I wonder if it would be useful to distinguish between research and scholarship, where formal research is but one type of scholarly practice?

If we look at a journal as a channel for promoting scholarship then there's no reason that we can't include essays as a category of writing.

I've been thinking it for a while, but have needed to write it down for ages---particularly from my experiences with older manuscripts.

In an age of print-on-demand and reflowing text, why in goodness' name don't we have the ability to print almost anything we buy and are going to read in any font size and format we like?

Why couldn't I have a presentation copy sized version of The Paris Review?

Why shouldn't I be able to have everything printed on bible-thin pages of paper for savings in thickness?

Why couldn't my textbooks be printed with massively large margins for writing notes into more easily? Why not interleaved with blank pages even? Particularly near the homework problem sections?

Why can't I have more choice in a range of fonts, book sizes, margin sizes, and covers?

Konrad Gessner's second edition of Bibliotheca Universalis in 1548 contains a list of keywords (loci communes) thus placing it into the tradition of the commonplace book, but as it is published for use by others, it accelerates the ability for others to find and learn about information in which they may have an interest.

Was there a tradition of published or manuscript commonplace books prior to this?

Jeffrey Todd Knight in Bound to read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature examines the works of various writers to dispel the notion of literary texts as static. He shows how the evolution of early print culture helped to foster the idea as interactive and malleable. This at a time when note takers and writers would have been using commonplacing techniques at even smaller scales for creating their own writing thus creating a similar pattern from the smaller scale to the larger scale.

This pattern of small notes building into larger items with rearrangement which is seen in Carl Linnaeus' index card-based notes as well as his longer articles/writings and publication record over time as well.

In the early history of printing, books weren't as we see them now, instead they were issued in loose sheets or with temporary stitching allowing the purchaser or retailer to collect, organize, and bind them. This pattern occurs at a time when one would have been thinking about collecting, writing, and organizing one's notes in a commonplace book or other forms. It is likely a pattern that would have influenced this era of note taking practices, especially among the most literate who were purchasing and using books.

I have no problem with publishers making a profit, or with peer reviewers doing their work for free. The problem I have is when there is such an enormous gap between those two positions.

If publishers make billions in profit (and they do), while at the same time reviewers are doing a billion dollars worth of work for free, that seems like a broken system.

I think there are parallels with how users contribute value to social media companies. In both cases, users/reviewers are getting some value in return, but most of the value that's captured goes to the publisher/tech company.

I'd like to see a system where more of the value accrues to the reviewers. This could be in the form of direct payment, although this is probably less preferable because of the challenges of trying to convert the value of different kinds of peer review into a dollar amount.

Another problem with simply paying reviewers is that it retains the status quo; we keep the same system with all of it's faults and redistribute profits. This is an OK option as it at least sees some of the value that normally accrues to publishers moving to reviewers.

I also don’t believe that open access - in it’s current form - is a good option either. There are still enormous costs associated with publishing; the only difference is that those costs are now covered by institutions instead of the reader. The publisher still makes a heart-stopping profit.

A more elegant solution, although more challenging, would be for academics to step away from publishers altogether and start their own journals, on their own terms.

https://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-expand-uk-pirate-site-blocking-151128/

Blocking at the ISP level has been used as a strategy for preventing copyright for a while. What better methods might exist? Is this method just whack-a-mole?

https://torrentfreak.com/major-publishers-expand-sci-hub-libgen-and-ebook-piracy-blocking-211112/

Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer Nature are expanding the use of domain blocking to prevent people from accessing services like Sci-Hub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wove_paper

Machine translation:

An example: since the beginning of the project, the editors have already created a good 2,800 bibliographical records on literature that Luhmann has worked with. Then there are the 2100 publications by Luhmann himself. And we are only in the middle of it.

I wonder what this ratio looks like for other writers and researchers? I'd suspect Niklas Luhmann to be several standard deviations above the average.

Of course someone has published a zettelkasten notebook for taking notes to be moved into one's zettelkasten at a later date.

