The New York Times ran a front-page story yesterday about open peer review, featuring an experiment conducted by MediaCommons for The Shakespeare Quarterly using CommentPress. The article is here and the experiment itself is here. Both MediaCommons and CommentPress were born at the institute; it’s exciting to see our efforts get such prominent notice.

One of my best friends’ parents both became very ill this year. Her mother, 87, elected to have a feeding tube inserted permanently. She is confined to her bed, alone much of the time, and in constant pain, waiting for the inevitable end, which thanks to the feeding tube may be many miserable months ahead. Her father, 90, elected to enter a hospice facility where he spent his last three weeks eating yogurt, sipping the occasional last whiskey, and having long wonderful visits with his three children, their spouses and his beloved grown grandchildren. By all accounts it was a very good death.
Thinking about my friend’s parents makes we wonder why their couldn’t be a “hospice” option for publishers, many of whom — my low-end guess is at least 50% — won’t survive the transition from print to networked screens.   If a publisher doesn’t have the requisite vision, desire and resources to embrace digital, what’s wrong with saying, “Gee, it’s been a great 25, 50, 100-year run. Instead of beating our heads against a wall and dying an ugly death, why don’t we go out in style.” Once this difficult decision is arrived at, it would be a matter of selling the assets that can be sold, providing staff with generous severance and really helping them to find new jobs, and then at the very end giving some wonderful parties, celebrating the end of an era. A death with integrity and dignity intact.
Please understand that I make this suggestion with huge love and respect for publishers. At their best they have played a crucial role in the complex discourse that moves society forward. Like a beloved parent, there’s no reason why they should suffer more than necessary at the end of a full and productive life.

Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called “a book,” people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it’s true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called “a book,” since we don’t have that word yet, “book” works better than “institute for the future of discourse” or “institute for thinking about what comes after the book.” I end my answer by suggesting that one day we’ll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.
I’ve always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman’s First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate — “app.” It’s not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right.
The aha moment went like this . . . . while zoning in and out of the Feldman piece I started to think about the iPad that I’d been using for the past six weeks — not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.
The distinction between media types was a lot more important during the analog era of the mid-twentieth cenury. In 1950 no one would confuse a novel with a movie or a song with a TV show. But today we have e-books with video sequences, and movies published with extensive text-based supplements. Is Lady Gaga a music star or video star?
While I think it will take some time to deeply understand the long-term implications of this flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps, i don’t think it’s too early to suggest that “app” is on its way to linguistic hegemony.
In the past we had books, movies and songs. now they’re all being bundled into one category — apps — to be further delineated by a descriptive prefix. It’s easy to imagine today that movies will have back stories and fan elaborations available on the web and new fiction forms will explore and make use of a complex almagam of media types. the categories- books, songs, movies- meant something in the past that loses specific meaning in this fluid digital domain where each can incorproate aspects of the other. In its media agnosticism and inclusive fluidity, “app” already describes this landscape.
Consider the word “book.” On its own, “book” usually refers to a minimally defined material object, a generic container. It’s not until there’s a qualifier that we know much about what’s inside: fiction or non-fiction book, cookbook, textbook, art book, children’s book, how-to book, illustrated book, history book, religious book, and so on.
From this perspective, “app” has already arrived. Book apps, cooking apps, movie apps, game apps, productivity apps, how-to-apps, children’s apps, music apps, photography apps etc. are all available. And of course we already have the App Store which is rapidly gaining a place in public parlance.
And yes . . . . I have now gone and registered futureoftheapp.org

Just a quick note to say that a condensed version of an interview that I did with Bob Stein back in March for The Public School NYC is now online at Triple Canopy as part of their ninth issue, which has several really interesting articles online so far and more to come. Most of what we talked about has been discussed at one point or another here; but there is a fair amount covered about the early history of electronic books that has never really been documented in detail. Should anyone want a full-length recording of the interview, email me.

thanks to a number of people who wrote to say they had heard this on NPR over the weekend.

