Social Reading

Platforms, Applications, Clouds and Tags

José-Antonio Cordón-García, Julio Alonso-Arévalo, Raquel Gómez-Díaz, Daniel Linder

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780633923
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Contemporary developments in the book publishing industry are changing the system as we know it. Changes in established understandings of authorship and readership are leading to new business models in line with the postulates of Web 2.0. Socially networked authorship, book production and reading are among the social and discursive practices starting to define this emerging system. Websites offering socially networked, collaborative and shared reading are increasingly important. Social Reading maps socially networked reading within the larger framework of a changing conception of books and reading. This book is structured into chapters covering topics in: social reading and a new conception of the book; an evaluation of social reading platforms; an analysis of social reading applications; the personalization of system contents; reading in the Cloud and the development of new business models; and Open Access e-books.

• Discusses social reading as an emerging tendency involving authors, readers, librarians, publishers, and other industry professionals
• Describes how the way we read is changing
• Presents ways in which the major players in the digital content industry are developing specific applications to foster socially networked reading

1

Towards a new conception of books and reading

Abstract:

The conception we have of books and reading has changed over time. These changes have been triggered by the evolution of the society we live in, by the developing reading habits of the members of our society, and by the technological breakthroughs that affect our society. In this chapter, different conceptual models of books and reading from the last few decades are surveyed, with a particular emphasis on the changes that the onset of electronic publishing has entailed. Electronic publishing has brought sweeping changes to the traditional notion of books and reading, leading to an entirely new conception of what book publication is and to entirely new reading and writing practices.

Key words

e-books

reading s. XXI

Introduction

In 1494, Sebastian Brant published in Basel, Switzerland a book entitled either ‘Narrenschiff’ or ‘Stultifera navis’, widely considered the most important work of fifteenth-century German literature, though it has no plotline but rather a series of 112 versified comments, each framed within tiny chapters rarely longer than a single page. Each chapter deals with a distinct type of madness and the lunacies to be found in the world we inhabit. Of all the different types of madmen and lunatics described who could board the ‘ship of fools’, Brant refers to book collectors, to those who cherish, worship and protect their books from the onslaught of flies, though these fools do not actually read these books. In the drawing that accompanies chapter XII, a man sits before a lectern in his private study where the walls around him are covered with shelves full of books. He wears a nightcap on his head which conveniently covers his donkey ears while wearing a jester’s cape appointed with jingle bells; he waves around a feather duster to shoo flies away and, very curiously, he wears spectacles to read a volume in his lap. This is the depiction of the Buchernarr, i.e. the ‘book-fool’.

‘There is a very powerful reason,’ says Brant’s Büchernarr, ‘for me to be the first on board that ship./For here I have great stores of treasure, of which I understand not a word.’ Later, while in the company of learned men citing scholarly tomes, he snickers with delight, saying ‘I have all these volumes at home’. He compares himself with Tomoeo II of Alexandria, who hoarded books without acquiring the knowledge they contained. Thanks to Brant’s book, the image of the ridiculous erudite scholar reading a book with thick spectacles on became an icon across the Western world.

Brant’s book was published precisely at a time when publication of books using the new technology of the printing press was exploding, but these mass-produced books co-existed with the publication of hand-crafted manuscripts, which were costly and slow to produce. This metaphor is easily transferrable to today’s print-published book vs. electronic-published book dichotomy, to a battleground where contemporary thinkers are staking moral stances in favour of or against the authenticity or falsehood of the eBook vs. its predecessor the printed book either entrenching themselves in defence of the established order or embracing the novelty of what is to come. In both cases, we find ourselves faced with categorical statements on both sides of the equation, of what true reading is all about.

As information technologies have developed over the last forty years into the predominant system of communication they are today, the intellectual process of evaluating the true nature of reading has been intensifying, though vacillating between those who resist them and those who consider them a utopia. As early as 1962, McLuhan forecast the emergence of a virtual communications space and the immediate downfall of the printed document (2011a). In 1970, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext and founded the Xanadu Project (Borges, 2002); until the 1990s, this Project was merely an experimental brainchild until the web gave it an operational foundation on which to develop into a reality. The modifications applied to the concept known as the written document, and to the reading of written documents, over the past four decades have directly affected book publication as new technologies are being used to write, produce, read and share books. In 1992, on the occasion of the Annual Conference of the International Publishers Association (IPA), Microsoft’s Head of Electronic Publishing, Dick Brass, announced the disappearance of the printed book, and it was not even a particularlynovel announcement. In 1996, ‘The Future of the Book’ conference nurtured by Umberto Eco was held in Italy; the highly provocatively titled event was attended by the world’s most important supporters and detractors of ‘the digital turn’.

Figure 1.1 The ‘book- fool’

Before the definitive consolidation of the Internet as the global communication system par excellence, many had predicted that the book would follow the same demise as records when CDs and then downloadable mp3s came out, and that they would simply become collectors’ items which could interest those interested in such rarities. Doomsayers clearly saw that new technologies which delivered online contents would cause the demise of the printed book.

This early, and overly drastic, conclusion was logical in light of the new possibilities that the Internet afforded, which included cheaper and faster sales and distribution channels than conventional book markets that involved a myriad intermediaries ranging from the author and the editor to the printer and distributor. The new technologically-mediated network would solve many of the problems that had nagged the book production sector for years, and it could do so all at once. Such problems included book storage, returns of unsold books, production deadlines, and a great many others. Observing what was happening in the world of music production, many editors quickly pronounced their intentions by investing early and heavily in technological innovations, fearing that failure to do so could lead to them being shouldered out of future business opportunities and even being forced out of their traditional market niches if they woke up too late to new technological trends. This rather optimistic mindset about the future of digital publishing was also taken on board by sectors outside of the book publishing industry, drawing heavy investments into what was perceived as a potentially successful market with new business opportunities at the juncture of publishing and new technologies.