It includes space for notes as well as meta data box which includes labels and spaces for the following:

• UID
• Parent UID
• Zettel
• tags
• refs

It's also got (at least one) page for an index in the end titled "tag list" with a two column ruling

This follows the general pattern of pre-printed commonplace books which was common with at least John Locke's index pre-printed.

Other examples include published bullet journals with custom formatting.

https://community.reclaimhosting.com/t/protecting-wordpress-media-library/3926

The ideas here could be useful for blocking e-books on my server.

https://community.reclaimhosting.com/t/pressbooks-add-on-to-dooo-differences-from-pressbooksedu/3695

This is the integration that I am using to connect my daily writing practice with the process of publishing. iA Writer and Ghost have enabled me to share my ideas and project intentions into the world in such a way that they have become indispensable tools for community building.

https://qz.com/2059755/book-publishers-warn-of-supply-chain-delays-for-2021-holidays/

Ebooks Are an Abomination: If you hate them, it’s not your fault. by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/

Ian Bogost has a nice look at the UI affordances and areas for growth in the e-reading space.

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Has anyone built a generalizable text zoom JavaScript library that let's you progressively summarize an article as you zoom in and out?<br><br>(Why yes I am procrastinating my to-do list. You?)

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 17, 2021

I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation.

It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.

Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.

The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.

I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?

It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I've noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

Also, I don't see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means "placed into abyss". It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

Having helped others to self-publish in the past, I definitely do spend a bit of time putting the small sort of bookiness flourishes into their texts.

It is an odd circumstance that tail bands are still used on modern books that don't need them. From a manufacturing standpoint, the decrease in cost would dictate they disappear, however they must add some level of bookiness that they're worth that cost.

https://www.stationers.org/news/archive-news/john-murray-publishes-samuel-taylor-coleridge

What a fantastic vision statement for a publishing company!

https://punctumbooks.com/about/vision-statement/

This is a great list of book types, genres, etc.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/using-the-book-an-introduction

https://punctumbooks.com/

Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have!

Patrick Rhone

video

Paper is the best solution for the long term. If it's not on paper it can be important, if it's not it won't be.

Our writing is important. It is durable.

All we know about the past is what survived.

Analogy: coke:champaign glass::blogger:book

Converting one's blog into a book.

"The funny thing about minimalism is that there's only so much you can say."

Change the frame and suddenly you've changed the experience.

See the UK Royal Society's Résumé for Researchers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammelband

Sammelband (/ˈzæməlbænt/ ZAM-əl-bant, plural Sammelbände /ˌzæməlˈbɛndə/ ZAM-əl-BEN-də or Sammelbands), or sometimes nonce-volume, is a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.

Compare and contrast this publishing scheme with the idea of florilegium and commonplace books.

Did commonplace keepers ever sammelband their own personal volumes? And perhaps include more comprehensive indices?

What time periods did this pattern take place? How does this reflect on the idea of reorganizing early modern information management practices? Could these have bled over into the idea of the evolution of the Zettelkasten?

Funnily enough, I've been on an intellectual bent in the other direction: that we've poisoned our thinking in terms of systems, for the worse. This shows up when trying to communicate about the Web, for example.

It's surprisingly difficult to get anyone to conceive of the Web as a medium suited for anything except the "live" behavior exhibited by the systems typically encountered today. (Essentially, thin clients in the form of single-page apps that are useless without a host on the other end for servicing data and computation requests.) The belief/expectation that content providers should be given a pass for producing brittle collections of content that should be considered merely transitory in nature just leads to even more abuse of the medium.

Even actual programs get put into a ruddy state by this sort of thinking. Often, I don't even care about the program itself, so much as I care about the process it's applying, but maintainers make this effectively inextricable from the implementation details of the program itself (what OS version by which vendor does it target, etc.)

I'll note that we've seen a similar trend here in publishers making copies of bullet journals in the past several years.

https://awarm.space/fast/standard-ebooks

Always fun to see people trying some of the same experiments I've done. A few interesting tidbits here to refine some of the process perhaps?

