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Future of the Codex Book

Discussions of the future of the book frequently contrast paper books and digital books. But every conceptual work is now born digital, what counts is how they grow-up.

Being born digital is advantageous. In deed, digital technologies and network communication have advanced print reading much more than screen based reading. This is because print reading began with a more refined installed base and was quicker to take advantage of the production and delivery attributes of digital technologies. In this country the conversion from composition keyboard strokes based on physical cams to those based on code occurred in the early 1970’s. Likewise, library classification was converted to electronic access during the same early period.

In addition the print book was already optimized for linear transmission of conceptual works. Economical comprehension in screen reading, however, was immediately forestalled by a need for rapid and extensive deletion of presented material. In fact, the advent of the “delete” key itself marks the transition from analog to digital technologies.

A simple demonstration of the current inefficiency of screen reading is the Google search or your daily purge of unneeded e-mail. The reading process requires a skill set for rapid deletion or de-selection of results which forestalls and interrupts efficient assimilation of concepts. This is a crippling circumstance for screen based reading and it may be endemic.

Meanwhile the future e-book device remains unclear. Various hand held electronic devices such as the Rocket Book and Softbook are no longer supported and extended reading at a PC is not popular. There is surprising evidence that the cell phone display is a possible incubation niche for the e-book. Such a trend on such a small screen indicates that lack of resolution is not the issue. Perhaps a deeper, embedded need for personal possession of conceptual works is at play.

The future of paper versus screen book comparisons must encompass interface engineering, library services, consumer web devices, book studies programs, the economics of book publishing and technologies of book production. Another factor to consider is persistence of individual books into the future. Only eye legible books on materials such as paper, as compared with those transmitted by code on computer media, have proven their capacity to survive centuries and even millennia. For various reasons, works committed to computer media and network servers frequently expire within a decade.

The Night Sky

Everyone loves to read from the screen. The popularity of on-line communication confirms this. Its just a different kind of reading than extended linear reading in a book. Like book reading, screen reading is timeless. The first screen was the night sky. High resolution, wide field. Electronic screens still work best in the dark. Pages in the daytime and screens in the nighttime. Its timeless.

Reading the screen of the night sky societies began to connect the dots. Mythologies, news omens and astrophysics have all been imposed on the screen of the night sky. But the night sky also presents us with the universe, or so it seems. In this way it is like network communication and screen based research. It dwarfs the individual reader and so the reader wants to see a mirror and not the universe. Blogs, live journals, Wikis, Google searches list servs are all used as mirrors to reflect personas, rather than universes. A mirror puts the reader in front of the universe.

To guide yourself through the universe you need a cursor. The first cursor was the pointed finger. You will see them drawn in manuscripts and see the “fists” in period printing. The cursor is also represented by the Yad, the small silver hand used to track recital from Judaic scriptures. And the same function is presented by the cursor in the teleprompter screen which also prompts recitation in a contemporary context. From the papyrus scroll to the teleprompter to any longer computer text display, the endemic need to utilize the scroll format and to impose tracking with a cursor appears timeless.

The Missal Missile

Now let’s adventure a bit with the timeless physical book. My question here is whether it possible that the practiced manipulation of codex reading also conveys conceptual patterns to the mind. Does the physical paper book somehow enable the manual understanding of print concepts? Stranger still, does the action and physicality of a book impose a particular receptivity to the content of a book? Is there a haptics of comprehension?

Watch yourself reading. You will find that you begin to turn the page at the start of the page reading and that your fingers will glide under the leaf to coincide the page turning with the completed page reading. You will also find, pages later, that you can recall the physical location of an encountered idea.

At first the hand-to-mind path seems difficult to define and historians remark on the lack of documentation of the hand skills. The needed realization is that dexterity itself is a medium of information. Hand skills have been conveyed for hundreds of thousands of years by direct exchange from hands to hands. Perhaps the practiced deftness of page turning is a clock that moves us through content; a punctuation of the page.

Let’s go a bit further in a consideration of the deeply embedded attributes of the traditional book. Is the book a legacy of neurological development across the hominid series and across millions of years. Where did those bloated brains come from anyway? Now this gets really strange!

For millions of years primate dexterity preceded the increase of brain size in the hominid genealogy. This circumstance engendered a learning pathway based on discovery by manipulation and tactile observation. This perceptive channel of primate dexterity then prompted the mind toward conceptual thought. The African savanna of the Pliocene was a dangerous and unpredictable place. To survive, small ground foraging primates had to be dangerous and unpredictable as well. The hominid species differentiated themselves by an innovative behavior of projectile predation or throwing of rocks. This one arm behavior and its endless practice led to the bilaterally asymmetric development of the human brain, essentially doubling its potential. As a result, we are the only species that is either right or left handed.

So what’s my point? It is that the haptic feature most embedded in the traditional book is that of conveying concepts as if they were physical projectiles. If this projection, relating the book to throwing stones, is too remote, let’s move forward to the Upper Paleolithic and people just like us. It was in this time frame, 10’s of thousands of years ago that conceptual fluidity between domains of knowledge engendered symbolic thought.

“…the physical acts of throwing and pointing actually lead to iconic gestures, which in turn made possible the transformation of communication into language. The fact that a gesture could be a meaningful object for perception facilitated the remarkable symbolic discovery that one thing can stand for another.” J. Wentzell van Huyssteen, P.231-2.

