"Every Friday, Kat Meyer hosts an hour-long conversation on twitter about the future of publishing. It's open to anyone following the hashtag. This one with Erin Kissane took place on April 27."

Notes here by @tealtan:

"unusual contexts in writing / reading text

“In a hyperliterate society, the vast majority of reading is not consciously recognized as reading.”

“What readers expect is more important than what readers want.”

Bill Buxton: “every tool is the best at something and the worst at something else”

skills, path-dependency, learning effects

“…we actually like constraints once we're in them.”"

And notes from @litherland:

"11:40: “I do things like … just obsess about weird little details. So, for instance … like, how do you do text entry in a Netflix app on the Wii? You know? I think about this a lot.” Your many other talents notwithstanding, Tim, you may have missed your calling as a designer. /

18:30: “I think it’s a tragedy that we have not been able to figure out a good interface for pen and ink on reading devices.” Holy grail. My dream for years. I would give anything. I would give anything to be smart enough to figure this out."

"Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, & socialize—reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost.

Phil thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. I agree. Every education would be ad hoc. It would be student-directed toward the job market she’s aiming for.

This trend toward…coffeeshopification…is changing more than just colleges:

Book Stores Will Shrink to Coffee Shops…

The Coffee Shop Will Displace Most Retail Shops…

Offices Become Coffee Shops…Again…

What Doesn’t Become a Coffee Shop?…

…houses of worship…

What will remain other than coffee shops? Upscale retail will remain…[for] experience…Restaurants remain. Grocery stores remain.

Brick and mortar retail stores will be converted to public spaces. Multi-use space will be in increasing demand as connectivity tools allow easy coordination of impromptu events…"

"Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further."

"David graduated from the UNC in 1993, Yale in 1999, & went on to form O-R-G, a design studio in New York City. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the arts journal Dot Dot Dot the same year. David currently teaches at Columbia University and Rhode Island School of Design. Stuart is currently involved in diverse projects at Parsons School of Design (NYC) and Pasadena Art Center (LA).<br />
<br />
Dexter Sinister recently established a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side in New York City. The workshop is intended to model a ‘Just-In-Time’ economy of print production, running counter to the contemporary assembly-line realities of large-scale publishing. This involves avoiding waste by working on-demand, utilizing local cheap machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity."

"Exploring New Information Cultures"<br />
<br />
"For example, words are colour-coded in a gradient from dark (more) to light (less) as a comparative value of frequency versus uniqueness. Also, several indexes are featured as random access interfaces to the articles. And finally, the subject matter in the texts is extended beyond the book through comparisons with Wikipedia entries of similar semantic meaning (micro- versus macro-context).So in essence, in the conceptualization of this book, we are not only trying to produce graphic and typographic design. But, by augmenting code and form with critical language theories, we are also practising what we like to call Digital Anthropology."

"It sounded like a ridiculous, unbelievable dystopia. It was even written like sci-fi. Of course that would never happen! Nobody would stand for this, ever, right?<br />
<br />
But exactly what Stallman described has come to pass, with very little protest.<br />
<br />
For example, here are the terms under which you can lend your Kindle books: books where lending is enabled by the seller, “can be loaned once for a period of 14 days.” Most other ebook stores and audio book stores have similarly restrictive policies."<br />
<br />
[Refers to this Richard Stallman piece from 1997: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html ]

"Read. In our minimalistic eReader the focus is on the text, so you can listen to the author's voice. Let his words inspire your own thinking.

Write. When a passage resonates with you, make sure you highlight it and add a note. It's your contribution to the dialogue surrounding the book.

Share. The openmargin lies next to the text, it's the place where the notes of all the readers are collected. Here you connect thoughtfully with readers you never met before."

