WWW.EYEMAGAZINE.COM/BLOG/POST/THE-FORM-OF-THE-BOOK-4
I recall from my college years, writes Sean Murphy, in the mid-1990s the oft-discussed scenario where interactive platforms such as CD-Rom and the internet would soon spell the end of the print and therefore, by association, the book. I was, even then, slightly dismissive of the notion that the internet could ever replace the printed object, as the relative experience of the two is incomparable. It now seems that the proliferation of digital technologies has pushed designers to almost
overemphasise the materiality of books – by producing exquisite designs with sublime production values and clever binding – acutely aware of their tactile potential as objects. The web is no longer considered the mortal enemy of the book. Indeed, the publication of the Design et Museographie research programme run by l’École cantonale d’art de Lausanne in Switzerland is distributed via the department’s own micro site: http:// www.design-museographie.ch. A perfect example of how the internet and the world of printed matter can live symbiotically. The visitor to the site can download and print pertinent sections, or even the whole book. I was lucky enough to receive one of a limited run of 50 printed and bound by the college. I received the full collection of interviews, essays and pictorial PDFs (designed by Nicole Udry and Audrey Devantay), which had been laser-printed and bound together. The paper stocks are bog-standard printbureau: rough-as-hell copier paper for the
text; natural white for section introductions; eye-bleeding fluorescents in pink, yellow and green for the colour image sections; Swiss-bound using a black book tape and a natural white board cover. I was immediately bowled over by the acid image sections, which are like poweredup versions of the pastel office paper used by college administration departments the world over. The structure is unconventional, as it does not use regular folio numbering, the designers preferring to number each section as if it were a book in its own right – allowing for flexibility in choosing which sections to download and print. The overall feel of the design is one of an academic or governmental report, complete with flow diagrams and pixelated reference images grabbed from the internet. Elevated from the word-composed PhD thesis by the systemised yet sculptural typography, delicate binding and the informed use of materials – such as the fluorescent stocks – in a nicely overstated way. The book provides an antidote to the plethora of slicked-up, content-lite illustrated publications that dominate the shelves of art and design bookshops. It is raw, un-glossy, unapologetic, a beautifully laid-out reflection of the content, the quality and depth of which means the designers are not forced to revert to superfluous, expensive processes. One could argue that printing only one side of the sheet is perhaps, in these times of abject resourcefulness, a little wasteful but that would be missing the point. There are no overly optimistic print-runs, no makeready sheets, no wastage when collated or bound, no transportation, and no pulping of unsold copies. The content is delivered digitally and the user is left to decide how, or indeed whether, the book should be printed. The modest production, Web-based distribution and the strangely pumped-up visual language of academia are what make this book special. Now I have lived with the book for a while, I find that the fluorescent image sections are a little too souped-up, leaving an uncomfortable imprint on my retina. But, hey, if I don’t like it I could always do it differently myself.
THE FORM OF THE BOOK BOOK PUBLISHED BY OCCASIONAL PAPERS
SCANS FROM THE FORM OF THE BOOK BOOK
WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/BOOKS/BOOKSBLOG/2010/ MAR/09/ECOLOGICAL-EBOOKS
The recent announcement that Foyles are soon to launch the bebook is further proof (as if any were needed) that the e-reader bandwagon is well and truly rolling. News that the New York Times book review will soon be available in e-reader format, meanwhile, also points the way to an increasingly interesting future for what we used to know as the “print industry”. The ability to buy something I wouldn’t be able to get in a better format elsewhere (so long as the UK remains starved of the glory of the Sunday NYT delivery) even makes me think I might possibly find a use for an e-reader. Up until now, they’ve struck me as less pleasant than books, far more problematic in terms of copyright theft and – at least for personal use – rather decadent. They’re a big computer that can only read books and so, I’ve always assumed, a waste of resources. But a bit of research has led me to question even that assumption. I’ve only managed to find one report – on the Kindle (by The Cleantech Group) – but it backs up suggestions that so long as e-readers are used as book replacements rather than supplements, they soon start
