The New Art of Making Books

Ranks of papyrus scrolls stored in clay jars, handcrafted manuscripts bound in leather-covered boards, and machine-printed paper sheets bound as codices are quickly being joined by digital bits streamed into a variety of new containers.

Content as data flowing through the Internet from the “Great Source” or “Everyman” (or “Everywoman”) into a number of containers, assuming their volume, definitions, and properties. Pour the content into a thimble and call it instant messaging; a drinking glass, electronic mail; a pitcher, an electronic journal; a bucket, an ebook.

Decades ago, Mexican artist, writer, and critic Ulises Carrión wrote, “In the old art all books are read in the same way. In the new art every book requires a different reading.” Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2005), seems to agree. “By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits—attention, memory, the ability to follow threads, and so on—the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years,” he writes. “Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books.”

The next generation of readers

Today, many American children receive physically formatted ebooks before they are able to walk, much less read. Stores are filled with books masquerading as toys long before toddlers are entrusted with the traditional fragile medium of paper. These books for children and young adults often include embedded electronic chips, audiocassettes and discs, CD-ROMs, and even video games.

With companies like LeapFrog leading the development of “book” and “communication toys” for children, and TumbleBook.com providing “e-books for e-kids,” with its related puzzles, quizzes, and educational resources, it is unrealistic to believe that more sophisticated digital publications will not be demanded by children. The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) is addressing this issue worldwide, encouraging the creation of ebooks that can be easily accessed by children of many languages and cultures. Since its launch in November 2002, and with the help of children, teachers, and librarians, ICDL has created almost 900 books in 34 different languages.

The 2006 Horizon Report, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, also describes emerging technologies that will have significant impact in education within the next one to five years. These include social computing, personal broadcasting, multipurpose cell phones, educational gaming, augmented reality, enhanced visualization, and context-aware environments and devices. The report additionally describes key trends: dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes becoming ubiquitous; mobile and personal technology as a delivery platform for services of all kinds; consumers’ increasing expectations for individualized services, tools, and experiences and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning; and collaboration as critical across the range of educational activities.

Projects such as the 21-campus Visible Knowledge Project, which focuses on learning in technology-enhanced environments, and those described by the Teaching Learning and Technology Group demonstrate portions of the research done in higher education on new technologies in teaching and learning.

All multimedia, all the time

Teachers at all levels of the educational continuum are being asked to move from traditional forms of instruction to multimedia and active learning. Digital learning object repositories are quickly being established to aid them in their efforts. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), one of the best-known repositories, provides free teacher-created, peer-reviewed resources. It has been joined by such statewide projects as the California Virtual Campus Object Library, PEN-DOR (Pennsylvania Education Network Digital Object Repository), and Wisc-Online and internationally by Australia’s EdNA and Canada’s Careo repositories. The AES Education Store, on the other hand, was created to provide an outlet for authors to publish and sell their teaching materials.

Students are also being asked to incorporate multimedia into their work. Electronic theses and dissertations, first openly discussed in the mid-1980s, are a growing part of academic library collections. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), a web site developed by VTLS and NDLTD to increase awareness of student research for scholars, represents materials contributed by member institutions worldwide and was built to “increase availability of student research for scholars, empower students to convey a richer message through the use of multimedia and hypermedia technologies, and advance digital library technology worldwide.” The site also provides information on how universities might set up electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) programs and provides current research in digital libraries related to ETDs.

Electronic portfolio products are now being marketed to elementary schools as well as to institutions of higher education. Having the ability to create, store, and share multimedia work easily over an “educational career” and to then use it as an electronic résumé for potential employers or graduate schools drives students to become proficient in the use of multimedia creation tools. PowerPoint presentations are quickly being replaced by full-blown audio and video projects. Student web sites, blogs, and wikis are inspiring many campuses to offer programs that include “multimedia composition” or “digital writing across the curriculum.”

The new multiliteracy

While research studies such as the 2004 National Education Association (NEA) report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America indicate that less than half of Americans over the age of 18 now read novels, short stories, plays, or poetry and just 56.6 percent read a book of any kind in the previous year, the recently published Pew Charitable Trust’s literacy study shows that more than half of students at four-year colleges and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges lack the literacy skills to handle complex, real-life tasks. OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources indicates that college students have the highest rate of library use and make the broadest use of library resources, both physical and electronic.

