Print is BLANK

As part of having my grad students introduce themselves at the start of the class, I asked them to fill in the blank in the following statement: Print is ______.

The classes are a mix of returning and new grad students, so I was interested in seeing if there were going to be a range of answers. What the students answered were surprising.  Most of them still believe in the primacy of print. It can be "evolving" or "changing" but they don't see it going away. There were a few other students who viewed it as an essential format, but a format nonetheless.

I think my favorite response was that Print is something older people worry about. There's is a lot to unpack in that statement. Why are older people worried about it? Why aren't younger people worried about it?  It doesn't hint at if there should be a worry but identifies a dividing line in different methods of thinking.

Here are the answers from my students:

Print is _______

• Not going away.
• Evolving.
• Changing.
• An art form.
• Another format.
• Beautiful.
• My life.
• Stubborn.
• Something older people worry about.
• Never ever, ever, ever going to die.
• Everlasting.
• Form, not function.
• Preferred.
• In flux.
• Alive and well.
• An amazing medium.
• Addictive.
• Useful.
• Relevant.

A few brief thoughts on information environmentalism

1.

Over the past year I have seen my consumption of information slow down. I've gone from daily visits to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn to weekly or monthly visits. I found no real reason for the visits. It's not like I was contributing anything meaningful to a conversation, nor was I finding any useful information about friends and family.

2.
At the same time I was uncoupling from social networks, I was also reading several books that I assumed were in opposition to my general outlook, but were worthwhile books that deserved a close read. Two of those books, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age* and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, were dealing with these issues as well. Both are worth reading if you're at all interested in how our culture views it's relationship with the web. But in both books, the authors took time to talk about how they found it hard to turn off the machine and had to impose internet-free or computer-free time at home. When I was reading this it struck me as odd. I understood the parallel of limiting TV consumption, but would we feel the same about book and magazine consumption? And do adults really need these limits? I understand why boundaries must be set for children and teenagers, but adults can't power down devices? Too much of a good thing....

3.
This past weekend I was at the Chihuly exhibit at the MFA with my parents and wife. First impression- "ooh, pretty glass. Lots of pretty glass." Then we started noticing the flashes. People were trying to photograph the glass with their flashes turned on. Then we noticed that people were photographing every single display using their cameras and phones. Almost to the point where they were no longer admiring the pieces and spending their time taking photographs. It felt as if people were there to capture the art but without the experience. By the third room it was apparent no one was "being here now" and the photos were being used to capture the information so that they could process it later (I think my moment came when I noticed people were photographing the Navajo blankets that lined a wall. Blankets that can be found in thousands of homes across the United States (Been out to the Southwest? Have a blanket/ rug? A similar one was probably on the wall). The exhibit reminded me of the concept of information environmentalism, something Carr and Powers alluded to in their book, but never made a strong case for it, other than as a personal responsibility.

So what?

I guess I'm putting these thoughts down here because it's something that we need to keep in mind when writing blog posts and uploading photos and tweets. How much of this is necessary and how much is ephemera? How can we improve the signal to noise ratio? Should we improve the ratio or let more noise in? Who gets to decide and how are we going to store this in any meaningful way? And how will access be provided that cuts through the noise? If we are to take our consumption of information as part of a bigger ecology, are we destroying it with every tweet and new Facebook profile picture? Does it matter all that much? And is all this consumption actually speeding up the "process of dumbening?"


*Okay publishers, I know you can't really control Amazon's pricing on all editions, but the Kindle edition of the book is currently two dollars more than the bargain priced hardcover and almost three dollars more than the paperback. And that's with Amazon's discounts applied to list price.

iRiver Story and Google Books

So Google has announced that iRiver is releasing a $140 device that will be connected to Google's E-book program.

So, is this the Google Books version of the Kindle?

Let's look at the specifications from iRiver's site:

1. $140 for 2 gigs (Kindle is $114 with ads, $140 without for 4 gigs)


2. USB


3. SD card slot (Kindle no longer has SD slot)


4. Wifi only (same as Kindle)


5. 6-inch display (Same as Kindle)


6. Keyboard (same as Kindle)


7. displays PDF, Epub, TXT, FB2, DJVU, MS office files and image files (Kindle right now doesn't support Epub and uses MOBI, instead. Also provides audiobook support).

Some comments:

1. It's only 2GB compared to 4GB for the same price


2. The specs page is one of the only I've seen that outlines a comics viewer, but doesn't handle CBZ and CBR files.


3. Using Adobe Reader Mobile so there's DRM control, but it's no different than most of the other non-Amazon devices

Here's my biggest concern- both iRiver and Google are promoting this device as the reader for their book store. It's being pitched as the easiest way to reader over 3 million books for free from the Google Book project. The epub version of those books are straight files from the OCR conversion of the PDFs. They have not been proofed and lead to a horrible reading experience. As much as I like the idea of having a reader that ties into one of the greatest online libraries in the world, that library's content is in PDF form, the text and Epub form are wretched. Geoff Nunberg has been rallying against Google's lack of quality control on these books for some time. Laura Miller also has an article in Salon from 2009 that looks at these concerns as well. I haven't seen a vast improvement in Google Books since these articles were published. Try searching for "Publisher's Weekly" in Google Books, there are several volumes that have been scanned and are available. Or just go find your favorite classic in a free version and look at the pure text version (Here's a link to the pure text version of a conversion of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, look at the table of contents in pure text form and think about how you would feel seeing this after paying for a reader to read this.)