WeasyPrint is a smart solution helping web developers to create PDF documents. It turns simple HTML pages into gorgeous:

Tool mentioned in IndieWeb chat. Could be used to turn a site into a physical book.

h-book is an experimental microformat at best.

I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine "bookness".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl3dJZjQpXE

There is no "theoretical pressure", however it still exists. The goal is to minimize it, to move beyond it.

Perversely, the author starts off getting this part wrong!

The correct answer here is to adopt the same mindset used for print, which is to say, "just don't worry about it; the value of doing so is oversold". If a print org changed their layout sometime between 1995 and 2005, did they issue a recall for all extant copies and then run around trying to replace them with ones consistent with the new "visual refresh"? If an error is noticed in print, it's handled by correcting it and issuing another edition.

As Tschichold says of the form of the book (in The Form of the Book):

The work of a book designer differs essentially from that of a graphic artist. While the latter is constantly searching for new means of expression, driven at the very least by his desire for a "personal style", a book designer has to be the loyal and tactful servant of the written word. It is his job to create a manner of presentation whose form neither overshadows nor patronizes the content [... whereas] work of the graphic artist must correspond to the needs of the day

The fact that people publishing to the web regularly do otherwise—and are expected to do otherwise—is a social problem that has nothing to do with the Web standards themselves. In fact, it has been widely lamented for a long time that with the figurative death of HTML frames, you can no longer update something in one place and have it spread to the entire experience using plain ol' HTML without resorting to a templating engine. It's only recently (with Web Components, etc.) that this has begun to change. (You can update the style and achieve consistency on a static site without the use of a static site generator—where every asset can be handcrafted, without a templating engine.) But it shouldn't need to change; the fixity is a strength.

As Tschichold goes on to say of the "perfect" design of the book, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed over centuries". Creators publishing on the web would do well to observe, understand, and work similarly.

Holmes, N. P. (2021). I critiqued my past papers on social media—Here’s what I learnt. Nature, 595(7867), 333–333. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01879-y

Prof Nichola Raihani on Twitter: “Submitted a paper reporting null results to a mid tier journal. Guess how it went. I literally don’t care at this point but I do feel bad for the first author (who I won’t name here). Https://t.co/sX5lTcEl29” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved July 16, 2021, from https://twitter.com/nicholaraihani/status/1415308025179656194

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in July Check-In · Buttondown (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:19:13</time>)</cite></small>

Idea of John Paul II's encyclical being a form of blogging in a different era. They're all essays in form, it's just about distribution...

Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.

Soderberg, C. K., Errington, T. M., Schiavone, S. R., Bottesini, J., Thorn, F. S., Vazire, S., Esterling, K. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2021). Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01142-4

Indeed. Web literacy among the masses is pitifully low. Browsermakers are certainly to blame for being poor stewards. Hot Valley startups are responsible as well. (See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/.)

Mentioned by Heather Staines

A tool mentioned by Alex Enkerli at I Annotate 2021.

This is badass James!

But peer reviewers are largely responsible for generating the assertions you talk about in the next paragraph, and which apparently, justify the cost of publishing.

example of a OER textbook with an embedded Jupyter Notebook. I've wanted to noodle around with this myself.

This is an interesting hack for getting one to hit the publish button.

I wonder if people have renamed the "publish" button in their CMS to make hitting it easier?

My own anecdotal evidence is that hitting it often can certainly make it seem trivial, particularly if one is posting their status updates to their site along with everything else.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Maggie Appleton</span> in A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (<time class='dt-published'>05/28/2021 18:08:16</time>)</cite></small>

There's something here that's reminiscent of Craig Mod's essay Post Artifact Books and Publishing.

Reminder to self: revisit this idea.

The same sort of dis-aggregation and disintermediation that has hit the publishing business is also taking place to newspapers, magazines, and music.

The question is how to best put the pieces of the pie together in the best way possible. There's probably room for talented producers to put these together to better leverage the artists' work.

I've never thought of the academic paper as a format that enabled the documentation of incremental progress.

The abstract generally tracks with my personal experience in the space.

