At a meeting of the Interaction Designer’s Association (IxDA) one of the audience members, during the Q&A, asked “Why are we all making websites?”
What a fantastic question. We primarily consider the digital at the Institute, and the way that discourse is changing as it is presented on screen and in the network. But the question made me reevaluate why a website is the form I immediately think of for any new project. I realized that I have a strong predilection for websites because I love the web, and I know what I’m doing when it comes to sites. But that doesn’t mean a site is always the right form for every project. It prompted me to reconsider two things: the benefit of Sophie books, and the position of print in light of the network, and what transformations we can make to the printed page.
First, the Sophie book. It’s not a website, but it is part of the network. During the development and testing of a shared, networked book, we discovered that there a particular feeling of intimacy associated with sharing Sophie book. Maybe it’s our own perspective on Sophie that created the sensation, but sharing a Sophie book was not like giving out a url. It had more meaning than that. The web seemed like a wide-open parade ground compared to the cabin-like warmth of reading a Sophie book across the table from Ben. Sophie books have borders, and there was a sense of boundedness that even tightly designed websites lack. I’m not sure where this leads yet, but it’s a wonderfully humane aspect of the networked book that we haven’t had a chance to see until now.
On to print. One idea for print that I find fascinating, though deeply problematic, is the combination of an evolving digital text with print-on-demand (POD) in a series of rapidly versioned print runs. A huge issue comes up right away: there is potentially disastrous tension between a static text (the printed version) and the evolving digital version. Printing a text that changes frequently will leave people with different versions. When we talked about this at the Institute, the concern around the table was that any printed version would be out of date as soon as the toner hit the page. And, since a book is supposed to engender conversation, this book, with radical differences between versions, would actually work against that purpose. But I actually think this is a benefit from our point of view—it emphasizes the value of the ongoing conversation in a medium that can support it (digital), and highlights the limitations of a printed text. At the same time it provides a permanent and tangible record of a moment in time. I think there is value in that, like recording a live concert. It’s only a nascent idea for an experiment, but I think it will help us find the fulcrum point between print and the network.
As a rider, there is a design element with every document (digital or print) that makes the most of the originating process and creates a beautiful final product. So a short, but difficult question: What is the ideal form for a rapidly versioned document?
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Jesse, I think you raise some very interesting points, particularly about retaining some sense of intimacy and boundedness in the wide-open context of the Web. As we work on similar issues at digitalculture.org, I have to say that I’ve developed a fascination with the versioning issue. We sometimes approach this as a problem–how can we avoid the divergence of print and digital editions of the same underlying work? But lately I’ve begun to wonder if divergence couldn’t somehow be made productive. After all, a POD copy of a digital text is a durable monument to the state of the work at a given point in time. This permanent commemoration of a particular idea at a particular moment is something that digital archiving is only just approximating.
But is there any value to this process of fixation? Well, for one thing, digital archives tend not to be particularly good at depicting the evolution of an idea: we get one version of a website or blog or wiki, frozen in time. Take a hypothetical wiki about American indigenous music, which evolves over a period from Time 1 to Time 5. The final product at Time 5 tells us little about how the work developed, and what it looked like at Times 1, 2, 3 or 4. Technically, we can read through a sequential list of the changes that were made over time, and a determined user could read such a list (yawn) in order to figure out how the state of knowledge changed from moment to moment. But this process is cumbersome almost to the point of implausibility for most users, leaving the final document, for all its interactivity, feeling ahistorical.
If, on the other hand, POD versions of the text are spun off at select moments (and the question of selectivity becomes enormously important here), then the evolution of our understanding of American indigenous music becomes apparent, albeit only in the tension between the print and online editions. That divergence becomes a source of meaningful information, worthy in itself of further scrutiny.
This is all rather flowery, and doesn’t resolve questions about whether such a cumbersome system of textual comparison could be improved upon; or about who, if anyone, would really care about textual correspondence beyond a relatively small circle of philologists. But I can’t help thinking that this digital-print tension could actually be made productive, if we only understood better how to work with it.
In the full disclosure department, I’m one of Jim Reische’s co-conspirators on digitalculturebooks but our responses are uncoordinated (as in, I started my response and said, oh,look, who got here first). My side of the shop does digital production and has a fair amount of experience with POD and short run printing. I think the model here of the the print books that fixes particular moments of an evolving text is dead-on right but that the tools for doing this are still under-developed. Unless we radically change our expecations for what a book looks like between the covers, a book still needs to be designed and formatted and that takes a level of investment ill-suited to quick-turn around POD. For years, we’ve harbored the dream (and harbor it still) of a unified XML workflow in which print and online versions flow from a single master file. All kinds of publishing software systems promise this, but I’ve yet to hear of any of them working really well, particularly for books and particularly at a price and scale that works for smaller publishers(I may be listening in the wrong places and would love to be corrected). With the current tools, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where iterative POD versions could be produced rapidly and cheaply enough to realize the exciting textual potential of this model. Then again, if we really change the reader’s relationship to the text, perhaps the tolerance for lightly formatted and designed reading copies will increase. We might even find a new aesthetic appreciation for such a lack of design.
maria said:
> Unless we radically change our expecations
> for what a book looks like between the covers,
> a book still needs to be designed and formatted
> and that takes a level of investment ill-suited to
> quick-turn around POD. For years, we’ve harbored
> the dream (and harbor it still) of a unified XML workflow
> in which print and online versions flow from a single master file.
