Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Date:         Tue, 29 Sep 1992 17:54:33 CDT
From:         Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
Subject:      Dead Trees and Humanities

7 Messages, 170 Lines
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From:         "Michael S. Hart" <HART@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject:      Re: Dead trees and humanities

re:  Sue Martin
Speed, efficiency, cost, quotability. . .in short, the cost/benefit ratio,
are the major factors concerning the publication of modern information. . .
not whether the book is going to last hundreds of years. . .in fact the
idea of making books more easily recylcable has a certain appear. . .
however, the computer disk is certainly the easiest way to make a book
recyclable. . .and how many of our educational texts are left to age any
appreciable amount before they are replaced with a new edition?

With electronic texts, when errors are corrected, updates are made, etc.
the students can just update their disks as they walk into the classroom.

Thank you for your interest,

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
hart @uiucvmd.bitnet or hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
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From:         "Michael S. Hart" <HART@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject:      Re: Dead trees and humanities

re:  Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz
All the items Lee mentioned as being relational to the printed book are
also easily done with the electronic text (except a certain kind):

the author can easily refer to a "page" being taken out

you can leave bookmarks in electronic text (along with anything else)

bigger books require more disks
etc.

The one thing that doesn't work is that others can't see how far along
you are in your book (presuming that they COULD see your bookmarks you
placed in the weighty tomes you carried under your arm instead of disk
or disks in your pocket.  Since with compression techniques, the plain
1.44M pocket floppies can each hold a copy of nearly any book, it will
not be terribly obvious that you are carrying a "ton" of books).

(Hey, Lee!  Aren't you getting the notes I sent to you directly?)
Thank you for your interest,

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
hart @uiucvmd.bitnet or hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
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From:         HAL HALL <E825HH@TAMVM1>
Subject:      Re: Dead trees and humanities

On the life of CD-ROM and related critters:
   We've done no real testing, but:  analog laserdisk in 12" are NOT in the
100 year life range.  Our experience indicates more like a 5-7 year life for
the 12" format.
   During the past 3 months, I have talked to multiple vendors of optical
storage media (in the 1 gig range); all, when pressed, would not commit to
a life-span beyond 10 years for either WORM or rewritable disks.  In our
projections, I'd guess we will plan to replace/rewrite the medium every
seven to ten years for archival material.

--Hal Hall
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From: stu@oclc.org (Stu Weibel)
Subject: Dead trees  (and save the rocks, while we're at it )

Lee Jaffe, concerning the physical presence of books, writes

> One of my favorties is Tristram Shandy where Stern substitutes one page
> with a slab of marble...

Inasmuch as few editions of anything are published with any more than
marbleized end papers, perhaps the physical manifestation of the novel
really is not so important as the metaphors themselves ;)

stu,
who wouldn't dream of taking anything less than acid-free paper to bed
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From: KAREN S. SUMMERHILL <ksumme01@gumedlib.dml.georgetown.edu>
Subject: information expressed via format (was dead trees)

(It's been raining here for days now, and "dead trees" is just too depressing
a heading :)  )

Just wanted to add a quick addendum to Lee Jaffe's thoughts about the book as
artifact:  If the book is converted to a bitmapped image, one loses less
information than if it is converted to a text file.  The "look" if not the
"feel" of the printed page is preserved, placement on the page of words or
graphics remains essentially as the author or editor intended.  Of course, you
also retain the disadvantages of the bitmapping: high memory use, need for
added indexing of some kind, lack of flexibility...

If, on the other hand, the work is converted to a fully searchable text file,
while accessibility is enriched, the facsimile qualities are lost in addition
to the "artifactual information", if you will.  Page placement is altered,
font characteristics may be lost, etc. Questions arise such as: Where do
the graphics go?  and, what sort of a mapping scheme between the text and
graphics is most useful?

I would venture to say that in the majority cases, the gains would easily
outweigh the losses, however, these points should be considered.
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From: cjg@stubbs.ucop.edu (Czeslaw Jan Grycz, University of California)
Subject: Re: Dead trees and humanities

I'm not sure the debate of which is tougher: paper or cd's will take us
anyplace new.  But I am reminded about a beautiful broadside written by
Beatrice Warde (perhaps it was on the introduction of Eric Gill's Perpetua
Typeface) in which she described things printed on paper as "perdurable."
Her argument was not that paper was stronger than the stone monuments of
the Romans to which she contrasted printing, but that once things were
replicated in some quantity, the likelihood of wiping them all off the face
of the earth was rather remote, while a stone monument could be destroyed
by one medium-strength earthquake.

It has always seemed to me to be the appropriate "take" on durability of
the medium.

Chet
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From: cjg@stubbs.ucop.edu (Czeslaw Jan Grycz, University of California)
Subject: Re: Dead trees and humanities

>The question I was trying to raise in my orignal article was:  what is the
>intrinsic value added to abstract information by virtue of its being in a
>printed, as opposed to any other form?

I've generally not been too impressed with the aesthetic arguments
supporting
the viability of the codex as a medium.  After all, if that's the best
reason we can provide, then the book is in a very precarious position.

However, hearing Geoffrey Nunberg speak last spring (?) during the National
Library of France seminar, I heard some of the first interesting points
in this debate.  (Basically, he ripped up both sides of the debate very
eloquently and I'm only highlighting the relevant points.)  To illustrate
the bookish quality of the novel, he quoted from Jane Austen where she
referred readers to the few pages remaining as an indication of the swift
completion of the story.  I can think of quite a few other texts that
use the page and the physical book as part of the story telling.  One of
my favorties is Tristram Shandy where Stern substitutes one page with a
slab of marble and in another section, explains that one passage was so
good that it shamed everything else he had written and therefore tore the
page out.  Nunberg pointed out that the physical artifact of the book is
directly related to the material it contains.  The size of the book is an
indication of the length of the work.  Your physical place in the book is
an indication of how much you have left to read.  My own sense of these
points is that the novel was developed and flourished during an era of
cheap print and growing literacy.  The genre is married to the medium.
Sure, James Joyce might have chosen to write Finnegan's Wake in hypertext
if it had been available, but it wasn't and he didn't.  He wrote a book.

For the sake of brevity, I'll leave it here.

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz
   jaffe@scilibx.ucsc.edu
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