Bookfuturism

We've talked before about the book as a cross-technological concept -- that a "book" can mean either (or both) a codex or a scroll, an electronic or a physical unit. Roughly speaking, our ideas of what a book is are driven by the different technologies attached to reading -- but there's also SOME sense in which "book" persists across or transcends any particular technology.

Don Linn has a terrific post reflecting on what was and wasn't said at the recent O'Reilly TOC (Tools of Change) conference. Here are a few selections (everything in a bullet point is a direct quote, with snips in between):

Dan Cohen writes a nice post on the same theme I wrote about a few days ago -- roughly, what is a book, and why do certain communities hold it sacred?:

The price-point advantage that E books have over paper books is a myth.  Sure, most e-books are cheaper, but the truth is that I can probably leave my paper copy of the the book I'm reading at the coffeeshop table next to my coat when I go to the bathroom, but I wouldn’t leave a $450 kindle DX.   The expense creates a trigger of investment protection.  No throwing this in the back seat of your car, leaving it on the table, or anything else you could do comfortably with a paper book.

I've missed what might/might not for you already be a well-known TED talk -- Pattie Maes's and Pranav Mistry's demonstrations of the "sixth sense" projector technology -- at least three times now. Twice, in November and again at the end of January, I had a good excuse, stuck in the hospital.

I'm taking it for granted that I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that books are different things. Books are novels, nonfiction, collections of photos, hardcover, paperbacks, inexpensive newsprint, rare vellum, scrolls, pop-up books, random pages bound together, text running left to right, right to left, vertically, no text at all, usually but not always made of paper. I think one of the things that we value so much about books is their very malleability. Hell, digitize it, put a "e" in front of its name and read it on a Kindle and it's still a book.

Will electronic media kill what the book buried?

Before we had the book, we had the bard, the minstrel, the storyteller.  In the dark evenings, we hungered for them to be singing, chanting, reciting from memory, improvising a tale.  The storyteller put his or her full body and spirit into portrayal, owning a room and whatever numbers there, directing the breath and heartbeat and emotion of those present -- those compelled to presence in a sacred moment.

I've been thinkig about how I'd debut myself on this site since I joined a few days ago (2 days and 2 hours ago according to my account log), and I've finally decided that my position on a few key (or at least timely) issues will suffice, even though I run the risk of repeating some of what's been said. If you've had an in-dept discussion on the site at one point or another, just point the way and I'll mosy over to comment. With any luck, though, this will add something to the conversation anyway.

In his essay Default Thinking (.pdf), Scott Jenson touches upon what it means to be a futurist (book, or otherwise):

Legacy Vision is the approach we all take when first considering how to use a new technology: it gives us our initial use. This approach is very understandable: we look backwards at what we are doing, our current legacy, and apply the new technology in a manner to make this existing problem better...These first uses aren’t wrong, only naïve, as they apply the new technology to well known problems. In retrospect, many technologies are disruptive, changing the status quo and often end up being used in far more profound ways. The initial uses are quickly forgotten...It takes time before the full impact of a new technology is understood and applied in a more significant way.