> All kinds of publishing software systems promise this, but
> I’ve yet to hear of any of them working really well, particularly
> for books and particularly at a price and scale that works
> for smaller publishers (I may be listening in the wrong places
> and would love to be corrected).
and i’d love to correct you.
because yes, i do think you’re listening in the wrong places.
instead of an x.m.l. workflow, you need a z.m.l. workflow.
z.m.l. stands for “zen markup language”, a light markup
aimed squarely at books, engineered to be dirt-simple (so
authors apply it naturally in the course of writing a book)
and designed as a “master format” that outputs .html, .pdf,
.rtf, and various other formats, all from a raw plain-ascii file,
in a way that will _exceed_ the “expectations” of our readers
relative to the typographic niceties they get from paper-books,
as well as the increased functionalities possible from e-books.
to see some preliminary examples, visit:
> http://www.z-m-l.com
if you’d like me to work up an example on a book of yours,
just furnish me the raw material, including text and graphics.
(if you have books with audio and/or video, they’d be great.)
don’t be afraid to throw something difficult at me, since you
are likely to think that z.m.l. “won’t work for some books”,
and seeing is believing. plus, i would love the challenge…
(i’m still in the process of refining z.m.l., so if you want to see
a light markup that’s more developed, take a look at “markdown”;
it’s geared more to webpages than books, but you’ll get the drift.
the beauty of light markup is that power has not been sacrificed
for ease of use.)
***
as for the topic at hand, the conventional answer today is
some type of versioning-control system. i think that’s silly.
instead, we need an authoring tool that _records_the_process_
of the writing of a document. i wrote such a program years ago
— i called it “process-recorder” — and it was quite fascinating
to go back and review the unfolding and blossoming of a text.
in contrast to a clumsy method of comparing “frozen” versions,
this keystroke-by-keystroke recreation of the writing of a piece
is positively teeming with life. the creativity thrusts itself at you.
it feels like you’re peering over the author’s shoulder as they write.
i would _love_ to have been able to see some classic books be written.
not only would it be interesting, but i’m convinced you can learn a lot
about the _craft_ of writing itself by observing how great writers write.
i can assure you that this will become the variorum of the future…
the good news is that it’s easy to code such an authoring-tool, since
— as i alluded above — it is little more than a keystroke recorder…
indeed, if your favorite authoring environment can record _macros_,
you can even demonstrate this methodology to yourself by simply
using that macro capability to record yourself while writing a piece.
(of course, it’s best if you can control the speed of the playback.)
-bowerbird
The central issue I see with the versioning system is that we are creating ever more information, with even less ability to compare between them. More versions (down to each keystroke) doesn’t necessarily mean better comprehension of the evolution of an idea – just more stuff to sort through in search of the point.
I was alluded, in my last sentence, to the form of the book and the pressure I see being placed on that form. It has to change to accommodate readers expectations of revision in a digital system, but it can’t lose its boundedness. We need better structures, with anchor points for textual analysis between printed docs. I can see how a continuous record of transitions provides the richest harvest of data, but we are creatures limited by space and time, and defining structures for versioned documents would go along way towards ameliorating the information overload.
bowerbird,
let me just say though, that sounds like an interesting program. I wonder if there are other examples of that kind of work out there…
jesse said:
> The central issue I see with the versioning system is that
> we are creating ever more information, with even less ability
> to compare between them. More versions (down to each keystroke)
> doesn’t necessarily mean better comprehension of the evolution
> of an idea – just more stuff to sort through in search of the point.
ok, first of all, if you want to trace “the evolution of an idea”,
then you really want something impossible. let’s stick with
the easier task of tracing the words used to express the idea.
now, i can see how you’d think that “recording the process”
would create _more_ data than saving frozen versions, but
it actually creates less data, because you’re only saving the
_changes_ to the text as it becomes more and more honed,
not saving the same mass of (unchanged) text over and over.
the keystroke file _is_ bigger than a single version of the text
— obviously, as it contains the false-starts and dead-ends —
but it usually ends up requiring less disk-space than even a
_couple_ of the frozen versions. so this is actually a _strength_
of the process-recording approach, not a weakness. moreover,
since you get to see all of those “false-starts and dead-ends”
— even changes in word-choice — which are ofen (perhaps
even usually) _not_ retained by the “frozen-versions” method,
you get more information from that diminished storage need.
but i can understand why you would have thought that.
it’s an easy mistake to make.
-bowerbird
Maybe the visualization needed is zen composition. Certainly a word management software that propagates revision as a prerequisite, or even as a convenience, of composition is suspect. An allure of print is that it quiets word processing and everyone knows that.
Other factors should also be considered. What about reading the identical work twice? Who will not confirm that the second reading of a book is a different experience? What about reading a book for the first time that tens of thousands of readers have read for centuries before? Such fixed displacements are significant attributes of print.
