Historians know that those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
When it comes to books, we are doomed to repeat it anyway, at least according to Corey Pressman, founder of Exprima Media, a software design and development firm based in Portland, Oreg. He's also a recovering anthropology teacher.
Over the past few months, Pressman has been writing some incredibly interesting blog posts about how the digital book age is reviving writing and reading conventions from our distant past. In a way, he's implying that there's some deep thread about humanity being rediscovered now that we read and write digitally.
So, I sat down with Pressman to learn more about why it's important to know the history of reading, what it can teach us about the future of books and a list of books you absolutely need to read that will change everything you think you know about the book.
Jeremy Greenfield: Why is it important to understand how the reading and writing conventions of the past are creeping up again in the digital age? Does it say something about humanity? Will it teach the publishing industry lessons? Is it an example of how history repeats itself?
Corey Pressman: It's always wise to look back, especially during periods of transition. Reading is an old and varied behavior, and the reading patterns, values, and assumptions with which we are familiar are themselves relatively new. Of course, they don't seem that way because we rarely have cause to look back.
However, as the promise of binary unfolds, we find ourselves in a new relationship with every aspect of reading, from market ecosystems, to the sociality of reading, to the things of reading themselves. Familiarizing ourselves with the history of reading, however, will help us find new (old) ways of continuing the experiment.
And yes, it does seem that the way forward is already stirring up elements of past practices. Let's take a closer look at these and get deliberate. The transition from scribed book to the familiar print book took hundreds of years past the advent of Guttenberg's press. Our current transition need not take so long; we've history to guide us. Also, we've the whole discipline of interaction design. User-centered interaction designers will save the world.
JG: What are some ancient reading and writing habits that you'd like to see make a comeback digitally but haven't yet?
CP: I'm lately enamored with the scale and effort of annotation that went on. Manuscripts and books were uncommon enough to be commonly shared. Readers annotated their reading not just as 'notes to self' but as notes to other readers. Early reading platforms were social media. One was often not just reading a book -- they were reading the book and a conversation about the book in the margins.
While there are intimations of this now, I see plenty of opportunity to design a digital reading experience that returns this sort of flow.
JG: Any you think we can definitely do without?
CP: We could do without the books chained to desks in ancient "chained libraries" and their digital analogy.
We could do without millions of remaindered books.
JG: As a digital publishing person, how does knowing all this benefit me?
CP: All of us in the publishig space (along with our colleagues in the interaction design field) should be engaged in envisioning the immediate future of reading. I'm talking about feature sets and behaviors, not fixed vs. reflow. And the best way to start such an egagement is by looking back at the ways and things of reading that preceeded our 20th century model.
JG: Where can I go to learn more?
CP: If you read all these books on a long flight, you will never think about reading the same way again:
-- An Introduction to Book History by Finkelstein and McCkleery.
-- The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton
-- A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
-- The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries by Roger Chartier
JG: I haven't read any of those. I'm about to hit the beach and these all sound like breezy summer reads (read: wink wink). Here's a question I ask at the end of every interview I do: What are you reading and on what platform?
CP: I'll list these by platform. On my iPad mini Kindle app, I'm reading The City and the City by China Mieville, My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe and Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie & Ben Reason.
On paper, I'm reading Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer by Roger Chartier, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gerard Genette, The Compass Flower: Poems by W. S. Merwin. I'm also always reading The New Yorker and Gastronimica.
Three of Pressman's recent posts:
-- Ancient Marginalia: The Eternal Ellipses
-- Ancient Marginalia: Return of The Bishop’s Fist
-- Ancient Marginalia: Resurrecting the Multitext
And here's a video of him lecturing on the topic:
