⤡ 04.01
Paper involves many senses, mainly touch, smell and sight. Touch tells you the type of information that you’re
reading when you turn the pages (rough for text books or xeroxes, smooth for magazines and illustrated books).
The smell of paper can tell you how old an item of information is (inky for recently printed and mouldy or dusty for older texts).
The colour of pages can tell you their age. The paper that turns yellow show its old age, but it takes decades to take
this
degenerative process. The electronic media are very focused on sight. You can guess the type and age of information mainly by
the technology implied, like the resolution and number of colours for the digital pictures,
or the graphic style used.
⤡ 04.02
O livro, como
território de especulação, oferece-se ainda como
a materialização do
cruzamento do imaginário e cultura literária, da estrutura
e processos da escrita, até à
especialização do léxico gráfico de paginação e tipografia (assume a macro-escala
da escrita à micro-escala da letra).
⤡ 04.03
Another important characteristic of paper
is the ‘repeatability’ of traditional print. Reading
a magazine or a book means being part of a community of customers all reading exactly the same content, so they can
all share a single reference. As Marshall McLuhan noted in Understanding Media: “Repeatability is the core of
the mechanical principle that has dominated our world, especially since the Gutenberg technology. The message of the
print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability.”
⤡ 04.05
⤡ 04.04
The problem here is that these are all arguments about the physical book: about its physicality.
And while traditional books are physical objects, that’s not the core of our relationship with them.
The truth is that books are essentially not physical objects, but temporal ones.
This is what one aspect of the life
of a book looks like: advert, through the reading experience, and out the other side as a souvenir. Just one possible
timeline, but a powerful one. The ebook as it stands only caters (poorly) to that bit in the middle, which unfortunately
is also
a black hole in publishers’ understanding, an area we’ve always been strangely incurious about.
So the real problem with the ebook as it stands is that
it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of
cognitive dissonance.
⤡ 04.06
And so paper may be seen
as a conceptual ‘conductor’, able to transfer the metaphorical ‘energy’
it contains, through the gestural act of passing the printed product from one person to the next.
⤡ 04.07
A newspaper or magazine can be folded for convenient transport, can be dropped down the stairs without disastrous consequences, can be cut up for clippings, can be re-used for many different purposes. Do all these features suddenly become obsolete, simply because the ethereal nature of the online environment does not include them? Perhaps. But hundreds of years of reading and handling habits can’t be discarded just like that.
⤡ 04.08
In fact, the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers. Thanks to Google,
scholars are able to search, navigate, harvest, mine, deep link, and crawl (the terms vary along with the technology)
through millions of Web sites and electronic texts. At the same time, anyone in search of a good read can pick up a printed
volume and thumb through
it at ease, enjoying the magic of words as ink on paper.
No computer screen gives satisfaction like
the printed page. But the Internet delivers data that can be transformed into a classical codex. It already has made
print-on-demand a thriving industry, and it promises to make books available from computers that will operate like ATM
machines: log in, order electronically, and out comes a printed and bound volume. Perhaps someday
a text on a hand-held
screen will please the eye as thoroughly as a page of
a codex produced two thousand years ago.
⤡ 04.09
Another intrinsic characteristic of print, besides its tactile quality, is the persistence of its physical presence. The act of leaving documents on a desk physically and visually ‘saves’ a work in progress.
Holding a printed object in one’s own hands, or seeing
it on a bookshelf, remains
an essential experience in
(at least some parts of) our cultural environment.
And the ‘balance of power’ between print and digital
(if we still assume the end result to be some kind of printed product) seems now to lie with one technology which,
more than any other, is allowing the printed page to survive the ‘digitisation
of everything’: print on demand.
⤡ 04.10
Print does have a number of unique characteristics which are yet to be superseded by anything else.
The first of these characteristics is the way print uses space.
The space taken up by printed materials,
whether in the shape of document folders, stacks of printed pages on a table, or a library of shelves filled with books,
is real and physical. This is entirely different from something existing only on a screen, since it relates directly to
our physical space, and to a sensorial perception developed over
(at least) thousands of years.
⤡ 04.11
We can encapsulate what stands out here
by using the term 'aura'. We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of
art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura. The process is symptomatic; its significance points beyond the
ream of art. Even with the most perfected reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art —
its unique existence in the place where it is now. But it is on that unique existence and on nothing else that the history
has been played out to which during the course of its being it has been subject.
That includes not only the changes it
has undergone in its physical structure over the course of time; it also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership
through which
it may have passed. The genuineness of
a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation
that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.
⤡ 04.12
Functions are are not the same as formal features. The activity of page turning is not the same as the binary structure
of either the two-page opening or the recto-verso relations
of paper pages.
⤡ 04.13
There is, consequently, a paradoxical development: Media richness, multimediality, tactility has become the domain of print. Artists' books are becoming mainstream and the paradigm for the whole book publishing industry. They are now a graphic design genre, taught at specialized schools such as Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. [In the recent past, publications like Dexter Sinister/dotdotdot and F.R. David have been indicators of the medium of artists' printed matter being taken over by graphic designers.] At the same time, it's a sure sign that print is moving from mainstream use to a boutique niche of material fetishism. What has emerged is an entropy of print: in the age of electronic publishing, all print books strive to become coffeetable books, often with warm, fuzzy, 'unbound' characterics.
⤡ 04.14
But the types of interaction made possible by paper are not yet available through new technologies
(nor vice-versa, for that matter). There is still no electronic device which reproduces all the characteristics of paper:
being lightweight, foldable, manipulable according to various reading activities, easily shareable with a small group of
people interacting with each other simultaneously using
a single medium, and being able to easily contain very different
types of content, all instantly generated by hand, or juxtaposed with prepared (reproduced) content.In fact, it seems much
easier to digitally simulate the limitations of paper than its strengths – and this is unlikely to change any time
soon. For example, the ‘readability’ of paper seems very important to us: most people still choose to print a
long document and read it on paper, rather than read it on a screen. So not only did the paperless office
fail to happen,
but the production and use of paper, both personal and work-related, and generally speaking the printed medium, have
actually increased in volume. Paradoxically, paper has even significantly contributed to spreading the culture and
consciousness of the new media. Paper is persistent, as is the ink printed upon it. Printed paper stays around for a
very long time, and its content doesn’t change at the click of a button.
⤡ 04.15
Like appropriation. How do you write your name in an ebook? How do you have that same sense of ownership
as you do with
a traditional book.
We spend a lot of time with these individual texts – per-unit consumption time, books are real
companions. We go on journeys with them. It’s important to maintain that connection. This process should be more
visible. It’s visible in paper books when we crack the spine and dogear chapters and fray and tear the pages and
scribble in the margin.
This is real metadata, this is where our experience of the book lives.