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Format

Three formats of the book; the scroll, codex and screen, differ in the reading methods and reading behaviors associated with each of them. Together they 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.

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 fully 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 new compilation of established reading methods and behaviors. The computer screen meanwhile verges on presentation of fully book like works. In place of simplistic displacements there is, in stead, a complex interaction of book formats surrounding us that continues to challenge our reading skills.

Other format considerations are provided by vertical or horizontal presentation. Historically horizontal sheets of paper were folded into gatherings of vertical orientations of pages. By contrast the computer screen is oriented horizontally. The computer screen is oriented horizontally. This is the orientation of cinema or television rather than the page or document. This divide impairs book presentation of the visual world while the horizontal format impairs the screen in presentation of the page. Another realization is that both formats are optimized for their prevalent content. The shape of the content is usually revealed by the presentation device. Ambiguities arise in composite presentation such as that lately achieved on the Web. In a further complication the cinema credits and blog postings advance vertically while the book advances horizontally, both codex and scroll. So the content progression is perpendicular to the framing. (Who invents all this stuff anyway!) Text presentation is also complicated as it evolves from traditional linear presentation to divergent, hyperlinked and animated presentation characteristic of computer generated presentation.

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 mirror and incite any and all of the behaviors and methods of reading. But the keyword here is mirror. 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. In view of these complexities, perhaps we should back up and attempt to find roots of reading behaviors.

Reading

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 symbolic thought. As neurologist Wilson points out, practiced manipulation actually embedded concepts in the mind and these began to compile into a useful database. The practiced manipulations of tools and fire added to the manipulations of food and projectiles. The hand signs engendered layers of social interaction. Slowly, the slow brain began to develop, just to keep up with the disciplined hands.

The eastern 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 complex feat of one arm rock throwing was achieved and practiced. This asymmetrical coordination and others induced the bilateral neurology of mind, essentially doubling mental capacity. A legacy of this neurological advance is our unique right or left handedness. Now if the connections between origins of reading and throwing of stones seems too remote, let’s move forward to the Upper Paleolithic and to people just like us. It was in this time frame, ten’s of thousands of years ago, that asymmetrical mind and conceptual fluidity between domains of knowledge engendered symbolic thought.

Wentzell van Huyssteen has provided an monumental study of just this emergence; “…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.” Relating such biological legacies to books and their functions is easy. Physical books are the very objects of manipulation that have always invited thought. Gesture is the parent of the screen cursor and human cognitive capacities enabled the grasping and tossing of concepts. Think about it; the author weighs each concept, calculates their trajectories, carefully aims and releases with the hope of stunning the target. Books do not fly across time and cultures; they are thrown.

The earliest literacies are now somewhat extinct. One such early literacy was animal tracking. Evidences of other animals; their numbers and their intentions, were carefully deciphered from subtle signs. Likewise, cycles of plant growth and energy exchange in nature were carefully read. The first screen was the night sky. 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, omens and seasons have all been imposed on the screen of the night sky. In general, these proto-literacies have atrophied even as reading behaviors have increased.

Reading behaviors have expanded to consume much of the time we once spent observing. This progression toward more reading is actually a long story across communication history. It was once possible to read all the books a person came into contact with. It was also possible to visit a city without noticing or expecting much signage. Such experiences are no longer possible and we are surrounded with and invaded by readable content. Some even say that our very existence is sustained by instant messaging! Only our dreams remain free of text.

Much reading goes unnoticed because it is silent. 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 just come to prominence.

Brian Stock describes this event in the following way; “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.”

Why is the codex especially associated with quiet reflexive activities such as silent reading and writing and library assembly? 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 savvy sectarians of Antiquity were eager adopters of the codex which is 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 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.

Technology

Technologies of reading do not determine reading behaviors, but they are an ingredient. Reading behaviors reflect advances of reading technologies. 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 an early cyborg relationship 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 prefigures contemporary software mediations that also disconnect the operator from the output.