to pay back in carbon terms. The report states that a book uses up “approximately 7.46 kilograms of CO2 over its lifetime” and that the Kindle produces “roughly 168 kg” during its lifecycle, making it “a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle.” There are still problems. Crucially, the report states: “Amazon declined to provide information about its manufacturing process or carbon footprint” – so we’re still really dealing with educated guesswork. I was also curious about whether the report has taken into account the role of books as “carbon sinks”. My theory was that books last a long time before they are destroyed – often longer than their source trees ... And even when they aren’t furnishing rooms they have a useful second life under the floor of motorways and similar. When I contacted the author of the report, senior research analyst Emma Ritch, she said: “While some of the carbon stored in the forest will remain stored in paper,
A PAPER MILL IN PANGKALAN KERINCI, SUMATRA. PHOTOGRAPH: SEBASTIEN BLANC/AFP
the majority will be emitted into the atmosphere. There is a significant amount of carbon stored in the soil, the roots of harvested trees, the usable saplings and other understory vegetation. These release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere when they decay, or when they are burned as energy sources for the pulp mill.” So it seems I’m – literally – barking up the wrong tree. Even wood sourced from sustainable forests uses a lot of energy (not to mention water) when it is being processed, and yet more when transported afterwards. (Books are heavy, after all.) Ritch also made the point that textbooks are often updated – and so become obsolete – every couple of years, showing another clear advantage to ebook readers. There are also plusses for academics ploughing through multiple journals and probably even for professional book reviewers. However, I parted company with Ritch’s positive view of e-readers when she suggested a further advantage: “the consumer who purchases an ebook often has the rights to use it on five or more devices, meaning multiple users within a household would not have to purchase multiple physical versions of a book.” I’d actually view that as a problem, as far as fiction goes. Five or more devices probably gives the ebook a lifespan of little more than 10 years if my experience with such machines is anything to go by – and that’s if you don’t share it. A book (so long as it stays together) can be shared with hundreds of people over hundreds of years. I also have concerns about the supply side. There’s no information available about the energy required to run Amazon’s “whispernet” and it’s hard to work out the amount involved in supplying other books for download. The internet is too often thought of as a cost-free resource in carbon terms – but it’s recently been suggested that Google alone produces as much as some nation states. Ritch suggested a good comparison would be that “a physical book purchased by a person driving to the bookstore creates twice the emissions of a book purchased online.” But of course, that depends on someone driving rather than walking to the shop. Nevertheless, I’m part-way convinced.
There are clear advantages to using e-readers in schools and academe. At home, I’m less sure – especially when you factor in side-issues such as the toxicity of the heavy metals used in ebook readers and their batteries. I also hesitate because the devices are so new we still know little about how they’re used. Here, I’m hoping an informal survey here might shed more light. So tell me: if you own an e-reader, how often do you use it? (Have you for instance topped off the 22.5 books The Cleantech Group require to break even with traditional books in carbon terms?) Are you buying fewer books? How long does your battery last? Have you had to replace it? Do these carbon savings seem realistic to you? And has that influenced your decision to buy one? I’d also be curious to know if other ebook agnostics are likely to be converted by the idea that they could be more environmentally friendly. I know it makes me waver. But then again, won’t an iPad be more useful? Even if that does mean my reading could be interrupted by emails … And you can’t throw the thing across the room when whatever you’re reading gets too annoying.
WWW.GREENKAMPONG.COM/DESIGN/CLEANTECH-GROUPREPORT-E-READERS-A-WIN-FOR-CARBON-EMISSIONS/
You can almost hear the trees breathing a sigh of relief and rooting for e-readers to sweep the world. For booksellers and magazine shops, this could mean the beginning of the end as the record stores such as Tower has gone bankrupt and others like HMV have closed several operations globally once the pirates and i-tunes stores took hold. With its low emissions and impressive storage of virtual books, e-readers make sense for the consumer and the environment. Only time will tell if electronic book readers are to become a new standard in the future. But the Cleantech Group takes an in-depth look at the environmental impact of the devices in its recent lifecycle analysis. The new study finds that e-readers could have a major impact on improving the sustainability and environmental impact on the publishing industry, one of the world’s most polluting sectors. In 2008, the U.S. book and newspaper industries combined resulted in the harvesting of 125 million trees, not to mention wastewater that was produced or its massive carbon footprint. The Cleantech Group’s report, The environmental impact of Amazon’s Kindle, suggests that e-readers are still a niche technology, with a little more than 1 million units sold to date. So they really haven’t had much impact on the environment, be it good or bad.
But with sales projected to see an uptick, reaching to 14.4 million in 2012, the report looks at the emissions that devices like the market leader, Amazon’s Kindle, could produce and prevent. The report indicates that, on average, the carbon emitted in the lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after the first year of use. The report, authored by Emma Ritch, states: “Any additional years of use result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO2 per year (the emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 books).” In the United States, Amazon currently holds a 45 percent market share of e-reader devices, with one main competitor Sony trailing at 30 percent. The Cleantech Group forecasts that e-readers purchased from 2009 to 2012 could prevent 5.3 billion kg of carbon dioxide in 2012, or 9.9 billion kg during the four-year time period. However, there are obstacles to overcome for the devices and their content to reach its full potential, the reports suggests. The publishing industry would need to put standards in place to help speed adoption of the technology. Reductions in emissions are also dependent on the publishing industry decreasing its production of physical books, according to the report. The report also encourages academic institutions to implement pilot testing of e-readers as a replacement to physical textbooks, citing schools such as Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University already leading the way.
WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/ENVIRONMENT/ETHICALLIVINGBLOG/2009/ JAN/12/CARBON-EMISSIONS-GOOGLE
Can two Google searches really produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling enough water in an electric kettle for a cup of tea? That’s what Alex Wissner-Gross, an environmental fellow at Harvard University, is claiming. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” says WissnerGross in forthcoming research about the environmental impact of computing, which calculates that every Google search produces 7g of CO2. “Google are very efficient, but their primary concern is to
NET GIANT GOOGLE IS CENTRAL TO OUR LIVES BUT IS IT ENERGY EFFICIENT? PHOTOGRAPH: AFP
make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy.” It should probably be noted at this point that Wissner-Gross is also the co-founder of Enernetics, and its associated website www.CO2stats.com, which, according to the Boston Business Journal, allows “websites to get analysis of how energy-efficient they are and sells carbon offsets to help them reach a neutral status”. So let’s first congratulate Wissner-Gross on getting himself and his company talked about all over the internet, including here. But does his claim stack up? Without any published data to hand it’s hard to tell. All Google is saying is that it is takes the issue seriously, but that “the energy used per Google search is minimal”. It adds: “”In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query.” (If this is true, it surely makes a mockery of Wissner-Gross’s claims as there’s no way an average computer uses as much power as an electric kettle when it’s boiling water.) So let’s do some crude sums based on what we know and what is being claimed. Google receives millions of search queries every day from all over the world. Estimates vary about quite how many queries it receives, but they seem to range from 200m up to 500m. Let’s, for the sake of argument, take the top figure as a worst-case scenario. If Wissner-Gross is correct then 3,500 tonnes of CO2 (500m x 0.000007 tonnes) are emitted every day through all of us performing Google searches. Or put another way, 1.28m tonnes a year. That’s about the same as Laos emits each year, the 151st biggest emitting country in the world. I’m torn between thinking that this sounds like an awful lot – “Shock: Google emits as much as a country!” – or whether it doesn’t sound too bad, given, for right or wrong, how integral Google now is to many of our lives. What is certain is that the environmental
impact of information technology as a whole is considerable and ever rising. A widely quoted figure is that the global ICT sector produces as much CO2 each year as the global aviation industry – about 2-3% of total global emissions. It is helpful, therefore, that Wissner-Gross’s claim is at least providing a needed spur to debating the ICT sector’s impact, and how best to reduce it. Ultimately, though, I suspect this particularly quotable nugget will have little impact on the searching habits of internet users. Nor should it, really. We can each monitor how much electricity our own computers use – and aim to keep it at a minimum – but it can only ever be Google’s responsibility about how much power its servers and related hardware use. Perhaps there’s even an argument for saying that internet searches have helped to reduce net emissions by greatly reducing the need to make physical journeys in search of information, say, a trip to the local library or bookshop? (NB: At least one cup of tea was consumed during the making of this blog.)
WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/TECHNOLOGY/BLOG/2010/ MAR/10/GOOGLE-ITALIAN-BOOK-SCAN-DEAL
Google and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage have reached an agreement to digitise up to a million out-of-copyright works at the national libraries in Florence and Rome, including some by Galileo. And it’s just two weeks after an Italian court gave three Google executives suspended prison sentences over a video of bullying on YouTube that had been removed once the company was told about it. Google is not only to work closely together with the Italian libraries, but also with the Italian ministry of culture – the first time that the search engine has had a government department a such a close partner on such a project. Google called it a “groundbreaking deal”. “The libraries will select the works to be digitised from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy’s most famous poets and writers,” says Google’s strategic partner development manager, Gino Mattiuzzo, in a blogpost announcing the deal. While the costs will be covered fully by Google, the company will pass the scans on. The books will be available to groups including the EU’s Europeana project, which already has scanned 6 million digital items of cultural value. “We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners,” says Mattiuzzo. Google has similar arrangements with Oxford University, Madrid’s Complutense University, the Bavarian state museum and others. However, it’s not clear whether Google is creating the world’s biggest library or the world’s biggest bookshop. Some fear the search engine is exploiting cultural heritage as a cheap context for advertising. Recently, a New York judge postponed a decision on whether the company should be allowed to display parts of books still in-copyright. Google on the other hand claims good intentions: “We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world’s books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius – like Shakespeare and Cervantes – are part of our human cultural history.”
WWW.THEBOOKSELLER.COM/FEATURE/ ARE-E-BOOKS-GREENER-PRINT.HTML
For a time, concerned about food miles, I only drank wine from Europe. Then a couple of years ago at a party for Green Profile, I got to talking about this with Duncan Clark, who co-founded the environment-focused imprint with Rough Guides founder Mark Ellingham. Clark told me that New Zealand wines are produced in a "clean and green" fashion and are often sent to the UK in container ships and bottled over here, thus perhaps giving them less of a carbon footprint than, say, wine from France that is bottled over there and shipped to the UK. Eco-conscious consumers face these sorts of dilemmas every day, the sort of electric handdryer versus paper towel debates (on that one, Al Gore recommends neither but waving your hands around in the air). But with the Amazon Kindle now available in the UK and the e-book market certain to rise, a vexing question UK consumers will certainly be asking themselves is this: are e-books greener than print? As often with these green debates, the answer is less than certain. A few recent reports from the US fall heavily on the "e is greener" side. In August, a study by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year. Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would "result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year"—the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books. The Cleantech Group forecasts that e-readers purchased in the US between 2009 and 2012 could prevent the production of 5.3bn kg of carbon dioxide in 2012, or 9.9bn kg during the four-year time period. Other implications But that study failed to explore a few of the issues. One is what difference is made to the carbon footprint of print books if publishers exclusively use Forest Stewardship Council or recycled paper. Another area it skims over is the long-term landfill implications of devices that are certainly not biodegradable and may contain toxic materials. And that leaves aside the social and environmental implications of "resource extraction", or the obtaining of raw materials—which more often than not come from developing countries. There is also the implication that the user will continue to use his or her Kindle for years. Given the increasing pace of technological improvements, in a year’s time the Kindle being sold now may look as ancient and as quaint as those briefcase-sized mobile phones from the 1980s. Will the people who buy them now, the bulk of whom are gadget obsessed early adopters, continue to plod along with their old devices when newer, sexier versions come on the market? Lastly, it should be emphasised that e-book devices, hooked up either wirelessly or through a PC to the internet, do use a not inconsiderable amount of energy. The Cleantech report does acknowledge this—and certainly a number of studies have shown that the dedicated e-reader is greener than reading books directly online from a compter—but it does not make any assumptions, good or otherwise, about where the electricity comes from. This can be crucial, according to a study done earlier this year by researchers at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology’s KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications. Looking into reading newspapers online or in print, the study found that
print and online newspapers could be comparable in their emissions, depending on the source of power used for the computers, how far trees have to travel to the paper plants, how far paper has to travel from plant to printer and a variety of other factors. The "e" versus "p" debate trundles on. One thing is for certain, if readers are truly looking for the greenest option, they should not buy a Kindle or print books; they should borrow them from their local library. But perhaps that is another debate.
WWW.PBS.ORG/MEDIASHIFT/2010/03/IS-DIGITAL-MEDIA-WORSE-FORTHE-ENVIRONMENT-THAN-PRINT090.HTML
Public opinion polls show that concern about the environment rises and falls based on the state of the economy and other factors, but concern about the negative impacts associated with using paper and printing continues to rise. Nothing captures the essence of these feelings more vividly than the signature line appearing at the foot of more and more emails: "Please consider the environment before printing this email." This seemingly well-intentioned call to action, as well as others like "Sign up for paperless billing, help the environment and save trees" confront consumers with a false dilemma and present a forced choice that may have unintended consequences. The false dilemma is: "By using paper to print your email or by receiving paper bills you are knowingly degrading the environment, destroying forests and/or killing trees." The forced choice is: "Eliminate your use of paper or feel like a guilty hypocrite." What’s implied is that digital media is the environmentally preferable choice and that print media is the environmentally destructive choice. But is it possible that digital media could be more destructive to the environment and a greater threat to trees, bees, rivers and forests in the United States than paper-making or printing? A heightened sense of awareness about the environment has developed in recent years. In particular, feelings of guilt and concern are on the rise about the use of paper and its alleged impact on the fate of our trees, forests and the environment. Are these feelings justified? The story of sustainable media is a “bad news/good news” story. The bad news is that the public’s concern about our forests and the environment is justified. The good news is that seeing beyond the green rhetoric and rethinking the lifecycle impacts of both print and digital media will play a major role in allowing us to enjoy forests and conserve our environment.
A PAPER MILL IN WASHINGTON
Digital Deforestation There is growing recognition that digital media technology uses significant amounts of energy from coal fired power plants which are making a significant contribution to global warming. Greenpeace estimates that by 2020 data centers will demand more electricity than is currently demanded by France, Brazil, Canada, and Germany combined. What is less widely known is that mountaintop-removal coal mining is also a major cause of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the pollution of over 1,200 miles of headwater streams in the United States. If your goal is to save trees or do something good for the environment, the choice to go paperless may not be as green or simple as some would like you to think. Digital media doesn’t grow on trees, but increased use of digital media is having a profoundly negative impact on our forests and the health of our rivers. Computers, cellular networks and data centers are connected to the destruction of over 600 square miles of forest in the U.S. One of the more
significant direct causes of deforestation in the United States is mountaintop-removal coal mining in the states of West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. America’s adoption of networked broadband digital media and “cloud-based” alternatives to print are driving record levels of energy consumption. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the electricity consumed by data centers in the United States doubled from 2000 to 2006, reaching more than 60 billion kilowatt hours per year, roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by 559,608 homes in one year. According to the EPA that number could double again by 2011. Chances are that the electricity flowing through your digital media devices and their servers is linked to mountaintop-removal coal from the Appalachian Mountains. The Southern Appalachian forest region of the U.S. is responsible for 23% of all coal production in the United States and 57% of the electricity generated in the U.S. comes from coal -- including the rapidly growing power consumed by many U.S. data centers, networks and consumer electronic devices. How Green Is Your Digital Media? To find out how much of the energy you use comes from mountaintop coal you can visit What’s My Connection to Mountaintop Removal? an interactive tool built by the nonprofit organization Appalachian Voices. By entering your ZIP code it allows you to see if the electricity you are buying came from a coal mine employing mountaintop removal. This map shows how electricity used in San Francisco through PG&E is linked to mountaintop-removal coal in West Virginia:
If you thought you were saving forests and protecting the environment by going paperless...think again. The real dilemma you face is that you may be doing more to cause environmental degradation and deforestation by going paperless than you think, and making responsible choices requires informed decisions and rational tradeoffs. Coal-powered digital media is destructive to the environment in many ways beyond deforestation. Coal fired power plants are responsible for 93% of the sulfur dioxide and 80% of the nitrogen oxide emissions generated by the electric utility industry. These emissions cause acid rain that is destroying red spruce forests in the Northeast and Appalachia, and killing brook trout and other fish species in the Adirondacks, upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains. According to a paper published in the journal Science, researchers found that recent scientific studies showed mountaintop coal mining does irreparable environmental harm. The researchers said their analysis of the latest data found that such mining destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests while also hurting fish and plant life. The widespread practice of mountaintop removal has been described as "strip mining on steroids" in which forests are clear-cut and topsoil is scraped away. Next, explosives up to 100 times as strong as ones that tore open the Oklahoma City Federal build-
ing blast up to 800 feet off the mountaintops and then dump tons of "overburden" -- the former mountaintops -- into the narrow adjacent valleys, thereby creating "valley fills." The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that mountaintop removal's destruction of West Virginia's forests buried over 1,500 miles of biologically crucial Appalachian headwaters streams, disrupted key nesting habitat for migrant bird populations and decreased migratory bird populations throughout the northeast United States. The Office of Surface Mining reports that more than 1 million acres of land in northern and central Appalachia were undergoing active mining operations as of 2004. In some areas of West Virginia, more than 25% of the land surface is under permit for current or future mountaintop removal.
and solar. When you purchase paper, you should consider if the brands you buy are investing in the development of renewable energy projects that employ sustainable forest biomass and close-loop water recovery processes that protect the quality of water in our rivers. This resource guide from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development can help you in choosing paper products. The Unseen Impacts Of Digital Media Just because we cannot see something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. While paper mills emit visible plumes of steam and waste paper can pile up visibly in our homes and businesses, the invisible embodied energy or "grey energy" used to manufacture digital technologies and the toxic e-waste associated with electronics
Go Tell It To A Mountain It's somewhat ironic that print media and the paper-making industry are so often targeted for "killing" trees while digital media is so often characterized as the greener "environmentally friendly" alternative. While its record is by no means perfect, the North American forest products industry has made great strides in the adoption of sustainable forestry and environmental performance certification practices. In addition, the majority of the U.S. paper industry's power and electricity needs are derived from renewable biomass that is sourced from sustainably managed forests. On the other hand, digital information technology's dependence on coal-powered electricity that is derived from mountaintop removal goes largely unreported. If you care about the environment and the health of forests you should become more informed about the energy sources used by both digital and print media. Research recently published by Bell Labs concluded that today's Information and Communication Technology (ICT) networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient than they are today. In fact, they can also be powered by forest bio-refineries that sustainably produce energy, biofuels, polymers, and paper with renewable forest biomass. Forest biomass can provide valuable baseload capacity for more intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind
are largely out of sight and out of mind, but their impacts can be profound. According to MIT researcher Timothy Gutowski (as quoted in Low-Tech Magazine), manufacturing a one kilogram plastic or metal part requires as much electricity as operating a flat screen television for 1 to 10 hours. And the energy requirements of semiconductor manufacturing techniques are much higher than that, up to 6 orders of magnitude (that’s 10 raised to the 6th power) above those of conventional
manufacturing processes. In addition to considering the way digital media can create new possibilities for a better world we also need to consider the less obvious impacts of the purchased energy, embodied energy, dark content and e-waste associated with the growing use of digital media. Informed Choices Save Trees Centuries ago the widespread adoption of paper and printing resulted in a spread of literacy that ended the dark ages, spawned a renaissance and changed our world for the better. Despite these advances, our environment now faces challenges on many fronts that call for a new literacy about the state of the environment and the “hidden� lifecycle impacts of the media choices we make. The widespread adoption of sustainable print and digital media supply chains can change our world again and help us to restore our environment. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to be misled by false dilemmas or deceived into making unsustainable choices, distal concerns about destruction of the environment and the decline our forests will soon become a harsh and uncomfortable reality.
WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/BOOKS/BOOKSBLOG/2010/ MAR/22/GET-LONDON-READING-APP
The citizens of London are facing a new threat: I'm bumping into people up and down the streets of the capital. Not because I've got my nose stuck in a traditional tome — on the contrary. I've become one of those people who traipse down the street attached to their smartphone, thumbs a-gogo. Truth is, I've become hooked on this free Get London Reading app, which brings the locale you are in at any given moment to literary life. This absorption in literary tech is not without its dangers. I came within an inch of a nasty entanglement with a cyclist at the junction of Southwark Bridge Road and Great Suffolk Street as I discovered Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway. I've lived in SE1 for a long time now, but embarrassingly both this novel and the historical existence of The Necropolis Railway, the "coffin-line", had escaped my notice. No longer.
alternative cartography remind us that cities are not simply a matter of bricks and mortar. Cities have a life beyond bricks, of ideas, of stories, of struggles, which books capture and preserve. In this sense, books are a very particular and important distraction. They take us out of the here and now, pushing against the constrictions of time and place. And we don't have to haunt libraries to encounter this living literary history. The ability of books to take us out of ourselves, to burst the bubbles of our humdrum preoccupa-
When you stop and think about it, this literary landscape has always been there, remapping the physical space around us. The literary life and history which make up this
PHOTOGRAPH OF BRICKLANE AND SCREENSHOT OF APP THAT RECOMMENDS BOOKS ACCORDING RO YOUR LOCATION
tions, doesn't depend on being cloistered away for some literary time out. Books constantly grab your attention when you're out and about in London, from the interesting-looking volume in the hands of a fellow passenger on the 68 bus, to books beckoning you from shop windows as you scuttle between meetings. Books insert themselves into the public spaces of our cities. They get in our faces when we least expect it. They are the physical signatures of ideas and arguments which have created and contributed to a city's politics and culture over time. Books in any city in the world will tell a story which spreads far beyond that city's limits, from Kolkata's College Street to the Left Bank booksellers in Paris. There is much discussion about what technology means for the future of literature: this discussion has been going on for many years now and will go on for many years to come. A bit of kit like the Get London Reading app reminds us that far from threatening literature's future, with enough imagination technology can set it free. That imagination can look back at history as well as forwards, bringing the rich literary heritage of the streets we walk down to life. My apologies to London cyclists in advance.
WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/COMMENTISFREE/2010/FEB/01/IPAD-THEREFORE-IWANT-WHY-IDUNNO
A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy, nonpocket-sized form. But look a little longer, and . . Nope. You were right first time.
looks ideal for idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that's what it'll largely be used for. Millions of people watch TV while checking their emails: it's a perfect match for them.
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it's taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren't really asking.
Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it'll make your life more efficient. Come off it. It's an oblong that lights up. I'm sick of being pitched to like I'm a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway. I don't want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it'll amuse and distract
It's an iPhone for people who can't be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your
me; how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world's first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it's got itself a hit. lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you're a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through Lord of the Rings and you'd need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards. It can also be used as an ebook, something newspapers are understandably keen to play up, but because it's got an illuminated display rather than a fancy non-backlight "digital ink" ebook screen, it'll probably leave your eyes feeling strained, as though your pupils are wearing tight shoes. The iPad falls between two stools – not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world. Or rather it would be, were it not for one crucial factor: it
Some people are complaining because it doesn't have a camera in it. Spoiled technobabies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn't mean it has to be done. It's technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they'd whine that it didn't have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection? And don't bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it'd be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm's length, and besides, the iPad is too
heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you'd end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another's others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It's like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.) Personally, I'm not sure whether I'll buy an iPad, although I think – I think – I'm about to buy a MacBook. Yes, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac sceptic for years. Yes, I've written screeds bemoaning the infuriating breed of smug Apple monks who treat all PC owners with condescending pity. But being chained to a Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I'd rather use a laptop that just works, rather than one that's so ponderous, stuttering and irritating I find myself perpetually on the verge of running outside and hurling it into traffic. (That's a moan about Sony laptops, not PCs in general, by the way. I'm keeping my desktop PC, thanks: that's lovely. Smooth as butter. Better than I deserve, in fact.) I just hope buying a MacBook won't turn me into an iPrick. I want a machine that essentially makes itself invisible, not a rectangular bragging stone. If, 10 minutes after buying it, I start burbling on about how it's left me more fulfilled as a human being, or find myself perched at a tiny Starbucks table stroking its glowing Apple with one hand while demonstratively tapping away with the other in the hope that passersby will assume I'm working on a screenplay, it's going straight in the bin. The iBin. Complete with built-in camera. $599.99.
SCIENCE AND THE ARTIST’S BOOK
Science and the Artist’s Book is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Special Collections. The resulting artist’s books, each inspired by the
subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty, imaginative, and even poignant insights into the creative side of scientific research. “Artist’s books” don’t look like most volumes found in a library. They are art objects in the form of books. As with painting or sculpture, much of the “story” in these books is visual. An idea may be illustrated in the book’s shape or binding, in the materials used, or in the artist’s choice of images. Words may be used to reinforce a message, but they are not always essential to the book’s meaning. Book artists often design, typeset, illustrate, print, and bind their own work, or at least supervise all these stages of production. Instead of paper, an artist may use clay, metal, or other materials. Artist’s books, recognizable yet new, can challenge us to explore innovative ways of seeing, learning, and understanding.
CONCRETE POETRY
poetry in which the meaning or effect is conveyed partly or wholly by visual means, using patterns of words or letters and other typographical devices.
UNSCANNABLE BOOKS BY JASMINE RAZANHAN
Jasmine Raznahan has created a small collection of unscannable books, “A structural exploration into book forms, created as a response to the destructive method of book scanning advocated by Google Books.” Much to my delight, she also has a project
called Shit! My book’s run out of battery! Described as, “A touring one-day workshop concerning the future of print. Each participant is asked to produce a double page spread that ruthlessly focuses on one shortcoming on the physical book, in an attempt to engage with the next evolutionary step of publishing. Available to buy from Lulu.” One of the things I enjoy about this project is how each piece makes me stop and think how it’s unscannable. Some, like the one directly above, are forms unlikely to happen to books by accident (at least with such an elegant and consistent curve), while others, like the one directly below, seems at first glance like a plausible shape for a book to be. A lot of book art highlights the different potentials of analog vs. digital media, but it’s more difficult to highlight a media’s limitations, no less in such an amusing way.
SAM WINSTON
DICTIONARY BY SAM WINSTON
ROMEO AND JULIET BY SAM WINSTON
The work of Sam Winston is an exploration of semantics and an unpacking of symbols with which we have become too familiar. Shakespeare’s oft-copied work Romeo and Juliet is reduced to its component parts and then re-ordered into a visually stunning piece that effectively re-structures the communicative possibilities of typography. Winston has de-constructed the bard’s syntax and collected the disparate words under the three emotions: passion, rage and solace. These collages create a new visual catalogue for the emotions expressed by the play’s protagonists, displacing the linear narrative of literature for a chronology that’s much more apt for our chaotic internet age. Whereby we seek out information thematically rather than conforming to a prescribed order.
HUMUMENT BY TOM PHILLIPS
A Humument: A treated Victorian novel is an altered book by British artist Tom Phillips, first published in 1970. It is a piece of art created over W H Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document whose title results from the partial deletion of the original title: A Human document. First page of A Humument, 1970 edition Phillips drew, painted, and collaged over the pages, while leaving some of the original text to show through. The final product was a new story with a new protagonist named Bill Toge, whose name appears only when the word "together" or "altogether" appears in Mallock's original text. When asked about the book, Phillips replied: "It is a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance ... plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems and replaced the text [he'd] stripped away with visual images of all kinds." A Humument was begun in the 1960s. In 1970, Tetrad Press put out a small edition. The first trade edition was published in 1980 by Thames & Hudson, which also published revised editions in 1986, 1998 and 2004; future editions are planned. Each edition revises and replaces various pages. Phillips's stated goal is to eventually replace every page from the 1970 edition. Phillips has used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material)
in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of Dante's Inferno, (published in 1985). The altered text is sometimes used in "reconstructions" or "realizations" where artists create a work using the fragmentary text as a basis. For instance in the early 1970s, the Music Department at the University of York performed an opera, "IRMA", whose lyrics and plot were based on A Humument. Tom Phillips has created a digital version of A Humument, A Humument App for the iPad to be released in November 2010. The Humument app was critically acclaimed receiving favourable reviews in The Independent (22nd Nov) Eye Magazine blog (17th Nov) and Design Observer (5th Nov). A version for the iPhone released 17 January 2011