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Formats of the Book

The Cursor, the Haptic and the Mirror: Three Formats of the Book

Three formats of the book; the scroll, codex and screen, differ in the reading methods and reading behaviors associated with each of them. This suggests embedded determinants for their use and comprehension of their content. It also suggests persistent, interdependent roles for each across time and cultures.

The reading method of the scroll is content tracking by cursor and the use of the scroll as a prompt for recitation. The reading method of the codex is a haptic of page manipulation, an associated behavior of silent reading and reflexive actions such as writing and authoring. The reading method of the screen is watching and visual tracking in a mirror that simulates the scroll and codex as well as a wider range of visual and audio events. Such clues indicate a deep past and distant future of each of these useful formats, persisting side by side, to convey books.

The Scroll Format

Consider the scroll format with its features of cursor, content tracking and the prompting of recitation or spoken delivery. An exemplar of the scroll book format is presented by the Judaic Scriptures. Here the prototypical cursor of the pointing finger is converted to a silver hand with pointing finger (Yad) which is used to follow the words across the scroll. The tracking is exemplified by the unrolled opening to the current passage and the retracting closing which leaves the scroll advanced to the next opening. The scroll provides the prompt for recitation as the assigned readings are delivered to the congregation. This whole array of presentational features exemplifies the use of the scroll format in Antiquity as well as in the present.

An example of the function of the scroll in contemporary reading behavior and reading methods is the teleprompter. Here the cursor features and scroll tracking are also present providing the prompt for recitation. Today's commentator speaking to a television audience with the assistance of a teleprompter is acting out behaviors and methods of delivery of an orator of Antiquity who was prompted by a papyrus scroll.

The goal of teleprompting as recitation and not writing is suggested in an on-line instruction; "Video Tutorial Program Guidelines for Presenters and Technical Editors Using a Teleprompter". "Your presentation should be a "talk", not a reading of a paper. To write a natural sounding script, make an audio tape of your presentation as you normally would in a live setting. By transcribing the tape you will have created a script that you can use as a teleprompter script. Feel free to edit the transcript to make it more concise or add items that have been left out, but don't change the spoken English to polished written English."

The Codex Format

If the scrolling format of the teleprompter is associated with oral delivery, is there another format associated with inaudible delivery? With the codex we observe silent reading, manipulated navigation and prompted writing or quiet reflexive activities other than talking.

Silent reading can be contrasted with verbalization of the read text. The earliest libraries were noisy as readers verbalized to mask out each other. Libraries became silent when verbalization by any single reader, however muted, became a distraction to other silent readers. Silent reading is also associated with a differing receptivity of the mind to concepts conveyed. This is illustrated by an encounter of Augustine of Hippo with the Bishop Ambrose which occurred in 385 CE at a time and in a society when the codex had come to prominence. The changing receptivity of the mind to new behaviors and methods of reading as exemplified at the meeting of Augustine and Ambrose is expressed by Nancy M. Malone in her book Walking a Literary Labyrinth, A Spirituality of Reading. “It is intriguing to me that he, who marveled at Ambrose reading silently, was born anew in an act of silent reading. And that he, who had been a teacher of rhetoric, the spoken word, became the author of one of the earliest – and greatest –pieces of introspective Western literature, a work that is a marker on the journey of the human race to greater interiority.”

Brian Stock further describes the event in his book, Augustine the Reader. “Augustine tells us that when Ambrose read to himself, he did so without pronouncing the words aloud, in contrast to the normal manner of reading in the ancient period. His eyes proceeded across the page, while he sought out the sense with his heart. In order to appreciate the context of this statement, one must keep in mind that Augustine was desperate to escape from himself . Viewing the Bishop, even at a distance, he saw something that he had apparently not seen before – the silent decoding of written signs as a means of withdrawing from the world and of focusing attention on one’s inner life. Silent reading was the technique: the silent reader, into whose interior world the outsider could not penetrate, was the sign that the desired state had been attained.”

Stock continues that Augustine reading silently “is not a member of a listening audience; he is alone in his library, where the voices that speak to him are from the codices that he has in hand: they enter his mind as he attempts to enter their thought. His awareness that he is reading plays a role in his conception of himself as an author and remains in his thoughts as he engages in…writing…”

But why is the codex especially associated with quiet reflexive activities such as writing and authoring? To some degree this provoked activity could derive from letter writing and ambiguities of “publication” during the manuscript era. Folded letters, longer expositions and complete book works were all accommodated by the codex format. Here media savy sectarians from Antiquity to the present day, become eager adopters of the codex, so adaptable for production, exchange and circulation. Beyond its compact enclosure, the codex also invites manipulated investigation that plays directly into efficient transmission of its content. The distinctive manipulated navigation of the codex is established by its portability and arm's length, hand held presentation. Haptical or kinetic responses that augment comprehension such as fanning, leafing and page turning, rather than cursor tracking, incite the hands to prompt the mind into near physical arrangements of information and concepts conveyed. The codex enables a physical grasping, physical arranging (both within the book and within the library) and physical storing away of conceptual expressions.