These mediations are exemplified by the advent of the keyboard. The Linotype keyboard, for the first time, separated the compositor from the type and, by extension, the scribe from the word. This initial disconnection is played out today in the much more attenuated code transactions required to relay a keystroke to a screen sustained text. 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 questions and the search results conveyed by automated answers.

Technologically all conceptual works are now born digital, so distinctions arise after birth – as they grow up. In this context, it can be argued that digital technologies and network communication have advanced print reading 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. There is no delete key on a Linotype or a typewriter.

A simple demonstration of the current inefficiency posed by deletions of reading material 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 configurations of an e-book device remain unclear. Various hand held electronic devices such as the Rocket Book and Soft Book 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 latest surge of interest in the hand-held book reader, exemplified by the SONY PRS (portable reader system), is based on electronic ink display. E-Ink renders text by electronically arranging thousands of tiny black and white capsules. Unlike the liquid-crystal display screens used in personal digital assistants, there is no backlight to strain readers' eyes, and characters show up sharp and clear, even in full sunlight. This course of development continues the focus on resolution and paper mimicry. But underlying print attributes of legibility (immediacy of display and navigation), haptic efficiency and persistence still remain unfulfilled. Finally the fully hidden aspect of virtualizing for the sake of virtualizing, should be considered.

Perhaps a more native approach would be adaptation of the hand-held reader to a kind of GPS/GIS (a global positioning system interfaced to a geographical information system) capability for on-line text. In this function the reader would be oriented, not to books, but to graphic and text interpretation of physical locations or events; enabling a live cultural tourism. The needed realization is that the e-book device is really a blank book awaiting field notes and travel journal uses. Global positioning systems (GPS) integrated with geographic intelligence systems (GIS) could extend the content of electronic books by providing live position of the physical reader in strange cultural and geophysical environments.

Paper vs. Screen

The future of paper versus screen book comparisons 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.

What is apparent is that two separate formats of paper books and hand held reading devices of all kinds are riding a cascade of different reading modes. Granting that let’s look at some authentic differences between the two reading devices. We will compare characteristics of legibility, haptic efficiency and persistence.

Legibility The first consideration in the comparison of print book vs. e-book is legibility where legibility is measured in immediacy and clarity of the meaning of the content. Lack of legibility of the on-line reading mode results from slow system transmission, broken links and browser errors. On-line presentations are authentically illegible as the reader, disconnected, watches a download monitor or waits as the browser fails to draw an over-laid text block. Other illegibilities are presented by interrupting sign-in or registration screens, to say nothing of unrequested pop-ups. Navigational transactions, learned and unlearned, continually interrupt reading. Ultimately there is nothing more illegible than a dark screen. The act of fanning through a paper book seems insignificant until we desire the same immediacy from the screen book.

Such impediments to comprehension will be dismissed by on-line reading advocates as temporary deficiencies correctable by the advance of technologies of connectivity. But the reverse appears to be happening. Link rot, application up-grades and retraining, email congestion and system cut-overs all load further illegibility to on-screen reading. Meanwhile the print book maintains its well refined legibility across immense technological progressions.

Haptics An important difference between hand held reading devices, either paper book or e-book, is haptic difference. The haptic feature most embedded in the book is that of conveying concepts with physical objects.

Haptic features of the book follow as the hands prompt the mind in an ergonomic of comprehension. At first it is odd, if not paradoxical, 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. We always recall read precepts in their physical location on the page of a specific book. Other fingerings of page turning and manipulations of book structure work as prompts to our progression through content.

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 paper book, the reader is the interface.

Persistence Differences in the basic persistence of text can be immense, but, surprisingly, there is 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 sixteen 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?

Conclusion

The contrasts in legibility, haptic and persistence that we are discussing here are consistent enough to indicate an assured future of the print mode as conveyed in a paper book. Another possible conclusion is that the composite, screen based reading mode is still an accessory of the parent print mode, not the other way around.