"Unlike Grandpa (me), today's kids are whip smart and tech savvy. I know eventually everything will be digital and kids won't even know from a regular old book book and that's fine. Truthfully? The reason I made the book? Certainly not to "throw down the gauntlet" as one critic has stated. Naw, I just thought digital vs. traditional made for a funny premise. No heavy message, I'm only in it for the laffs. <br />
<br />
My first version featured a kid. I dummied up some ruffs showing a dummy of a kid who doesn't know what this thing called 'a book' is. "What's this?" he said. The narrator answers, "It's a book," etc."<br />
<br />
[See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4BK_2VULCU AND ªªhttp://www.lanesmithbooks.com/Home.html ]ºº

"JLW: I just interviewed the designer Paula Scher in Eye 77, who hates computers but loves the iPad.<br />
TP: I’m a bit like that. It’s different things at different times, a serious research tool, or a communication device, but it’s a toy, I can play with it and find things I didn’t know existed.<br />
<br />
JLW: It’s like a cross between a stained glass window and a book.<br />
TP: It’s also one of the oldest things in the world, as its called, a pad or a slate. This is a child’s slate like the one I had when I was five years old."

"Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?"

"Bookfuturists refuse to endorse either fantasy of "the end of the book" [bookservativism and technofuturism] -- "the end as destruction" or "the end as telos or achievement" as Jacques Derrida would have it. We are trying to map an alternative position that is both more self-critical and more engaged with how technological change is actively affecting our culture.<br />
<br />
We're usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We're tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren't destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech."

"Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do."

"All signs suggest punctuation is in flux. In particular, our signs that mark grammatical (and sometimes semantic) distinctions are waning, while those denoting tone and voice are waxing. Furthermore, signs with a slim graphical profile (the apostrophe and comma, especially) are having a rough go of it. Compared to the smiley face or even the question mark, they're too visually quiet for most casual writers to notice or remember, even (or especially) on our high-def screens.

"Bri­dle says read­ers don’t value what pub­lish­ers do because all of the time involved in edit­ing, for­mat­ting, mar­ket­ing, etc., is invis­i­ble to reader when they encounter final prod­uct. Maybe. But mak­ing that time/labor vis­i­ble CAN’T just mean brusquely insist­ing that pub­lish­ers really are impor­tant & that they really do do valu­able work. It needs to mean some­thing like find­ing new ways for read­ers to engage with that work, & mak­ing that time mean­ing­ful as THEIR time.

"After a Room for Debate discussion last week, “Do School Libraries Need Books?” the comments from readers included some first-hand views from students. Below are excerpts of their observations on how studying has changed, how they use libraries (if at all) and how to use the space differently."

"Stefanacci, on the other hand, can strike you as the smartest student in the physics lab. In fact, she left a career as a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute to buy a bookstore that drew her like a velveteen rabbit through the business world’s version of the looking glass. ... Despite a recent 10 percent downturn in revenue, Stefanacci is defiantly bullish on the future of what she likes to call a “curated bookstore,” a passionate marriage of emporium and museum."

"mifiction is an exciting new concept in publishing interactive fiction for mobile phones for the teenage market.

"Regarding the tablet and Apple’s rumored future as a merchant of content, here’s something I’d like: An easy way for people who write, draw, play, and combine all of these, to publish their work to a simple, popular, digital store serving a device ideal for reading; a publishing equivalent of the App Store." [via: http://bookfuturism.com/?q=content/digital-lulucom]

"More than any other animal, we humans constantly reshape our environment. We also have an exceptionally long childhood and especially plastic young brains...At this very moment, if you are under 30, you are much more likely to be moving your eyes across a screen than a page. And you may be simultaneously clicking a hyperlink to the last “Colbert Report,” I.M.-ing with friends and Skyping with your sweetheart...he ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library...surely, in the end, the story of the reading, learning, hyperlinking, endlessly rewiring brain is more hopeful than sad." [See also: http://bookfuturism.com/?q=content/future-reading-brain AND http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4636]

"Will eBooks push volumes with paper pages off the shelves for good? They're defined as "an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a personal computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose". So, they have the weight of one book but contain hundreds of volumes - but they don't feel like a book.

"I used to work in a bookstore and often parents would ask me how they could get their children to read more. Always, my first question was "what was the last book you read?". Unvariably, the return answer was "Oh, I don't read." <insert head in doorway, slam door hard until rendered unconscious.> That is one reason I was happy to find this site. ... So, we return to the question at the top. How do we get children to read more? We have to focus on the children because it is already too late to convince the latest generation to hit twenty that reading is a singular, important and valid experience itself. This leads to two points:

"The Book Works intends to spend a lot of time visitng Bookfuturism. We encourage you to do so, too. Our interests are philosophical but also very, very practical. We want to survive, we want to adapt, we want to stick with you (and vice versa) through the next several decades. If we are inspired enough, we may try out some ideas in a project that I'm calling "Bookfuturism: A Case Study"."

