From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 19:40:56 -0600

I would note that Jim's #2 is what Robert Darnton envisioned in his
NYRB essay "The New Age of the Book" (March 1999) and sought to have
implemented through the Mellon-supported Gutenberg-e and ACLS
Humanities Ebook projects. One of the lessons from those projects is
that this new kind of "book" is terribly expensive to produce if every
new one has to be created de novo, without developing templates that
can be used for enough books of this type to make their production
economically feasible. I cover some of this story in my essay "A
Post-Mortem for Gutenberg-e" in Against the Grain (January 2009):
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr53k

Sandy Thatcher


> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 11:09:40 -0700
>
> Rick, Thanks for your question about dismissive reference to current
> "ebooks".  I'll try to be brief.
>
> There are many publishers and vendors who provide today digital
> representations of books, usually works where there coexist a print
> version and a digital version.  The digital representations known to
> me vary in my judgment from failures to dismal failures.  First, they
> do not successfully reproduce the functionality of print books.
> Second, they are licensed to libraries on terms that most commonly
> involve the deliberate further crippling of what functionality they
> have or could easily have in order to sustain the business model of
> the publisher and/or vendor.  These things are commonly spoken of as
> "ebooks", a term to which I regularly object (as you saw) because I
> believe their failures of functionality are too egregious to be
> accepted.   Attaching a playing card with a clothespin to the wheel of
> my bicycle to counterfeit the noise of an internal cumbustion engine
> does not make it a motorcycle.
>
> I believe four kinds of progress are needed:  (1) A better and
> standard format for the digital representation of existing printed
> books, e.g., for mass digitization projects, where we assume that the
> original format is determinative and needs to be reproduced as well as
> possible; flat file PDFs have their virtues but the only digital
> advantage they bring is network transmissibility.   (2) A better and
> standard format or set of formats for representing new work in digital
> form, with or without the option of creating a separate printed
> version of the same argument.  In this case, there needs to be high
> functionality in matters of notes, links, images, embedded media, and
> the like.  In this case, "book" is a useful conventional name for
> bundling together and presenting argument and narrative in ways that
> take advantage of the possibilities of new media without being
> constrained by being the e-representation of an old media artifact.
> (3) Significantly better business models and practices for delivering
> this content to users and especially library users without the
> deliberate crippling that now occurs.  (4) As I indicated in my
> posting this week, work on metadata and discoverability, heavily
> dependent on standards, is also essential.
>
> An historical aside:  Kindle's format works reasonably well for novels
> and other material where a single line of discourse, usually
> narrative, runs from page 1 to page xxx and where the only
> functionality required is to see the words as written in sequence,
> "turning pages" one at a time.  That format works as reasonably well
> as the papyrus scroll did in antiquity, and of course there is a mass
> market for such products, allowing Amazon to settle for what it has
> created.  No existing format known to me, however, has the same
> functionality as the codex book had at an early state of its history,
> say the sixth century of the common era.  That is the behindhandedness
> we must overcome.
>
> I'm grateful to the other posters for pointers to some good work now
> going on, and I would say that the JSTOR Reimagining the
> Monograph project seems to have laid out the desiderata quite well.
> We have a long way to go.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Arizona State University
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 6:50 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>  From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
>>  Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:44:16 +0000
>>
>>  Hi, Jim -
>>
>>  I'm interested in your phrase "what publishers and libraries persist
>>  in calling 'ebooks.'" I get the impression that you're suggesting
>>  "ebooks" is the wrong term for the things to which you're referring.
>>  Am I mistaken - and if not, can you expand on that?
>>
>>  ---
>>  Rick Anderson
>>  Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
>>  Marriott Library, University of Utah
>>  [log in to unmask]