These cognitive capacities enabled the grasping and tossing of concepts. Books do not fly across time and cultures; they are thrown. The author weighs each concept, calculates their trajectories, carefully aims and releases with the hope of stunning the target. Secondary haptic features of the traditional book follow as the hands prompt the mind in an ergonomic of comprehension. At first it is odd that concepts should be conveyed by physical objects. Electronic transmission better mimics the neural connectivity of the mind, but the physical book better engages the hands to prompt the mind. In contrast to the manual punctuation of the page and the physical clock of content of the codex, the on-line page is manipulated with impaired haptic feedback. The “previous/next” click, the cursor slider and scroll tabs utilize grip and finger motion directed to the mouse and keyboard, but not to the substrate of the text. At least two other layers of interruption intervene. There is the electrified, rather than manual, instigation and an indirect interfacing via the navigational software. With a print book, the reader is the interface.

That is pretty much the end of the story...except for one factor; we have not escaped this deep learning pathway of hands prompting the mind. In accord with this circumstance, cultures have directed young learners to hand skills for thousands of years, including the expressive skills of crafts, visual arts and instrumental music. We may be the first generation to demote this educational approach as we seek to strip education of manual activities and supplant them with purely visual learning. What is achieved in such displacements is the amputation of the hand to mind discovery pathway. Even more risky is the influence of such displacement at an early age.

So reading must be, in part at least, a handcraft. It would be interesting to compare books in languages with cover lifting to the left and those with cover lifting to the right to see if that reflects the 11% species left handedness. It would be fun to know if the adoption of the codex format by sectarians in the deserts of north and eastern Africa reflected a need to thrown or project a scripture and if the codex was invented in a context of a new craft of sending off folded letters. At least we see...from this perspective...that on-line reading technologies take a backward step to try to mimic the hand induced print reading mode. How did we somehow know that all along...contrary to all the hype and hyperbole? Do the hands prompt the mind?

Good News, Bad News

On the bright side, computers augment our native abilities to sort, search and discover. On the dark side, the search results, unbeknown to the reader, can be pre-selected, manipulated or censured. So contrasts between print and screen reading include issues of democratic governance. These issues are not much different than those posed by paper ballots vs. electronic voting. "Under a secret ballot system, there is no known input, nor is there any expected output with which to compare electoral results. Hence, electronic electoral result cannot be verified by humans and the people need to have an absolute faith in the accuracy, honesty and security of the whole electoral apparatus (people, software and hardware). Requiring reliance on such faith may not be considered compatible with democracy." Wikipedia

Surprisingly, there is also not that much hand ringing over the persistence of electronic resources. It is frequently mentioned that the computer can “store” vastly greater quantities of documentary materials. But for how long? And for how long without modification? The fourth century codices found in a jar at Nag Hammadi were immediately readable after 16 centuries. In a few decades they have enriched the understanding of sources of New Testament scripture and the understanding of sectarian life of the period. Just as miraculous, we know that they were unmodified during that long time. For reliable transmission across time and cultures, which technology, the papyrus codex or the digital network, is more advanced? There is also not much regret expressed, especially by network advocates, of the eclipsing of the bibliographical identity of a book. Computers can mirror books but they should not be confused with books. Screen based reading actually dissolves books. Search engines provide a reading method that eliminates the coherence of individual books digesting and parsing whole libraries down to word frequencies, search terms and tagged images. The cultural transmission concern is no longer deterioration of paper, but digital dissolution of books.

This digital dissolution is now advancing from books to library classification. The Library of Congress is in the process of discontinuing catalog classification in favor of inventory control software augmented with Google search. As a trend this atrophy may not end this side of a new dark age and this time the dark age will have begun in the libraries.

The Future of the Book

It is remarked that as new media emerge they mimic older media. It is less remarked that old media return the complement as they exploit patterns of the new. For example, Google now plans to image on-line the older research library print collections. It would be ironic of this massive effort to bring print books to the screen resulted in their reprinting. Realize that scanners are really printing presses. Once captured the books are actually returned to print and to the production streams of digital print-on-demand operations. Are we verging on the post-digital era when the book at its best will assimilate paper and screen into a unified publishing system?

Will the Google “digital copy” really access out of copyright books? Certainly Google Print will provide a different bibliographical utility or indexing for these books, but why presume that a precisely formatted conceptual work will suddenly be more easily referenced, assimilated and comprehended on the screen? That’s something like saying these books will be easier to use if they are on television. PowerPoint format has taken over live presentation in much the same way that Google Book Search will take over book reading. Screen reading presents a string of bullets just like PowerPoint, crippling both assililation and comprehension. Now Google is very protective of its “digital copy” assuming that the screen parsing and presentation is the proprietary product. But what if readers turn Google Print into a different kind of engine? What if an Amazon-like blog, front end simply processes Google finds across different reading communities, identifies titles of interest and goes to the stacks to scan for print-on-demand?

Screen based reading and on-line publications and their attributes of discovery and interactivity all pose a refreshing challenge for the traditional paper book. Up to now the book has been a presumed tool of culture and it is time to more critically consider its attributes and its disadvantages. The larger adjustment to new reading behaviors will take their course and it is too early to say that we are headed to a post digital era. We are headed toward a tertiary orality, toward wide experiment in learning and reading and toward new and virtual social behaviors. Perhaps only the book can enlighten the future itself. And the role of books is just that. At any era including a future post-digital era, books will bring expansive conceptual works and complex evaluations of our destiny into our hands.

08.16.06/glf