[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 9 (Domenico Quaranta, Ethel Baraona Pohl)

[Ana Valdés]

Printed or not printed books are narrative and the narrative can be perform
in any platform you wish. I am a writer but as a writer I don't have a
fetisch with books, my books are now as audiobooks to listen to, ebooks to
download as files and regular books to be read as Gutemberg saw when he
invented the printing press.
As many of you know I am a former political prisoner and in the four years
I stay in prison we didn't own a single book, the books our relatives sent
us were burned as political propaganda. Such irony, Proust, Homer and Dante
as political agitators...
But we created narrative, we told tales to each other, we made up plays and
we performed them. We didn't have newspapers to read, films to see,
television, radio, we were confined with several hundred women, but it was
the most creative period of my life. The confined were university tenured
professors, deans, nuns, architects, writers, actresses, playwriters,
dancers, philosophers, the whole intelligentsia of Uruguay was in prison or
in exile.
We, the youngest (I was ninenteen barely when I come into prison, was
released and sent to Sweden four years later), enjoyed literature as it was
created, as tales to share.
Ana


On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 12:51 PM, adamhyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> On 02/15/2014 05:25 AM, Ethel Baraona Pohl wrote:
>
>
>  I would add that yes, I also agree with that. Maybe is on us, as
> publishers to try to deeply understand the different platforms we have and
> use them properly. e.g. I don't see any improvement when a book is simply
> transformed into a PDF to be read on tablets, because we're not using the
> possibilities that the device offers, such as implementing videos, podcast,
> 3D models, etc.
>
>
>
> So...the interesting thing is that in this day and age 'books are not
> transformed into PDF'. I don't to take issue with the loaded meaning of
> 'books' in this statement because I understand what you mean, however what
> is interesting to me is that because of the age of accelerated medium
> transformation we could be switch the two key operators in this sentence
> and it would be be equally true. Which do you prefer?:
>
> "Books are transformed into PDF"
>
> or
>
> "PDF are transformed into Books".
>
> Depending on who you are one of these statements is true and the other is absurd
> or, at best, annoying.
>
> 'books' these days, if we are to talk about paper, are first digital.
> There are not many books still being produced by analog means. Thankfully,
> although I want to skip the politics of file formats for now which is a
> troublesome issue here, there is a single format (PDF) that all paper books
> transition through. So you could very easily say that paper books are a
> conversion of the digital and that it is not a very good conversion because
> while it may leverage the tactile features of paper we lose all the digital
> opportunity.
>
> Is it a lossful conversion? Hard to say when a specific form of
> tactile-ness is gained but at the same time it is possible to agree that
> something is lost in all paper books when they continue their transition
> from digital to paper - their 'digitality' perhaps.
>
> So I find these kinds of statements illustrative in that we are very very
> deep into the transformation of books. It is not EPUB or Amazon or any
> phenomenon in the last 5 years that has caused it. Our language has not yet
> caught up with the deep transformations that have already taken place - we
> are still swimming about on the surface trying to make sense of the
> apparently obvious and we end up inevitably and unfortunately in a hopeless
> mess.
>
> I also find the statement "I don't see any improvement when a book is
> simply transformed into a PDF to be read on tablets, because we're not
> using the possibilities that the device offers, such as implementing
> videos, podcast, 3D models, etc"... incredibly interesting.
>
> Setting aside my point from above which si equally applicable to this
> statement, I find it interesting that we don't hear many people criticizing
> a paper book because the creators didn't take time to use the media to its
> full potential. The designers didn't utlise margins, or they didn't use
> color, or double page spreads or any number of paper book features. Why is
> it assumed that digital media must use as much as possible of its
> 'digitalness' (or at least its non-analog-ness) inorder to cross some
> threshold of 'being digital'?
>
> Its very curious to me. Somehow Elizabeth Eisensteins word (I find her
> very poetic) taunt me here:
> " When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are
> also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it
> becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must
> be viewed."
>
> or maybe we can repeat them in a stanza:
> "When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them,
> they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them,
> and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which
> they must be viewed."
>
> (taken from 'The printing press as an agent of change').
>
> either way they poke and prod at this issue for me, not in a way she
> intended but I take inspiration from some other essence in these words.
> Something that compels me to wonder if we have always been disconnected
> from the book and never realized and all we are fighting for is our own
> historical context.
>
> adam
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



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