Piper, Andrew. _Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times_. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. [[2020-06-12]] # Turning the Page > The essence of the page is the turn. With books reading is experienced as a gradual unfolding. > If holding is a precondition of dreaming, facing is a precondition of caring. It is through faces where we meet others at a distance. > The page is the atom of the book, it's most basic building block. > Taken all together, then, the book is an amalgam of the arbitrary, the simultaneous, and the sequential. Leroi-Gourhan says that: > the evolution of the human species was intimately tied to increasing degrees of sequential sophistication. > No matter how much we are drawn today to the horizontality (and democracy) of distributed cognition, we will always need sequence. Pathways allow us to do things over again, they are technologies of recurrence, perfectibility, and survival. Books, stories, _recounting_ are primordial defences against extinction. > Goethe: "Nature can only achieve all that it can in a series. She does not make leaps." > I want my children to learn how to learn one thing after another, to accept that there is a before and an after in life. I think reading books is still one of the best ways we have of reminding us of this fact. # Of Note > Notes are an essential part of the economy of reading. They are translational at their core, like the ribosomes of human thought. Louis Darget - ==thought photography== - he put a photographic plate against people's foreheads in order to capture their thought. > Notes not only let us go fast, they also allow us to look over our ideas in some distilled fashion. Notes are technologies of oversight. # Sharing Three things we look for: - **commonality** - we want people to read the same thing we are reading; - **transferability** - we want to be able to send other people what we are reading; - **sociability** - we want to be able to talk to other people about what we are reading. Bones were the first writing surface. They endure long past a human life. Adam's rib was the first example of sharing in the Judeo-Christian religion. Books were the most popular item to give when Christmas gifting took off in the 19th century. Sharing has its etymological roots in the word "to shear", which means to carve out or fork. The key quality of sharing is a sense of mutualism. And in order to experience mutualism, the person sharing has to give something up. We know this from childhood, when it's painful for a child to share something with another child. Andrew Piper makes the bold suggestion that we make digital books unique, that we limit our ability to copy them, so that when we share a digital book, we have to give it up. This restores mutuality and friendship to the online exchange. > Books are meaningful because as material objects they bear time within themselves. # Among the Trees English word book and German _buch_ both came from the word for "birch". Latin "codex" came from the word for trunk. Greek work "biblion" from which we get "bible" and "bibliography" comes from the Phoenician town Byblus, which was a major exporter of papyrus. Reading a book is like reading in a bower, or a nook. It has a dreamy and deep quality. An old definition of "browse" means the young shoots of a tree. To browse books in a bookshop or a library is to get little glimpses of literary worlds, glimpses that are like the young shoots, early and full of potential. This is "discontinuous reading". There is a place for it, just as there is a place for the dreamy depth quality of reading in a nook. The problem with "web browsing", is that it combines the physical inertia of the nook (our bodies are stationary), but the mental dislocation of browsing a bookshelf. We lose the distinctiveness of "the long durations of the corner and the ambulatory, punctuated rhythms of the bookshelf." [[_Inbox/Luhmann has written extensively on how the 18th century saw a transition from the tree of knowledge to a field of knowledge.]] Even though the tree structure has been embedded in our computers, through the if/then bifurcating logic, this has only increased the sense of knowledge as an overwhelming field. Fields will always feel like work to us. > Unlike forests, fields must be tended. How can we reclaim moments of repose within the restlessness of the field? How can we put place back into reading? (I like the idea of a bookmobile. One of my most memorable Burning Man moments.) Piper refers to "areas of immeasurability, pockets of discontinuity, one-way streets, dead ends, and hollows." He talks about "the pressure of reading." > We have entered into an exponential relationship to the growth of reading material. He worries that > the growing expanse of reading pulls us apart, not just socially, but also personally. # By the Numbers > The earliest forms of writing were notches on bones, dating from around 30,000 BC. > When we read a digital text we are not reading a static object. We are reading one that has been generated through a set of procedural conditions that depend on our interaction with them. Digital texts are never just there. They are called forth through computation and interaction, whether by a human or a machine ... It is this feature that marks the single strongest dividing line between the nature of books and that of their electronic counterparts. > In European languages, riddles are some of the oldest forms of literature. Alan Turing took the 2-dimensional form of the page, and translated it into 1-dimensional tape. He brought the scroll back at the dawn of the computer age. The combinatory power of the wheel was fused with the serial procedure of the tape. > The algorithm is the riddle's heir. > ... one of the book's historical strengths as a technology has been its ability to be used in so many diverse ways. We don't need more reading, just more kinds of reading. As in an ecosystem, diversity is a sign of a system's health. > When my son comes home today, he will play with the computer. Then he will go and do his homework, where he will use books for his reading, writing, and math exercises. My daughter, who is still in preschool, will simulate this process in reverse, playing with her notebooks, while the computer is still very much work for her. My hope is that these two categories, work and play, will remain as interwoven throughout their lives as the instruments that they use to engage in them, the book and the computer. I hope they are afforded the advantages of both, and that they pass on those advantages to others. My real hope, though, is that when it comes time to learn how these two very different instruments work (and play), I can send them to just one camp. Repetition and redundancy are crucial to the nature of books. Being able to interact with text in a variety of contexts, so that they all echo one another. Compare Angela Leighton’s [[Hearing Things]]. # Books referenced: Honneth, Axel. “INVISIBILITY: ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ‘RECOGNITION,’” n.d., 10. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. _Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange_. London ; New York: Verso, 2003. Leroi-Gourhan, André. _Gesture and Speech_. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.