Feed magazine, edited by Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman, started publishing online in 1995 as a “webzine”. They’ve been gone for a long time: they stopped publishing after the first dot-com boom, in the summer of 2001. It’s exciting to see that they’ve just put their online archives back up (at www.feedmag.com: a huge number of interesting critics got their start at Feed, and I expect I’ll be spending a lot of time digging through pieces that I only half-remember.
One thing worth pointing out is from very early in their tenure – it’s dated May 1, 1995. Editor Steven Johnson (of Everything Bad is Good for You etc.) convened Bob Stein, Sven Birkerts, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce to discuss reading electronically. The Gutenberg Elegies had recently been published, and Birkerts was the go-to critic for electronic media; Michael Joyce is still remembered for afternoon, a story; and Carolyn Guyer was another hypertext author, though I have to confess that I’ve never seen her work. It’s an interesting conversation: in some ways, the same conversation that we’re still having fifteen years later, though the discussion is almost never as wide-ranging as this one.
It’s hard to tell – I certainly don’t remember, though maybe Bob will – how different the current presentation is from the original. Navigation is a bit confusing: there are four main pages, but you need to click the button labeled “This way for the next object” to get to following pages. There’s a very interesting sort of hypertext linking going on: links in the main text link to comments by other participants, who are sometimes, but not always, identified in the left margin. The design doesn’t always work: but the pixelated graphics and complicated structure beckon us back to a time when the web was pure potential.

a fairly smart wishlist for iPad’s iBooks — including two features that are directly related to social-reading.

I’ve been reading Homer lately, particularly The Odyssey. Obviously, I should have read him a long time ago, probably in high school: I remember, vaguely, extracts from the book, but nobody ever made me read the whole thing. To a certain extent, it’s a book that you don’t have to read any more because everybody’s already read it for you. But it’s worth going back to read things for yourself, so I’ve been having a small project, picking my way through the various English translations.
While on a visit home, looking for something to read, I picked up the Great Books edition of Homer, volume IV in that series. This edition of the Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1952, was my family’s one real pretension to intellectualism. I am not entirely sure how it got into the house; it was never really read, because, as, my mother explained, the type was too small. It was also vexingly incomplete, as some religion-crazed relative had made off with Volume II of Thomas Aquinas, which bothered me immensely as a youth. I don’t think anyone actually read any of these; I’d periodically pick up one volume or another (“Darwin” or “Swift/Sterne”) with intent, but I don’t remember how far I would get. Looking at the list of authors now, it seems decidedly weird: Plotinus gets a whole volume? Is it really worth reading Lavoisier or Fourier or Faraday now? The English-language novelists consist entirely of the aforementioned Swift & Sterne, followed by Fielding (Tom Jones), then a big jump to land on Moby-Dick. The ending sequence, volumes 49 through 54, seems particularly ominous: Darwin, Marx & Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Presumably there’s a good history of the Great Books project, though I haven’t seen anything other than Wikipedia’s entry, which points out that ours was the first edition of the Great Books of the Western World, and that Sterne and Fielding were dropped in the second.
But picking up their Homer, it turned out that the translations being used are by Samuel Butler. His is a translation that I’m particularly interested in because it’s the one that James Joyce used as the background for Ulysses. It’s a decidedly idiosyncratic translation: most prominently, names are given their Roman rather than Greek version, so Odysseus is Ulysses. Butler famously decided that Telemachus’ room must have been in a tower, which is why Joyce’s novel begins in one. Butler’s version is also prose. It’s an odd choice, really, for a version to include as one of the Great Books: while it’s eminently readable, Butler’s ideas about Homer and how he should be translated were very much his own, and his introduction and footnotes explain his view that the Odyssey was written by a woman (probably Nausicaa) and ferret out details in the text that support this view; Butler had first advanced this view in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), and came at his translation with an argument, albeit one argued in a way that leaves much to be desired. (This note on III.266 might be taken as typical: “The writer – ever jealous for the honour of women – extenuates Clytemnestra’s guilt as far as possible, and explains it as due to her having been left unprotected, and fallen into the hands of a wicked man.”
What I like about the Butler translation (there’s an online edition at the Internet Archive) is precisely how idiosyncratic it is: his Nabokovian concern for how Ulysses’ house was laid out led him to include his photographs of houses that he’d seen in Sicily which, he supposed, might be similar to the Greeks’. In his introduction, he apologizes that a man and a dog appear in one of the pictures: this, he says, was “accidental, and was not observed by me till I developed the negative”. Looking at the illustration in question, one notes that there’s also a person in the lower illustration; this person is not apologized for, and one wonders who he might be. But the reader is reassured that they are safely in the hands of a kook; Butler clearly had no interest in academic rigor, which is what makes it more interesting that his would be the translation selected to go into the Great Books. Maybe that’s why Joyce liked him: Butler’s ideas about Homer are wildly divergent from what everyone else thinks, but his prose is always entertaining.
What’s weirdly interesting about the Great Books edition, however, is that the editors have swept away Butler’s introduction and notes. Not, however, particularly well: consider the start of Book IV, which starts, in Butler’s original, in mid-sentence, the sentence having been started at the end of Book III. While the Great Books Book III ends in a comma (“Now when the sun had set and darkness was over the land,”), Book IV starts, in house style, with a drop-cap, capitalized, of course: “They reached the low lying city of Lacedæmon, where they drove straight to the abode of Menelaus”. The next phrase starts with a bracket: “[and found him in his own house, feasting with his many clansmen”; at the end of the next paragraph, we find the end bracket. No explanation, in the Great Books edition, is given for these brackets; however, turning to the scan in the Internet Archive, we find an interesting note:

