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Print Book and Screen Book and the Other

UICB Book Studies discussion topic, November 5, 2008 Facilitator, Gary Frost

So many projections of the future of the book just toy with the contrast of the print book and the screen book. Popular discussions question which reading device is best at the beach, on the subway or in the tub. And there is endless evocation of the smell and feel of old books. Meanwhile, many other discussions are biased by presumptive projections of screen advocates where print advocates are cast as misguided and regressive. Trivialities are everywhere. But notorious print constraints frequently reposition nicely as attributes. For example, the much remarked print limitations of onerous revision and fixed and link-less text actually afford the "performative space" needed for effervescent meaning and intuitive readings and re-readings. Perhaps a more effective approach is needed to distinguish print and screen books by weighing their different transmission attributes and by realizing their enlacing interactions. The mediation of the print and screen book, getting from one to the other, is already efficient and pervasive as libraries have demonstrated for decades. Services of bibliographic utilities, smart search applications and screen delivery have transformed print libraries. So print attributes of fixity, navigational and haptic refinement and reliable re-access across time, all pair nicely with screen attributes of immediacy, automated search and live content. Another crucial pair of print and screen attributes is revealed by the self-authenticating nature of the print book contrasted with the self-indexing nature of the screen book. The print book carries with it layers of physical evidence, overt content and bibliographic codes that persistently reveal the source and intent of its production. Such features of self-authentication, confirmed with ease of re-readings across time and cultures, give the material book its special role in transmission. But print books resist indexing and have been compiled into libraries only with great effort or with the help of on-line cataloging and finding aids. By contrast the screen book is self-indexing because the encoding or production process that renders books to the screen also enables their keyword search routines. This is really amazing. It is as if printing ink on paper inherently tabulated the letters and remembered them. However, the effervescent screen books resist authentication. Screen books, like touch screen voting, remain vulnerable and un-trusted with ease of unmonitored deletions or revisions and uncertain provenance. And expectations are very different with screen based research. The content is served quickly while the reader is induced to consume quickly as well. These are eerie counterpoints. It is as if the screen is filling a transmission void of print and as if print is founding its own more essential, less ramified, role. A lively interaction of the two modes is in motion. Simple competition between the print book and screen book is an illusion; each has different function, there are exclusive attributes of each and super-cession is a minor factor. Mirror attributes, rather than contrasts of advantages and disadvantages, have emerged and mutual redefinition is at work. The surge of advance and use of screen based reading confirms its complementary fulfillment in print and a surge and advance of print confirms its new dependence on digital technologies. The needed evaluation, to clarify all this, has yet to happen. We are still wandering among pre-cursive inventions such as digital encoding, photo imaging, audio recording, instantaneous communication and their various integrations and indexing to screen delivery, but we have not yet realized the transition to the post-digital book. There is an assumption that the traditional print book is fully evolved and highly refined, but what if that assumption is a central problem for the future of the book? What if the book is evolving further?

Evolution of Content

A merge of text and image characterizes both print and web. Emphasis varies in both modes, but mixture, exemplified by the picture and caption, is typical.

Origins of text encoding and pictorial encoding were extracted from skills of engagement of natural ecologies and transmitted to environments of synthetic technologies. A long practice of projectile defense and deliberate throwing conveyed ultimately to projectiles of text thrown across time and cultures and a long and attentive watching of the natural world conveyed to pictorial representation and ultimately to watching photographs and screens. The text skills derived from kinetics of projectiles and the pictorial skills from attentive watching, both engendering purely conceptual skills.

This little diorama is exemplified by the captioned image. The caption has text meaning and the image has visual meaning, but the real charm of the transmission of caption and image is their potent interaction; the caption says something visual and the picture says something textual. We have noticed this new meaning and clever reading, but what does it mean?

At least this merge suggests that the meanings of throwing and watching are intermingled in behaviors of reading and there is a possibly that skill of their synthesis is also so deep that it transcends technologies. The book, in its invention, evolution and modes of transmission is a great achievement of this synthesis of text and image.

Evolution of Production

The intermediation of print and screen goes either way with on-line retailing of print or with digitization of print. Likewise digital research can find resolution and transmission in print as print simulation on-line propagates screen based research beyond print sectors. To begin we should look for a reinvented role of print in the context of screen delivery.

Print on-demand industries exemplify digitization of manufacture of physical books. Lightning Source produces 30,000 to 35,000 print books a day with an average run of 1.8 copies. Such a phenomenon of electrostatic printing and on-line fulfillment exemplifies the book-on-demand industry and the advancing digital future of print.

A serious threat to such reinvention is faulty production of the print book itself. Poor quality of the physical book, obvious in on-demand production, subtracts directly from efficiencies that have long enabled its success. Of course a threat of atrophy of physical quality and performance is not suddenly new in the history of the book, but it is suddenly more strategic. Exclusive attributes should not be neglected at a time that special attributes of screen media are aggressively promoted.

Evolution of Reading Behaviors

The most unmentioned allure of print reading may be its critical counterpoint role in support of screen reading, and visa versa. What if neither will prosper without the other? On-line mimicries of print are now nearing fifteen million volumes, but what if these surrogates are exactly that, a searchable database providing expansive access to print? What if the interplay itself, between print and screen reading, is this current era's contribution to the invention of the post-digital book? Some projections suggest otherwise and even scholarly positions are swayed toward new domination of the screen. But perhaps outright advocates for print have finally found a premise. This would be that the screen and print are really a single transmission ecology that is the momentum toward a different, post-digital, book. Counterpoints of print and screen works should be observed in detail to better understand their interaction for cultural transmission and the strange emergence of a new synthesis.