One of the flaws of using Digital Mappa for projects like this appears to be that it acts more as a viewer (as a result of it's original use with maps) than as something for text. As a result, when looking at various pages, the URL of the page and it's attendant resources doesn't change, so one can't link to particular resources within the work, nor can one easily use digital tools (Hypothes.is for example), to anchor and annotate portions of the text.

Amalarius's Bells: An Old English and Medieval Latin Edition

An example of a book in Digital Mappa

This is a facsimile and diplomatic edition of Codex Vercellensis CXVII, Archivio e Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli.

An interesting example of a digitized version of a book.

Old English Poetry in Facsimile: Restorative Editions

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Whitney Trettien</span> in Digital Book History (<time class='dt-published'>04/07/2021 12:59:11</time>)</cite></small>

Manifold – Building an Open Source Publishing Platform

Zach Davis and Matthew Gold

Re-watching after the conference.

Manifold

Use case of showing the process of making the book. The book as a start to finish project rather than just the end product.

They built the platform while eating their own cooking (or at least doing so with nearby communities).

Use for this as bookclubs. Embedable audio and video possibilities.

Use case where people have put journals on the platform and they've grown to add meta data and features to work for that.

They're allowing people to pull in social media pieces into the platform as well. Perhaps an opportunity to use Webmentions?

They support epub.

It can pull in Gutenberg texts.

Jim Groom talks about the idea of almost using Manifold as an LMS in and of itself. Centering the text as the thing around which we're gathering.

CUNY Editions of standard e-books with additional resources.Critical editions.

Using simple tools like Google Docs and then ingest them into Manifold using a YAML file.

TEI, LaTeX formats and strategies for pulling them in. (Are these actually supported? It wasn't clear.)

Reclaim Cloud has a container that will run Manifold.

Zach is a big believer in UX and design as the core of their product.

This still exists in the social media space, but has gotten even worse with the rise of algorithmic feeds.

Scheel, Anne M., Mitchell R. M. J. Schijen, and Daniël Lakens. ‘An Excess of Positive Results: Comparing the Standard Psychology Literature With Registered Reports’. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 4, no. 2 (1 April 2021): 25152459211007468. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459211007467.

Example Manifold projects mentioned during Manifold – Building an Open Source Publishing Platform.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Katharina Schulz</span> in domains21 (<time class='dt-published'>04/19/2021 18:33:31</time>)</cite></small>

Sorry to hear this Dan, but I might be able to help in terms of providing some perspective for moving forward.

These days the idea of bestseller means selling in the range of 10,000 books. The average book released these days sells only 250 copies, so if you're over that, you're doing well.

It's also incredibly uncommon for any publishers to put any serious money behind promoting their titles unless PR opportunities are falling off the trees for them. (This means that unless you've been selling a million copies of everything you write, they probably don't care.) Many publishers will assign you a pro-forma publicist to help when they can, but don't expect much from them. Most publishers will tell you to hire your own book publicist (usually for about $1,500-3,000 a month).

My guess is that the first run of your book was probably 1,000 to 2,000 books, which will bring the cost of raw printing down to $2 a copy. If you need copies of your book and they're remaindering them, you might offer the publisher $1-2 a copy plus shipping to get 50 or 100 copies for yourself for hand sales over the next decade (for speaking engagements, etc.) or selling a few copies from your own stash on platforms like Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, etc. The cost of keeping a book in print these days is usually around $12 a year and then they print them on demand.

Some of the methods you mentioned, talks, online readings, etc. can be useful marketing for both you and your book(s). Look around your local community/state for book events, fairs, bookstores that invite authors, etc to supplement this.

Depending on your next title, it might be worth hiring a publicist if you're going the route of a text accessible to a broader public.Often this can be a reasonable risk but getting copies into reviewers' hands can be helpful, as can radio or print appearances. Another option is to pay for adds in appropriate print magazine outlets related to your material.

It's an uphill slog, but getting a publisher to take most of the risk and offering you all the free amenities of editing, proofreading, typesetting and distribution can be worth it in the end to get your material out.