"Early in his career, Mau began to consider the idea that everything a business does matters; that every action communicates a message to the world and also has consequences on some level...saw...compartmentalised thinking as standard practice in business, & felt that it allowed industry to wreak havoc on the world...Study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Mau has always believed that a design studio should be a place of study & that designing should be an exercise in lifelong learning. Mau recommends making your own design studio, wherever it may be, into an environment that encourages learning. Surround yourself with ideas; stock the place with books. Just don't spend too much time arranging the bookshelf...new iterations of Massive Change idea...network of schools, or "centres for massive change"...franchise concept of massive change to universities or companies, enabling them to set up their own design/innovation labs using Mau's methodologies"

"Bookfuturism.com is a digital commons and multi-user blog open to anyone interested in the future of reading. It's also a social network for bookfuturists - men and women who believe that books, bookshops, libraries, publishers, newspapers, authors, and readers have a future -- albeit one that may be radically different from the present -- and who want to participate in that future."

"AN IDEA. I have an idea! ... More to the point — book­fu­tur­ists. I love it because the first word mod­i­fies the sec­ond as much as the other way around. A futur­ist (in the orig­i­nal sense) wants to burn down libraries. A book­fu­tur­ist wants to put video games in them. (And he wants one of those video games to be Lego Ham­let.) A book­fu­tur­ist, in other words, isn’t some­one who purely embraces the new and con­signs the old to the rub­bish heap. She’s always look­ing for things that blend her appre­ci­a­tion of the two. (The book­fu­tur­ist might be really into steampunk.) The book­fu­tur­ist is deeply dif­fer­ent from the two peo­ple he might oth­er­wise eas­ily be mis­taken for — the tech­no­fu­tur­ist and the book­ser­v­a­tive. Tech­no­fu­tur­ists and book­ser­v­a­tives HATE each other. Book­fu­tur­ists have some affec­tion for each of them, even if they both also drive him nuts. What do I mean by “tech­no­fu­tur­ists” and “book­ser­v­a­tives”? Well, I can show you."

"How will my book­store evolve over the next sev­eral decades? How can I retain the essence of what I do — and how the store serves the com­mu­nity? It’s sound­ing like the cur­rent model will be obso­lete pretty soon, at least in terms of finan­cial via­bil­ity. I can’t tell at this point how the Amer­i­can Book­sellers Asso­ci­a­tion is going to help us tran­si­tion to the near future, but I doubt there will be any rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes — they are advo­cates for too many indies to try any­thing too rad­i­cal too quickly. As for me, I’m plan­ning to stick around and fol­low your con­ver­sa­tions, per­haps try out an idea or two, and attempt to fash­ion a model that will fly in the real world. Maybe I’ll start a blog on the store web­site: Book­fu­tur­ism: A Case Study."

"key point seems to be that book­store patrons today are kind of like Repub­li­can Party — almost every­one who hasn’t given up on the project alto­gether is a zealot. To stay alive, book­stores need to fos­ter their com­mu­ni­ties & har­ness that zealotry, mak­ing sure that they don’t lose a gen­er­a­tion of future zealots sim­ply because they didn’t show up. I like Doctorow’s for­mu­la­tion: “In that world, book­sellers become a lot more like blog­gers who spe­cial­ize in all things book­ish — wun­derkam­mer­ers who stock exactly the right book for the right peo­ple in the right neighborhood.” Now this actu­ally loses book­stores the pure democ­racy argu­ment. It will no longer be the case that book­stores are the only places offer­ing sal­va­tio — er, I mean, books. Book­stores might not be Catholic churches, where every­one is wel­come — but could be our hard, thrifty Puri­tan churches, whose mem­bers go out into world & demon­strate their sal­va­tion through their worldly works."

"The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support...All of which is to say that trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try."