do away with the printed codex entirely. New technologies such as e-books, widely presumed to be the book’s successor, are inextricably caught up in the look and feel of printed books, as Johanna Drucker puts it, “electronic presentations often mimic the kitschiest elements of book iconography, while potentially useful features of electronic functionality are excluded” (2009, 166).

What can account for this lack of dissimilarity? I wonder if it comes down to something Drucker mentions about the difference between “the way a book looks” and “the ways a book works;” she writes, “think of the contrast between the literal book – that familiar icon of bound pages in finite, fixed sequence – and the phenomenal book – the complex production of meaning and effect that arises from dynamic interaction with the literal work” (2009, 169). Certainly changes in technology have meant differences in how we interact with words – whether on a page, a screen, through a hyperlink…all of these things have changed our reading experience. Yet, with only a difference in degree, perhaps the story of the book over the last few hundred years has been a narrative of continuity, and not change? Despite Andrew Piper’s assertion that digital reading may not in fact be ‘reading’ at all, but something entirely new (2012, 46) – it seems that many of our traditional ways of being with books and bookish things still apply.

As for the future of the book, Robert Coupland Harding wrote in 1894: “Will moveable types still remain? We think they will. Steam and devil-driven though the world may be now – dazzled by electric light and thrilled by galvanic motors as it will be in years to come – there must still remain classes of work that no mechanism can perform” (85). In some ways, Harding’s statement still stands true. In this hybrid reading environment, with print and digital co-existing, it would seem that the ‘work’ of reading can still occupy a decidedly traditional space, while it changes, morphs, and adapts. Umberto Eco, in This is Not the End of the Book, writes of the future, “One of two things will happen: either the book will continue to be the medium for reading, or its replacement will resemble what the book has always been, even before the invention of the printing press. Alterations of the book-as-object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon” (2011, 4).

I would agree wholeheartedly, and yet, I don’t think that with regards to bookish pursuits we are entirely in the clear. The Economist’s essay on the future of the book, “From Papyrus to Pixels,” notes that, “In the past decade people have been falling over themselves to predict the death of books, of publishers, of authors and of bookshops, even of reading itself. Of all those believed at risk, only the bookshops have actually suffered serious damage” (2014). To this I would add, libraries. Not to get all doom and gloom here, but library cuts and closures are about as close to the ‘death of the book’ as we’re coming – Leah Price notes, “Writers foresaw space travel, time travel, virtual reality and, endlessly, the book’s demise; what they never seem to have imagined was that the libraries housing those dying volumes might themselves disappear” (2012). In 1955, Lester Asheim wrote that, “The library of today is still essentially a book agency, and our training, practice, and outlook are book-oriented. The library of the future may or may not be primarily a book agency. If it is not, those of us who limit our attention to the book may find our libraries, if not completely discarded, at least relegated to a position of considerably reduced importance and vitality. On the other hand, if the library of the future should continue to be a book agency, it will be an effective one, not through our blindly devoting ourselves to the service of books in and for themselves, but because as librarians we will have analyzed and understood the unique role of the book which qualifies it to serve new and developing needs” (282). For once, a projection we should take heed of. So, I guess if I were to go back in time and give a warning about the future it would be this – forget about the death of the book, it will be just fine, but direct your attention to the library instead. Maybe it has been a bit of hubris that lead to a denial that libraries could ever disappear – whatever the case, it seems that libraries might do well to consider a difference in kind (to their collections, their services, their outlook) in order to survive (and thrive) into the future.

References:

Asheim, Lester. (1955). New problems in plotting the future of the book. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 25 (4): 281-292. http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/pdf/4304463.pdf.

Drucker, Johanna. (2009). Modelling functionality: From codex to e-book. In SpecLab: Digital aesthetics and projects in speculative computing. (pp. 165-175). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eco, Umberto and Jean-Claude Carrière. (2011). This is not the end of the book. London: Harvill Secker.

“From Papyrus to Pixels.” (2014). The Economist. http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21623373-which-something-old-and-powerful-encountered-vault.

Harding, Robert Coupland. (1894). A hundred years hence. Typo, 8: 85. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/etexts/typo/Har08TypoFCo.jpg.

Piper, Andrew. (2012). Turning the page (roaming, zooming, streaming). In Book was there: Reading in electronic times (pp. 45-61). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Price, Leah. (2012). Dead again. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/books/review/the-death-of-the-book-through-the-ages.html?_r=0.

Uzanne, Octave. (1894). The end of books. Scribner’s Magazine, 16 (2): 221-232. http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=scri;cc=scri;rgn=full%20text;idno=scri0016-2;didno=scri0016-2;view=image;seq=0229;node=scri0016-2%3A9.

 

If I could go back in time and tell the people of an era one really important thing about the future of books and reading, it would simply be that books are not going to die. With this message, I could travel back to a variety of different time periods, because there have been many instances of moral panics over “the death of the book” (i.e. Théophile Gautier in 1835 France; Marshall McLuhan circa 1966).

