Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) correspondent Judith Rosen (@Judith2dogs) reports on the conference Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book (#unbound) held May 3-4 at MIT.
The symposium, organized by two postdoctoral fellows in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, Amaranth Borsuk (@amaranthborsuk) and Gretchen E. Henderson, lingered most on what forms the book might take.
The answer varied from Christian Bök’s (@christianbok) The Xenotext, an attempt to genetically engineer a bacterium to store a poem in its genome, to Nick Montfort’s computational poem, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, to Bob Stein’s SocialBook, a post-print publishing platform that allows users to share comments and drawings on books and articles read in Web browsers.
James Reid-Cunningham, associate director for digital programs and preservation at the Boston Athenaeum, a private membership library, was the only speaker to proclaim the book dead, specifically the reference book. “Books that carry data will be dead; the phone book is already dead,” he said, and drew parallels to other “dead” technologies like the daguerreotype. Digitization may be replacing the codex, but one form that Reid-Cunningham thinks may be a future of the book is art books, which are in and of themselves works of art.
In looking at reshaping the book, Gita Manaktala (@sylviamath), editorial director of the MIT Press, the only traditional publisher on the roster, discussed the difficulties faced by scholarly presses. “Our authors live in a wiki world, where knowledge is produced quickly,” she said. Yet publishers have to figure out what content should be preserved. She also discussed the need for alternatives to peer reviews given that today’s authors put up content and solicit comments as they prepare their manuscripts.
Stein suggested that Manaktala use SocialBook, which is currently in beta, and invited her and all 240 attendees to sign up by emailing him at futureofthebook@gmail.com. The idea behind the platform, he explained, is that a book becomes a place where readers and authors can gather. “Google Docs, wikis, they’re great at letting you change the text. They’ve grafted social awkwardly on top of it. For us,” said Stein, “social is not a pizza topping, it’s the cornerstone of reading and writing.”
Also see imprint's (@printmag) "Between Page and Screen," The Institute for the Future of the Book, and Harvard’s History of the Book.
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