When choosing your next publisher/editor, have a bit of this conversation with them at the outset to see what expectations they have for themselves. Don't tip your hand though by letting them know prior sales numbers.

Since you've got your own website/newsletter/social media presence, you should also look into affiliate accounts with the bigger online platforms. Chances are you're actually selling most of your own copies, you may as well get a 4% or larger cut of the referrals you're giving. Your link on this page alone could give you a reasonable little return on top of the boilerplate 7% you're probably getting from the publisher.

Interesting to see this actually hosted by GitHub pages.

Some of the future of the book may be taking new technologies and looking back at books.

I wonder if the technology that was employed here could be productized and turned into an app or platform to allow this sort of visual display for more (all?) books?

Again, a piece that nudges me to thing that a local-based IndieWeb provider/solution would be a good one. Either co-op based, journalism-based, or library-based.

Books are inherently visual, and cover design is in something of a golden age at the moment with designers like Alison Forner, Gray318, Rodrigo Corral, Suzanne Dean, and many others producing consistently outstanding work.

Folks like Ben Thompson are effectively writing books. Take a year of his essays, edit them for brevity and clarity, and you’d have a brilliant edition of This Year in Tech. And so in a strange way, Stratechery in paid newsletter form is as much a Future Book as a bounded Kindle edition.

And this isn't a new thing, publishers were mining the blogosphere for books from websites in the early 2000s.

Purchasing a book is one of the strongest self-selections of community, and damn it, I wanted to engage.

The Kindle indicated with a subtle dotted underline and small inline text that those final sentences had been highlighted by “56 highlighters.” Other humans! Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines.

Social annotation is definitely part of the future of text. Distributing it across modalities may be the difficult part.

Why the future book never arrived? I might posit that the book we want needs more context about us (perhaps a commonplace book?). If it had this then it could meet us where we are and help to give us the things we need.

An Algebra text would be dramatically different things to a 4th grader, an 8th grader, and a college math major. It could still be the same book, but hide or reveal portions of it's complexity depending on our background and knowledge of its subject.

Perhaps it would know our favorite learning modalities and provide them based on whether we're motivated by stories, audio, video, data visualizations, or other thoughts and ideas.

Too few editors are spoken of...

Ravi outlines some of how he syndicates from his Drupal website to Twitter.

I particularly appreciated that he's using a sort of taxonomy within Drupal to add some of his particular content to "books" which aggregate related content together. If this were done in an editable outline then it should be easier to aggregate and edit later into an actual book. This would be a cool UI to have within a website for writing and creating.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

I wonder something related, but even broader, "How do we get everyone to work in public?"

This! This is the piece of the puzzle that so very few teachers even bother to think about. Perhaps they're stuck with so much other work they either go with what they know, have used before, or are simply sold to them by textbook sales representatives.

This pattern has concerned me for a long time.

More:

• On Choosing Your Own Textbooks
• To Purchase, Rent, or Pirate? The Broken Economics of Textbooks in the Digital Age

Not to mention the fact that the experiment will continue on into the future past the official publication.

Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

Amazon is making many books exclusive to their platform and not allowing libraries digital access.

Maybe worth looking at what they're doing and how those practices mirror those of academic journal publishing for creating monopolies.

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 5 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1325749905911123968

Conference Details. (n.d.). AIMOS. Retrieved 5 March 2021, from https://aimos.community/2020-details

These few paragraphs do a great job of outlining the idea of slavery in an academic setting.

Often when I see this pattern happening, the dissertation is the new and original research and the subsequent book is a rewriting of that research into a form meant to help popularize and distribute it into a broader public.

This is similar, in a way to journal articles being written about by science journalists which then usually massively broadens the audience of the work. Usually this version helps the work to reach more eyeballs than the dissertation to book route does.

Another version of this might be the translation of a screenplay and a move into a novelization for popular movies. Some of the goal here however is just to make more money.

It's worth looking at who is (privileged to be) doing the writing in each of these cases.

There's an odd double entendre here where one could use his abbreviation of dissertation to diss and the 1980s dis as an abbreviation of disrespect.

Just wait until you see what publishers have planned for India and China