I was listening to a story on NPR called “Loading Up on Penguin Classics”. My son was running around the living room screaming, so I didn’t hear most of the broadcast. In my digital thoughtspace, I assumed “loading up” referred to software. Imagining an entire library, 1,082 classic titles, as electronic objects, stored neatly on my hard drive, is enormously appealing to my minimalist aesthetic and my nomadic digital worklife. However, as it turns out, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection is being offered as a 700 lb. load of paperback books (delivered free to anyone who can afford the shelf space and the $7,989.50 price tag). If only Penguin could catch a vision of THIS century and start making digital versions of the classics. I need screen-based books, audio books, lower pricetags, and I don’t think I’m alone. Penguin, are you listening? I’m clearing out virtual shelf space now, make me some ebooks!
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A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
mmmmm, that or they know they could never compete with http://www.gutenberg.org
You are alone. The ebook thing is over. Just as the mimicry of manuscripts books was short lived in early printing, the mimicry of print on the screen has been short lived.
Incidentally, I imagine that the entire Penguin series is probably printed as a single work; all half million pages, 1,082 titles and packaged to shipping boxes in about two hours. It called print on demand and it is the future of books.
Once you unpackage the books you will begin to notice other attractions. For example you can assemble the physical volumes in various arrays called libraries. This physical manipulation is itself an act of comprehension of conceptual works. Readers too dependent on screen based transmissions have lost such skills.
in response to Gary’s comment that the “mimicry of print on screen has been short lived,” I just want to say that the online versions of these books could EASILY do better than the Penguin paper books, in terms of legibility, overall quality, and (believe it or not) longevity. Here’s a few customer reviews culled from the Amazon order page.
Reviewer: James Robert “Jim” (Cambridge, MA) – Says:
And here’s another review that points out the poor quality of the books:
As the last reviewer points out, a hard-cover, quality printing would be worth the price. The objects would last long enough to be passed down to the next generation, who will, undoubtably, still be reading these classics. But low-quality print-on-demand paperback is not going to last much longer than an electronic version, and given all the legibility issues the come with poorly printed books, I’d rather have the screen version.
Also, just wanted to respond to Ravi’s comment. I think they could compete with Gutenberg. They have a lot of titles that are not in the public domain. And, whenever I download something from Gutenberg, I have to reformat it so it’s readable and nice to look at. I would probably pay for a packaged set that was well designed and ready to go.
Amazon reviews aside, in performance of knowledge transmission print excels screen based reading in legibility, navigation and persistence.
If legibility is efficient visual access to text it is important to realize that there is nothing more illegible than a dark screen. Screen drawing errors, connectivity pauses and formatting anomalies are much more prevalent now than they ever were. And PDF mimics of print pages are still slower loading and displaying than print page views. This has nothing to do with resolution. Legibility in screen based reading is getting worse, not better.
Navigation is also easier in print if efficient navigation is measured by ease of comprehension of content. Readability studies comparing same content comprehension between print and screen confirm this. Especially with linear content as presented in the Penguin works, the haptical, hand manipulated print format prompts the introduction, management and retention of concepts in the mind.
Books were not invented yesterday. Initially books provided prompts to oral presentation, arranging concepts into progressions. As contingent, observational concepts were developed in early sciences the book progressed to further refinement with various navigational features. In the last few centuries the book has been adapted to all genres of informational, knowledge and expressive functions. Of particular relevance is the navigational attribute of library arrays of physical books.
In terms of efficient navigation which would you rather navigate; the few adjoining shelved monographs on Cenozoic turtles from Ceylon or the thousands of Google hits on the same? Which would you rather reference; the few adjoining monographs to those or the hundreds of thousands of Google hits on any wider search?
Finally, as regards persistence, there is really no contest. Print content is more persistent than screen based content. All of the original Penguin titles still exist in first edition formats and they are youngsters compared with the scope of research library print collections. In my library we also have a collection of 1st generation electronic reading devices. Only the cell phone has survived the Rocket Books and SoftBooks as an electronic reading device. The Web is based on spinning discs as well, something like a steam engine.
There are strategies for persistent screen based resources, but persistent in a funny way. Compared with print, the process of retention of on-line resources splits the costs of acquision and maintenance with maintenance being any multiple of the first. And the field experience is limited as well. It is a reach to imagine the instant access to computer media following 16 centuries of storage as was demonstrated with the recent recovery of the Gnostic Gospels written on “fragile”papyrus.
Very interesting, the reviews at Amazon pick up the same set of concerns regarding the investments: longivity of the copy, access to public domain sources, support to a publishing enterprise that makes texts affordable, etc. All very interesting for how folks take on the concepts of book, text and property.
gary frost said:
Hmm – “physical” aside, I’m not sure that arranging volumes in arrays is really a high-point of the paper codex, although it has many attractions. Miscellanies from the bound-manuscript era offered many more opportunities to arrange than bound books do. Likewise, the digital unit (the track, the image, the chapter) tends to encourage normal users to engage in arranging behaviors that are touted as “remixing” – that is to say, advanced conceptual arrangement. I have Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” in hardback, on PDF, and on MP3. However, in addition to multiple arrangements made possible by standard spreadsheet/file system cataloging, only the digital forms allow me to make alternate playlists of the chapters read out-loud by different people – to list file folders of shortcuts with the audio mixed with the text – to create concise editions with my favorite chapters only – or to burn CDs with one chapter performed in a number of different ways.
Some of this behavior and the acts of comprehension entailed would be familiar to medieval monks used to working with loose documents and doing their own rebinding, but readers too dependent on bound transmission have lost such skills.