From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 17:43:46 -0500

Yes, as Jim says, we now have a choice of reading books in a wide
variety of formats on a wide variety of different platforms. But,
basically, the book has remained what it has always been since the age
of Gutenberg, viz., a linear document with a beginning, middle, and
end. The advent of new technology has done little to change this.
There are two exceptions, both related and both originally funded by
Mellon: the ACLS Humanities Ebook Project and Gutenberg-e. Both were
inspired by Robert Darnton, who wrote about a new type of
multilayered, multidimensional, interactive document in his classic
NYRB essay "The New Age of the Book" (March 1999), which can be freely
accessed by Googling the title.

The first of these projects focused on works by senior scholars, the
other on revised dissertations. The latter was operated by Columbia
University Press, the former by a separate entity that drew upon
participation by some twenty presses.  The ACLS project was more
successful financially than Gutenberg-e, mainly because it
incorporated backlist titles in newly digitized form.  Gutenberg-e
struggled for a variety of reasons, as I pointed out in this article
in Against the Grain:

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr53k#.VRh6izvF9q4.

(One reason is that book reviews of professional journals insisted on
having a hard copy of an online work that had no exact print
counterpart.) But both served to pave the way toward a different kind
of future. It would appear, from the description of these two new
Mellon-funded initiatives, that that future has arrived. Better late
than never.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 06:54:06 -0700
>
> Three different messages cross my screen and seem to speak to each other.
>
> First, study of what is actually happening with the academic book in
> particular in a time of many formats, changes in reading practices,
> and abundant distractions.
>
> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/03/24/the-academic-book-of-the-future/
>
> Second, reports of funding for two well-admired institutions to take
> the hard work of production forward.
>
> http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/22771-mellon-funds-u-m-press-collaboration-to-create-new-ecosystem-for-digital-scholarship
>
> http://library.stanford.edu/news/2015/01/stanford-university-press-awarded-12-million-publishing-interactive-scholarly-works
>
> Two related observations from this scholar-librarian:
>
> 1.  It's interesting that we are just in a moment in which we seem to
> have shrugged just a bit about format -- ok, fine, so we'll read them
> in hardcover, softcover, Kindle, web, PDF we might print out,
> whatever.  That does seem to describe practice and I'm perfectly happy
> to say that I embody it -- I'll read whatever I read however seems,
> unreflectively, to be most convenient to me, a convenience driven by
> availability, price, accident, and whimsy.  OK, fine, but there's lots
> of reasons to think that *how* we read is not a matter of
> indifference, that the way we read, what we retain, and what we can do
> with what we've read will differ widely based on format and reading
> practice.  There's something happening here and just at the moment
> many people aren't particularly paying attention or making
> well-informed choices.
>
> 2.  There's a larger story I've not seen written, where I think we're
> already in chapter 6.  As the media change and as the reading
> practices change and as the business models change, it seems obvious
> that the books we actually produce and consume will be changing.  If
> even university presses need to work harder to sell books, if everyone
> has too much to read, and if everyone is reading their books and
> journal articles while *also* reading blog postings and tweets, it
> would seem likely that the nature of the things written and published
> as "scholarly books" will be changing.  Anecdotally, I think I see
> that's true.  Has it been studied carefully and made sense of?
>
> Together my observations say that what Michigan and Stanford
> are doing is quite important and quite non-trivial.  It's not a question of
> migrating formats and migrating business models *only*, but a question
> of what we are doing when we read and write scholarly work and therefore
> what the forms of production and consumption might be.  McLuhan said
> the content of a new medium was an old medium:  so we've tried for
> the "e-book". Are we now ready for the electronic "post-book"?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU