"I Read Where I Am. Exploring New Information Cultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Various)

3. From Books to Texts – Andrew Blauvelt

It took about 300 years for the codex (the book as a set of bound pages) to rival the popularity of scrolls and another 300 years to replace it completely. This easy to read, efficient, durable, compact, portable, and randomly-accessible format multiplied with the invention of the printing press and endured for the next 1400 years. In 2010, Google estimated that there are about 130 million unique books in the world. In 2011, Google had scanned more than 15 million books and planned to have all known books scanned by the end of the decade. In 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched as the first collection of digitally formatted texts (what we now refer to as eBooks). In 2011, many booksellers reported that eBook sales surpassed their hardback equivalents for the first time. It has taken only 40 years for digital texts to rival printed books.

In a reversal of the publishing process, digitization converts an image of a book page back into language – searchable, retrievable, scalable, and translatable text. This linguistic alchemy transforms atoms into bits, the fixed materiality of a book into fungible texts. In the future, most designers will be creating reading experiences not book designs. However, the codex survives for much longer than we think. To paraphrase Kenya Hara, the physical book becomes an information sculpture – a unique, haptic, three-dimensional reading experience. Counterculture guru Stewart Brand once remarked that information wants to be free, but he also noted that it wants to be expensive because it can be valuable. In the future books will be more expensive while eBooks will be ubiquitous – their texts having already been liberated from the codex will want to be free.

Andrew Blauvelt is Curator of Architecture and Design at the Walker Art Center , Minneapolis .