The Screen Format

The screen format simulates all the methods and behaviors of reading. So the distinctive feature of the screen is actually its composite nature and its capacity to mimic and incite any and all of the behaviors and methods of reading. But the keyword here is mimic. The screen simulates or mirrors the scroll and the codex as well as a wider range of visual and audio events.

The screen can montage audio, video, instant messaging, facsimile text images, pop-up search results in a single website.  This fluidity is only constrained by a self identity and preference of the individual reader and the capacity of the computer to gate each reader to a specific reading profile.

How is each reader profile extracted from the universe of on-line visualizations? Here the performance of underlying search engines and preferred links is at work while forums of connectivity further sort readers into specific “communities”. This dynamic of automated focus of self identity from the nebulous, characterizes the screen format. It is interesting that a mode so transient and anonymous has an ability to authenticate the individual. Another indicator of the role of the computer screen as an interface for personal identity is its size. Smaller iPod and cell phone display screens are now assuming roles for personal and portable connectivity. Perhaps the manual possession previously exclusive to the codex book is migrating (with some promise for the prospects of e-books) to the smaller screens.

It is appealing to attribute screen based inter-tangling of reading behaviors and reading methods to a temporary churning of advancing and interacting technologies. But disturbances of technological evolution have been present across the history of the book. The symbotic relationship between mechanical or automatic reading and bionic perceptions is a theme of media history. Digital encoding, instantaneous communication, photographic imaging, audio recording, mass marketing were all inventions of the 19th century. The unique technical achievement of the computer “revolution” was the integration of communication modes to a single screen presentation. Or was even this innovation foreshadowed?

The daily newspaper of the 20th century presented the reader with a spreading array of the events and news of the hour. This paper spread offered a quilt or mosaic for the individual reader’s selection and seclusion of topics just as the presentation of the internet does today. The newspaper mosaic also presented the reader with a much more ample and highly resolved “screen” than that of a computer monitor!

Behind the 20th century daily newspaper was a technology of production and distribution no less refined and complex than information transmission of the 21st century. This included the realization of an ideal cyborgian relationship as exemplified by the Linotype machine and the Linotype operator. The operator could not produce the daily newspaper without the ingenious line setting and line casting machine and the machine could not set and cast without the prompts of the operator. The Linotype ultimately prefigures contemporary software mediations that disconnect the operator from the output or the reader from the content.

This mediation is exemplified by the advent of the keyboard. The Linotype keyboard, for the first time, separated the compositor from the type. This initial disconnection is played out today in the much more attenuated code transmissions required to relay a keystroke to a screen rendered and screen sustained letter.

On-line readers ultimately accept or discount the mediation of software encodings, connectivity handoffs, screen drawing errors and unwanted search results just as historical readers paused over other transmutations and delays. And all readers continue to weigh a balance between their own interpretation and search results conveyed by automated answers. Re-interpretation is occuring from both ends.

So what if a familiarity, rather than a strange newness, has enabled the quick assimilation of email exchange, hypertextuality, mechanical access, blog conversation and website navigation? Worth a thought. We must have been somewhat pre-adapted and already skilled or very few people would have taken an interest in computer connectivity. So, perhaps, the screen reader is looking into a mirror experience of all kinds of familiarities.

The Three Formats

The three formats together encompass much of the transmission range of the book. They have functioned together and can be projected together toward a future of the book. Scenarios of one format superseding another are inadequate. As Jacques Derrida remarked; “For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use the word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with new form and even coming to terms with a new economy.”

The scroll is no more obsolete than the teleprompter or the scrolling of computer presentation. The paper book has not been supplanted by a screen based reading device. The only e-book application that has successfully emerged is print-on-demand technology that digitizes the process of paper book production using high speed copiers. And for its part, screen based reading is not new, but a compilation of established reading methods and behaviors. The computer screen meanwhile verges on presentation of fully book like works and library like compilations. In place of simplistic displacements a complex interaction of book formats surrounds us and continues to challenge our reading skills.

02.08.06 in process