Incorporating multiliteracies, a term created by the London Project over a decade ago to describe the different textual, visual, auditory, and kinetic learning styles we use to understand the complex interplay among text, images, video, and audio, is rapidly gaining acceptance in both the commercial and educational arenas. Authors and artists like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have gained new fame for their picture books, graphic novels, audiobooks, ebooks, and movies. Ebooks are more likely to be part of the solution rather than a symptom of the aliteracy problem. Rather than focusing solely on digitizing print text and worrying about redefining the term book, publishers of electronic materials should take full advantage of the multimodal learning styles that can be addressed by well-designed electronic publications. As artist Donna Leishman describes her intent in creating the ebook redridinghood, we are in “an attempt to battle against the missionary position of reading.”

After all, how many print books can sing to you or place the user in control of the content? How many allow the content to be emptied and refilled, including metadata, or tell their own stories in the voices of real characters? How many demonstrate techniques; picture anything in unmatched color; link to other resources; are distributed at the speed of light; sound out or spell each word or phrase; are made accessible to suit most everyone’s needs; or contain thousands of additional works in the same container?

Those containers are getting more and more fun to use. A 2004 OCLC report, Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers, examined the “unbundling of content” from traditional publishing and distribution methods, and noted “as the boundaries blur between content, technology and the information consumer…format now matters less than the information within the container.” Similarly, the OCLC symposium at the American Library Association 2005 Midwinter Meeting on “Gaming and the Significance of Information Literacy” shared how young people’s social interaction and technology skills are fusing work, play, and information seeking and use. James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan), states that video games “build into their designs and encourage...good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-­basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.” Although video games provide the examples for his argument, Gee’s book is really about reforming American education according to a set of 36 abstract learning principles demonstrated by the games described, which require complex thought and make substantial intellectual and often physical demands on their players. He studies such cognitive activities as how one grasps meaning, follows a story line, identifies with characters, and perceives the virtual and physical world. Many of today’s ebook authors could learn much from these successful gaming colleagues.

Future functionality

Less well known may be the work of the standards organization for ebooks, formerly known as the Open eBook Forum and renamed the International Digital Publications Forum in 2005. It recently created a new Container Format Working Group to “help ensure interoperability of contained publications across Reading Systems” and “to reduce consumers’ fear of platform death.” Presentations at recent publishing conferences, such as BookTech and Buying and Selling eContent, address such themes as the identity crisis in the publishing community, cross-content publishing, multichannel marketing, exploring alternative media, and what to do when everyone is a publisher/aggregator. A June 13, 2005, National Public Radio report by Gloria Hillard noted that of the 195,000 books published in the United States last year, about 50,000 were self-published.

Other research worth noting includes MediaBASE, XMAS, and the PBOS (Processed Book Operating System, or Processed Book Open Source) Project. PBOS is described as having two parts: “content, not technology” and “technology, not content.” Its creators define a book as a mostly static document and its annotations as the means of including “process,” or anything that adds lexical, semantic, or procedural value to the book. PBOS provides a context for adding this value to a web-based document “through multiuser comments, various kinds of connections, and analytical and vis­ualization tools.”

XMAS, or the Cross Media Annotation System, is being developed under the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative. The MIT Shakespeare Project has been developing tools to study and compare Shakespeare texts, images, and films for over a decade. XMAS combines online discussion and text editing with video sequences on DVD to provide a range of new teaching and learning techniques in which “text, video, and images can be studied, excerpted, and shared remotely in more flexible ways than in the past.”

A similar software application, MediaBASE, was developed at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. It allows the “casual user” to create, share, and exchange media objects and compositions with “the speed and informality of text-centric technologies such as blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, discussion forums, and email.” Built around an associatively indexed database, the software allows “these media 'conversations’ or 'dialogs’ to transcend their original context and take on relevance for subsequent users of the system.”

In January 2002, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center became PARC Inc., an independent firm, continuing the research work started by Xerox in the 1970s that includes many elements of modern computing: computer-generated color graphics, the mouse, WYSIWYG text editor, Ethernet, and laser printer. Now, PARC’s researchers are working on 3-D ebooks, hoping to find a “sensible balance among important factors such as visual realism, readability, interactivity, and scalability,” and on Scent­Highlights, which directs a reader’s attention toward the most relevant passages within a text using computing and psychology modeling so readers can be more effective “skimmers.”

With the rise of electronic literacy supplementing traditional forms, librarians are in an ideal position to show the new generation of readers how content transcends form.