There was a time when a lot was made of the concept of ‘disintermediation’ (Smith, 2000) and many editors and agents in the publishing supply chain tried to imagine where and how to position themselves in order to assure themselves of the brightest possible future in a world where an ever increasing amount of contents could be administered and delivered in digital formats without the need for traditional intermediaries.

Precisely at that same time, Robert Darnton offered his view of the state of things, though casting a completely opposit picture:

Marshall McLuhan’s future has not happened. The Web, yes; global immersion in television, certainly; media and messages everywhere, of course. But the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction, as McLuhan prophesied in 1962. His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium that we are about to enter. The ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ still exists, and ‘typographic man’ is still reading his way around it.

Consider the book. It has extraordinary staying power. Ever since the invention of the codex in the third or fourth century AD, it has proven to be a marvelous machine—great for packaging information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage. It does not need to be upgraded or downloaded, accessed or booted, plugged into circuits or extracted from webs. Its design makes it a delight to the eye. Its shape makes it a pleasure to hold in the hand. And its handiness has made it the basic tool of learning for thousands of years, even before the library of Alexandria was founded early in the fourth century BC. (Darnton, 1999)

Many at the time, and afterwards, agreed with Darnton that the printed book was the most near-perfect communicative instrument ever attained in human history for transmitting and preserving thought. Informing this discussion were not only longstanding conceptions of what culture and history meant to the different intellectuals weighing in with Darnton and company, but also longstanding notions of how books were meant to be stable bastions against change. To this group of intellectuals, any modification in the format of books would mean a modification of the very nature of book production itself and would therefore signify a change in how we perceive of culture and history.

Therefore, a central question, and one of the major issues we will address in this introductory chapter, is ‘What is a book?’. As we try to tackle the answer to this question, specifically as it applies to books in today’s world where conventional and digital technologies are coinhabiting, others also emerge: ‘To what extent are new technologies altering traditional notions of what books are?’ ‘What notions have changed, in both qualitative and quantitative terms?’ These questions will frame the following introductory discussion.

From books as objects to books as systems: towards a new understanding of books

In 1911, Thomas Edison thought that books published a century later, in 2011, would be like this:

Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound. (Edison, 2012)

Margueritte Duras, when asked in 1985 what she thought books and culture would be like in the year 2000, offered this vision:

Il n’y aura plus que ça, la demande sera telle que … il n’y aura plus que des réponses, tous les textes seront des réponses en somme. Je crois que l’homme sera littéralement noyé dans l’information, dans une information constante. Sur son corps, sur son devenir corporel, sur sa santé, sur sa vie familiale, sur son salaire, sur son loisir. C’est pas loin du cauchemar. Il n’y aura plus personne pour lire… . (Observatori, 2013)¹

At the year 2000 Annual Conference of the International Publishers Association (IPA), Dick Brass stated that by 2005 sales of electronic books and newspapers would reach a billion dollars, by 2008 sales of electronic books would match printed book sales, by 2010 authors would be acting as their own editors, and by 2012 campaigns in defence of the lame-duck printed book would be under way. He also predicted that all of the collections in the Library of Congress will have been digitalised by 2015, that in 2018 the last paper newspaper would be printed, and that from 2019 onwards the first definition of a book in all dictionaries would be a substantial piece of writing accessible by computer or personal electronic device.

Each of the three figures mentioned above have a completely different understanding of what a book is, for the term ‘book’ cannot be understood in exactly the same way by authors writing in the nineteenth century (Edison) or the mid-twentieth century (Duras) or the twenty-first century (Brass). Perhaps the book is indefinable as an object because it is more like a living thing, as Robert Escarpit (1965) stated, gathering this conclusion from the very diverse approaches that had been expressed about books in essays published over the long period of time since books were first created.

What nearly all traditional definitions of books have in common is the notion of thought being transcribed onto a support medium using a writing instrument and following a set of basic rules for proper inscription. In other words, one of the very basic definitions of the book is associated with writing. However, this way of conceiving of the book is one-sided, for, as many theorists claim, the book is an object of communication with others. The book is a means of written communication initiated by text authors and readers who can establish communicative links across distance and time so as to satisfy individual needs and the needs of political and social groups, and these communicative needs could not be satisfied if it were not for the professional production and distribution structure of the book industry.

Contemporary research on books has attempted to define them from a number of different angles, many of which are clearly paradoxical. For instance, one approach highlights how books seem to be absent insofar as what is expressed within them is ephemeral (Manguel, 2009) which is what Kafka certainly meant when he said that ‘one reads in order to formulate questions’ (Tessio, 2010). This absent character of books seems to reinforce the notion that one reads in order to partake of a conversation; publishing a book, says Zaid (2010), is to join in an ongoing conversation, and the book is the means of being heard in that conversation; according to Millán, this act of schoarly or artistic creation is often socially cloaked in the vestments of prestige and power (1996). Other approaches consider the symbolic status of books as cultural artefacts (Olson, 1998): ‘The book is a fragment of space where language is linked through transgression and death … books become the essential place for language origination and propagation, yet they are essentially without memory’ (our translation, Gabilondo, 1997).

Book definitions can be divided between two basic camps, i.e. tho...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Figures and tables
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Towards a new conception of books and reading
• Chapter 2: Reading applications: an analysis
• Chapter 3: New business models for reading in the cloud
• Chapter 4: Open access eBooks
• Chapter 5: Social reading platforms: diagnosis and evaluation
• Chapter 6: System contents personalisation
• Chapter 7: Social tagging and its applications for academic and leisure reading
• Chapter 8: By way of an epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index