Like the choice between “paper or plastic”, the choice between paper or screen does not just pose choices of packaging, but larger ecological choices. And the question itself may be naive. An assumption that electronic presentation of books will supplant print book presentation or screen replace paper, is certainly inadequate.

The scenario in which digital resources supplant print resources has not occurred. The explanation for the overlaps, including "inside the book" engines, is that the digital resources integrate and therefore can mimic all the reading modes. But their superiority, beyond the technological achievement of simultaneously screening verbal, written and print modes into a readable matrix, is overrated. For one thing the richness of expression of the visual/verbal mode is not approached, the conceptual exercise of the written mode is not fully required and the permanence and systematic accumulation of the print mode are not achieved. Digital research is still an accessory of the parent reading modes.

It is remarked that younger readers prefigure a shift to screen reading. Yet younger readers generally prefer visual and audio reading, just as they did in the radio and television eras. It is remarked that younger students go first to the Web for research, but so do scholars. The issue is how the query is resolved.

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, Microsoft and various library agencies now plans to image on-line the older research library print collections. What if this massive effort to bring print books to the screen actually resulted in their out-put to paper?

We should 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 a post-digital era when the book at its best will assimilate paper and screen into a unified publishing system? Certainly Google Print and Microsoft Live Search Books 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.

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 front end simply processes Google finds across different reading communities, identifies titles of interest but then goes to the stacks to scan for print-on-demand?

Certainly 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, but it is not too early to say that we are headed toward a post digital era.

Perhaps 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.

No one denies that everyone loves to read from the screen. The popularity of on-line communication confirms this. But, while computers can mirror books, they should not be confused with books. If computers are books they are blank books, connected and disconnected, but not the thing itself.

Endnote

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. Cultural transmission is no longer threatened by deterioration of paper, but digital dissolution of books. This digital dissolution is now advancing from books to library classification. Libraries are now considering discontinuing human classification in favor of inventory control software augmented with Google search.

So, libraries will determine the persistence of access to recorded knowledge. Libraries of Antiquity were established for preservation of texts. Only later did libraries turn to accommodate reading. As reading and the use of libraries by readers increased the original preservation function became less apparent. Ultimately readers began to consume libraries and expect a continual renovation of library stock. Modes of access became dynamic as well. Finally, in an era of electronic reading, libraries of ephemeral, transient and mutable resources emerged. But now a failure of libraries to preserve digital resources can discredit their underlying preservation mission. The needed realization is that persistence differs in the print vs. screen based reading modes. A misguided dependence on digital libraries could bring us to a new dark age and this time the dark age will have begun in the libraries.

Footnotes

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.” p.9, Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine, Stanford, 2005. [1] Kingdon, Jonathan, Lowly Origin, Princeton, 2003. [1] Wilson, Frank R., The Hand; how its use shapes the brain, language and human culture, 1998. [1] For neurological relationship between projectile predation and capacity for management of concepts see; Calvin, William, “The unitary hypothesis: A common neural circuity for novel manipulations, language, plan-ahead, and throwing?” in Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution, edited by Gibson, Kathleen R. and Ingold, Tim, Cambridge University press, 1993. [1] For explanation of the neural origin of handedness see p.221, McManus, Chris, Right Hand Left Hand, Harvard press 2002. [1]p.231, Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, Alone in the World, Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, 2006. [1] For a narrative of changing and persisting reading behaviors see; Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books, Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Stanford University Press, 1994. [1] 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.” [1] p.61, Stock, Brian, Augustine the Reader, 1996. [1] For an expert analysis of relations of the print book and e-book see; Drucker, Johanna, “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space”, (lecture, 2002), <http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/> [1] Haptics is the study of touch as a means of communication. It is investigated in perceptual psychology and robotic engineering as well as in anthropology. [1] Meyer, Marvin, The Gnostic Discoveries, impact of the Nag Hammadi library, 2005. [1] For reference to developments on library classification see Book Reviews, Daniel N. Joudrey, in the Library Resources and Technical Services journal, October, 50/4, 2006,