The lines which I have enclosed in brackets are evidently an afterthought – added probably by the writer herself – for they evince the same instinctively greater interest in anything that may concern a woman, which is so noticeable throughout the poem. There is no further sign of any special festivities nor of any other guests than Telemachus and Pisistratus . . .

One wonders, really, how many people ever actually read Homer in the Great Books edition: did the editor? Butler’s ghost brackets, for what it’s worth, don’t end in 1952; the online edition at MIT’s Internet Classics Archives also has them and no notes; the Project Gutenberg edition, from 1999, includes Butler’s notes, but in unwieldy fashion (they are numbered, at the end, and don’t include his frequent use of Greek), and, inevitably, a huge number of people have issued cheap print-on-demand & Kindle versions of Butler’s Odyssey; looking inside one revealed it to be lacking notes though it did have brackets. Others can’t be inspected, and one has to assume the worst. (My favorite of Amazon’s lot is the nicely titled The Odyssey B utler – one hopes the extra space is significant – an unknown new work by Samuel Butler.) One knows, of course, that the people creating these POD and Kindle editions are hacks, if they’re even people at all and not a batch script running on the Gutenberg library. This isn’t, of course, a problem specific to Amazon: the same seems to be true with most of the easily accessible versions on the iPhone. It’s odd to realize, though, that the editors of the Great Books seem to have had the same hackish tendencies. The reason for the choice of the Butler translation for inclusion is almost certainly not because they thought Butler’s was the best (or because they realized the importance of this translation to Ulysses); rather, Butler’s was probably the most recent translation out of copyright in 1952. I wonder again about the ending sequence of the original edition of the Great Books: did the Great Books series come to that conclusion because copyright gets in the way?

Alain Pierrot gave us permission to repost this:

Martyn Daniel’s remark about Ether Books’ move into the digital short story, which can be “read as installments” (thanks to Virginie Clayssen for the link) rang a bell for me about the way many kinds of readings compete for chunks of my attention.
Can I read the next chapter of this essay, study or novel before I’m called to board the plane, before my train comes to the station, or should I pick a shorter magazine article or a short story from Ether Books, etc.?
On a more professional field, can I spare the time to read the full version of the report, or should I restrain to the executive summary, plus the most relevant divisions of the report before the meeting?  
Or in academic situations, what amount of reading time should I plan to spend on the textbook, on the recommended readings and extra relevant titles before I sit term/final examinations?
Cross this with the last remarks in the excellent post from Information Architects, about their work on Average Reading Time (ART): 

Imagine, when you read a book, it doesn’t show you how many pages are left or how many words you have read, but how far into the text you are time wise and how much reading time is still ahead of you. Imagine that, when you write a text it doesn’t count words but the right column tells you:

1. how much time you spent to read your text until the cursor position (top number)
2. the total reading time (bottom number)

And they prepare to manage calibration, which should allow to match individual skills, reading situations, with different texts – I don’t read Joyce’s Ulysses at the same rate as the last issue of Wired !
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to leverage all the occasions where digital texts are chunked in relevant spans to store their ART into metadata, made available to apps that would sort timewise what I’m proposed to read? Social media and relevant storage solutions might host measured ARTs at convenience.
XML structured editing affords many solutions for identifying the relevant sections of texts, and storing their length, timewise. I would love to see the feature embedded into a next version of ePub, or at least recommended as best practice.
Would that make sense for Google Books, Amazon, iBooks, publishers, librarians?

Embracing the Digital Book, by Craig Mod