What is at risk?…conceptual works will be conveyed to screen transmission, but the process of reading these works may be so diffused and attenuated that the transmission acts themselves will take on the role of the content.
Perhaps the agenda is interfunctionality of print and screen transmissions with meaning of conceptual works engendered by the interplay. if:book and then:book
gary said:
> What about reading a book for the first time
> that tens of thousands of readers have read
> for centuries before?
or, as hamilton wright mabie put it:
> So rich is the vitality of the great
> books of the world that men are
> never done with them; not only
> does each new generation read them,
> but it is compelled to form some
> judgment of them. In this way
> Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe,
> and their fellow-artists, are always
> coming into the open court of pub-
> lic opinion, and the estimate in
> which they are held is valuable
> chiefly as affording material for a
> judgment of the generation which
> forms it.
by the way, gary, no need to go to the library,
because you can read mabie’s book on your screen:
> http://www.z-m-l.com/go/mabie/mabiep007.html
(thankfully, i could copy-and-paste that quote,
since i wouldn’t have wanted to have to type it!)
-bowerbird
Well strange that you bring it up; “going to the library”. The same projections of the if:book (screen) and the then:book (print) are interplaying at the if:library (digital) and then:library (analog). As with other pioneer contexts it is as much a social discussion as a technical. See for example the interesting current discussion on digital library policy. Notice the emerging interest, not in the tableaus of the two ways of life, but in the interfunctionality of collections from collections of Dictaphone belts to Second Life libraries.
My insignificant suggestion here is to consider the potential of screen based reading beyond the mimicry of print. After doing that consider the interfunctionalities of print and screen. Beyond that give passing regard to other modes of communication and socialization. The digital library is almost everywhere now. Its called Starbucks.
gary, i checked out the link you referenced. it said:
> In January of 2007, the Digitization Policy Task Force
> of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy
> introduced the draft Principles for Digitized Content.
it’s nice the a.l.a. finally got around to that topic,
but i hardly feel the discussion there is “interesting”.
> The digital library is almost everywhere now.
> Its called Starbucks.
starbucks? i’m not sure i understand what you mean.
actually, i am quite sure that i do not understand…
i certainly don’t see how it’s related to the topic —
tracking changes to a book as it comes into being.
-bowerbird
Is Starbucks a precursor to the digital library?
Recent developments suggest this. The use of Starbucks outlets as wireless study lounges is already well cultivated. Google is hiring librarians to manage digital collection building and Starbucks is going into book retailing.
Does it relate to tracking changes to a book as it comes into being?
This is exactly the sort of environment that has been associated with the germination of books. The coffee houses of London in the 17th century were the setting for many of Adrian Johns evocative descriptions of printer/publishers/authors transactions.
But if you mean the specific methods of book formatting, such as you develop, these are more likely not associated with social settings, but with scholarly printers of an earlier period. Here the Ong book On Ramus describes the transition to spacial display of ideas advanced by earlier 16th c. printing. Diagramic depiction of early sciences and all the academic disciplines were “marked-up” into page format and printed with arrangable, fonts of letters. This activity and technology engendered our continuing mind set of graphic depiction of idea organizations embodied in books.
Such issues of perspective leading to interplay between print and screen….even the prompting or framing of the debate in those terms….should probably be considered here.
For all the elegance of your management of running text, it is curious that we must revert to conventions of the print book to project the screen book.
gary said:
> For all the elegance of your
> management of running text
i wish i could take all the credit, but really i’m
just using a file-handling model pioneered by
ventura publisher in the earliest days of d.t.p.
> it is curious that we must revert
> to conventions of the print book
> to project the screen book.
“revert” seems to me to be a wrong word.
print typography is a functional art with
half a millenium of user-tested refinement.
it would be terribly unwise to throw it out.
especially as i’m trying to create a synergy
between paper and digital versions of a book.
since the paper version came first, and is frozen,
i’d be duty-bound to mimic it even if it was inferior.
(and it’s not, except in the important realms of
reproduction and distribution, where digital rules.)
so i don’t think of what i’m doing as “reverting”,
not in the least. i’m standing on the shoulders
of giants.
-bowerbird
Magnificently Manifestoed! I am in complete accord with the parenting role of print and the exemplaring role of the print book. In such context the future prospects of communication and delivery of conceptual works becomes a lively interplay of delivery technologies and reading methods. You certainly have a grip on the current prospects of screen based reading in context of print and print in context of network communication. It now falls to advocates such as yourself to define that interplay.
In my opinion we do not need some new sandbox to explore these issues. We are in the dunes already. Just as with a 16th century transformation of mindset (assimilating the visualization of ideas as diagrams) gave no thought to the role of print from movable type as a context for the reframing…so we must attend the actual “nature of the book” as it crosses new technologies. In my opinion, that focus and the two way interplay of print and screen is where we should be.
The full proposition is “if:book, then:book” with the if:book shifted to explore the nature of the book and the then:book shifted to see history/future bridges. The triad “legibility, haptic efficiency and persistence” is part of the first as is your “zen markup”. The parts of the second are already out there. One of them is the experience of a contemporary library. This is fun.