Return from the wilderness...

18 months since my last post.

18 months of quiet contemplation on the mountain top of digital publishing.

18 months of watching publishers stumble and trip and rise over digital publishing and changes in the market.

18 months of new devices- tablets, e-readers, phones that allow the reading of books on their screens.

18 months of new lawsuits and still no resolution to the Google lawsuit.

18 months.

Okay, maybe I haven't really been alone in the wilderness watching the world change like some monk watching the seasons change from a small window. If anything the past 18 months have been a hectic run. I got the electronic publishing concentration up and running in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department at Emerson College. Taught 8 classes, including three new ones that focused on digital publishing and e-books. Guided students in independent studies on podcasts, digitizing heavily illustrated books, creating wordpress blogs for food writers and an investigation into how these new digital tools can further some of the concepts outlined by the Oulipo school. And that was just the class stuff.

Anyway, I feel like I'm slowly coming back from the wilderness and starting to turn back on posting and sharing between this blog and my twitter feed. Figure it's better than torturing friends and family with talk about digital publishing and publishing in general

New feature: blast from the past

One of my big goals this summer is to organize and archive what I've been doing at Emerson since I started teaching an Electronic Publishing Overview course there in 2007. Most of the material created for the class exists within a transparent bubble for that class. I hope to add the syllabi and class assignments that were originally posted behind the protected gates of webCT to an Emerson site for everyone to see. I will also start posting other material I can to an Emerson site so that students and other interested parties will have access to what has been developed in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson (more on that in July).

I also wanted to start reposting and saving some of the blog posts my students have contributed to the class over the years. I've decided to repost the complete text with a link to the class blog. Why? I'm not sure how long Emerson will maintain older blogs for classes. Theoretically they should exist forever as they were published documents, but realistically does Emerson want sites that haven't been updated in 3 years sitting on servers just in case someone searches for it?

Plus, it's worth it to collect these posts here to showcase what publishing students think and talk about when they are given an open forum.

The first post is from October 10, 2007 by Michelle Salzman. Michelle is currently the Web Writer/Project Coordinator at Boston University School of Public Health. Her portfolio can be found at msalz.wordpress.com.

Here's her post:

Web Two Point Uh Oh

Oh Wal-Mart, how interesting that your attempt to connect with your shoppers on a site like Facebook didn't go over so well as noted in Social Marketing Do's And Don'ts. It just goes to show how picky people are about their cheap home furnishings. Ok, what it really demonstrates is that you've got to pick your marketing channels more wisely. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are great venues to hook potential customers because people are already there to make connections. "A new friend? I love Target stuff! Why not?" However, you've got to be sure the audience your targeting to interact with you is your audience. I'm sure plenty of college students purchased their dorm stuff at Wal-Mart, no doubt. Still, for a company that regularly gets dogged for its business practices and how it treats its employees, Wal-Mart was really going out on a limb by opening itself up to people's comments by creating a back-to-school page for itself on Facebook:

Rather than mention the company's bargains and goods, many people—in fact, more than half who have posted—criticize the company's labor practices and corporate reputation. One posting reads: "Wal-Mart is toxic to communities and livelihoods." Another notes: "We don't support this company's use of a space for social networking to further horrendous business practices."

Ouch.

Wal-Mart's response: "We recognize that we're facilitating a live conversation and we know that in any conversation, especially one happening online, there will be some positive posts and some not so favorable. We welcome them all."

I guess if you're going to take the plunge into interactive web marketing, you've got to expect drowning is an option.

Originally published at the Fall 2007 Electronic Publishing Overview Blog at Emerson College.

Summer Reading and Prep

Time to set the bar.

For the Fall semester I will be teaching my graduate level Electronic Publishing Overview course, my undergraduate level Electronic Publishing Overview course and a new course on web development for grad students in the Masters in publishing program. There's a lot that need to be done over the summer since I need to update the overview classes and finalized the web development class. I also want to build web pages for all the sites as I tried it this semester and I think it worked really well.

As part of my prep, I'm giving myself a reading list to help enhance the lectures and maybe take the labs to a next level. I want to post this to keep track of the list and to offer some transparency on how I'm developing the classes. I wanted to be more transparent in my classes to help students go beyond the class, but it turns out transparency is more time consuming than I thought.

The list:

• Learning JavaScript, 2nd Edition
• A Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML: Harness the Power of XML to Automate your Print and Web Workflows
  
• CSS Cookbook, 3rd Edition (Animal Guide)
• Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition
  
• Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)
  
• Pro CSS Techniques
• Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics
• Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, Special Edition
• Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))

I'm hoping one of these will stand out as a possible new text as some of the feedback from students this year was that our textbook wasn't the greatest and felt a bit dated. I also need to start reading up on CS5 as they are installing it in the lab this summer (and maybe my office computer), so that my exercises are trouble-free (slight differences frustrate students as I learned from developing exercises on CS3 and seeing small differences on CS4 in class. Not the time to notice them.)