The intent behind this message would primarily be to allay these poor book lovers’ fears regarding the death of the book. Think of the time and energy that could have been saved and redirected into more creative writing endeavours if people hadn’t fixated on arguing over this issue (not to say that what people wrote about the matter in all of these different periods is not interesting in and of itself!). I wish I could tell them that books will change, and while some will embrace this change, books as they were known in times past will continue to flourish, and people will continue to read them. If they had known this, perhaps more people would have been encouraged to write books, to write more books, or to write different books.

As we have learned in this course, print books are not going to die, and e-books are not going to take over. Even if they did, works would still get read, even if the format might change slightly (or drastically). In any case, other technologies such as newspaper, radio, or TV will not replace books and reading: the need for books is strong and the love for them is ever-present.

Apologies in the delay getting this post to you fellow bloggers, the Easter bunny brought me the flu for Easter so I’m a bit out of sorts, but here goes!

Besides music, the downloading of apps is probably the main way in which my ownership of digital objects gets tested. I find myself mildly annoyed when an app I get accustomed to using in one way, is altered or updated in another way that forces me to re-learn its functions or re-shape my attitudes towards it (I am a creature of habit I suppose).

A very current example would be Instagram, which is purportedly going to be changing its feed algorithms to favour popularity over chronology. This is annoying because it means that it will be harder to follow the famous and non-famous in a peacefully co-existing way, as the more popular content is privileged. However because the app is free rather than a purchased app, it’s difficult to feel too hard done by, after all there are many instances where apps disappear or change after you have purchased them. Also, there is of course the option to turn off automatic app updates so that you can stay with whatever versions is currently being used. The downside of this is that there is sense that you are missing out on something and you have to go through the additional labor of manually updating some things and not others if you do decide to update. This is all just to say that updating is not a bad thing, just merely an interesting aspect of the digital object that contributes to our sense of it as a living, evolving organism rather than a complete creation. FOMO (fear of missing out) seems to eventually get the better of us – you don’t want to update, but what if you miss out on something cool?

If you do purchase an app, these things become even more interesting to think about because the boundaries of ownership become even blurrier – you have access to the app – but it’s being altered and updated by its creators. There is a sense that it really never is yours in quite the same way. When I purchase something digital I know in the back of mind that I may very well be paying for a very temporary experience with something, but instant gratification usually gets the best of me and I will purchase something because I want to use it today without much concern for its use tomorrow.

The sense of the update as being an embedded part of a digital object means that the thing we purchased is a living service rather than something we make a single transaction for in order to acquire a specific item. One simply cannot have control over the app in quite the same way as a physical object (unless you happen to have elite hacking skills). The update complicates our relationship to something we own because it means that what we have paid for is still very much under the control of the original content creator.

Apps already seem to occupy a grey area in terms of ownership as their existence isn’t in conversation with a tangible history the way the digital book is. Part of their identity is defined through their use and purchase, and the tenuous and fragile nature of these digital features. The less control you have over something, the harder it is to feel as though you possess ownership. The concept of control of information comes up in the Adrian John’s article as something that has “become a principal foundation of modern social, economic, and cultural order. As it has become the key commodity in the globalized economy, so control and management of information have vastly increased in overt importance.” (5). Who controls the things we buy is a more intriguing question than ever when the commodity never fully leaves the control of the creator. With apps, whether purchased or not, people are less likely to invest their confidence in them as an enduring commodities, which has created a diluted sense of ownership when it comes to apps.

Bibliography:
Johns, A. (2009). Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.

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.

I intended my example for this week’s blog question to be a textual artifact in digital form (truly, I did!) but my mind kept returning to artifacts neither print nor digital in form: seeds. This has something to do with Adrian Johns’ statement on policing intellectual property: “Efforts to uphold intellectual property against piracy take place in all areas of today’s economy, but they are most prominent in three: media, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture” (499). This statement resonated with me, in part, because I am part of a group starting a seed library in Cobourg. Last weekend I was promoting the project at our local annual seed exchange and was questioned by a visitor about seed copyrights and whether or not what we were proposing to do was legal. I didn’t have an answer because it was something I had only considered in abstract terms. You hear about the large-scale-agri-business farmer in the states being sued by Monsanto for saving seeds, but I had never really considered the possibility that any one at that seed exchange would be violating copyright laws. We were not (as far as I know) as heirloom, untreated, open-pollinated seeds are what people are interested in, but what would happen if someone donated copyrighted soybean seed containing copyrighted pesticide to the library? It is improbable, but it is possible. This exchange really made me question my assumptions about what I own when it comes to my food and food production. I am determined to educate myself further on the subject.

If anyone is interested in the topic of intellectual property rights and seeds from the perspective of advocates for seed sovereignty, there is a free webinar on the subject happening on March 30. The panelists include Ann Slater of the National Farmers Union, Julie Dawson of the University of Wisconsin Madison and Jack Kloppenburg of the Open Source Seed Initiative. It is currently full, but the materials will be posted to the site the following week. It can be found here: http://seedfreedom.info/events/webinar-seed-freedom-intellectual-property-rights/

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Bibliography:
Johns, A. (2009). Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P.