We’re burning way too much midnight oil this weekend trying to ready a networked version of the Iraq Study Group report for release next week. We’ll introduce the project itself in a few days, but right now i just want to mention that i think we’re about at the end of our ability to organize these very complex reading/writing projects using the 2-dimensional design constraints inherited from print. Ben came to the same conclusion in his recent post inspired by the difficulty of designing the site for Mitch Stephens’ paper, Holy of Holies. My first resolution for 2007 is to try an experiments building a networked book inside of Second Life or some other three-dimensional environment.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Whenever there is discussion of an entirely new context for digital publication I imagine the same transformation conveyed backward into analog innovation. Paper folding teaches us to be alert to innovation and a likely reverse fold of the familiar. Reinventing the fundamental codex structure beginning with fold impositions is exactly what is occurring in print on demand technology. Likewise an application for screen publication and network authorship should start with multidimensional idioms already fundamental to digital publication. There are at least three of these preconditions. (1) All expression must be transposed to performance genres of typography, animation, photography and audio. There is no unmediated speaking, writing, drawing or gesture. (2) Constraints of screen rendering must be satisfied. Overcoming that two dimensional frame is as challenging as it has been in all graphic depiction (3) Transience and interruptions of depictions must be absorbed and selection and deletion oversight must be maintained. Such preconditions and others hedge in the scope of collaborative publication.
“…we’re about at the end of our ability to organize these very complex reading/writing projects using the 2-dimensional design constraints inherited from print.
The print book is three dimensional, its the screen that is only two.
Bob –
If you want any help, please give me a shout. I just built the first dedicated publisher bookshop in SL – http://www.snowbooks.com/secondlife/ – and I want to see where the book is going, in SL or otherwise. It would be a great project and I’d love to help out.
I’d also argue to Gary above that the traditional book is definitely 2D not 3D – in that the information it contains is stored in 2D – so the possibilities of a true 3D book are very exciting…
James