complete, lights-out, book production
watch the video I can visualize micro book publishers, like micro breweries. In the world of print, on-demand conveys to endless demand. Now all they need are distributed "leaf masters" binned to the printer or even post-Google library captures of public domain works.
Its not post-digital, its post-screen digital book making. Every conceptual work is now born digital, its how they grow up that matters.
mechanical software
The computer quickly transforms mechanical prompts to electronic transactions. This obvious context for writing, publishing and reading is given better definition by earlier systems for writing, publishing and reading that transform mechanical prompts to mechanical responses. If a Linotype machine cycle balks the cause may be uncertain. But it is then possible to hand roll the great cam set both forward and backward through its cycle to reverse the program and discover the problem. The computer, however, balks on the other, inaccessible side of the manual prompt.
world of paper and print
third edition?
The classic Writing Space was first published in 1991. Jay David Bolter evaluated the advent and functionality of screen based hypertext in a context prior to the Internet. The 2001 edition was almost a
different book. There was a modified title and a different size and a completely revised content. The second edition suspended technological determinisms; "writing technologies do not alter culture as if from the outside, because they are themselves part of our cultural dynamic."
We are now approaching the interval for another edition. It will be interesting to see of the consistent eclipse of print projected in the previous editions holds. Consistently Bolter has projected an "uncertain future of the print book" contrasted with the "bright future of digital media". Although comparing apples and oranges, it will be interesting to see if the prospects are exactly the reverse.
Another consistency; that the "writing space" is the mind regardless of transmissions to papyrus or electroluminescence, may be more resilient.
a library of computers
Everyone knows that Google "actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster". The implication of this achievement is a facility of "hundreds of thousands" interactive computers, a library.
The
librarian search engines also differ from bionic librarians but the whole complex acts like a conventional library and the "bibliographers" and "catalogers" turn out to be as bionic as the millions of daily "patrons". Perhaps the "search quality" divisions of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are "library schools".
|
