Jeremy Caplan summarized Johnson’s essential points in the WSJ Digits Blog:

“Textual productivity” is the Web’s most important feature.
When text is shared, remixed and recombined in new contexts, fresh value is created. Mr. Johnson calls that “textual productivity.” Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously remixed the Bible, leaving out the supernatural bits. Before the Web, it was more difficult to rejigger texts. The Web reinvented the sharing, spreading and productive adaptation of information in new ways that multiply its value. It’s vital that e-texts preserve that capability, Mr. Johnson says.

The iBook freezes text.
Web links can connect previously isolated ideas in many ways. That gives digital texts the power to add rich layers of meaning that printed texts cannot. But many iPad apps and Apple’s iBook software thus far limit the way words can be linked, Tweeted or shared. That suggests a step backward from the Web’s potential. Mr. Johnson contrasts the locked approach with the stance adopted by investigative nonprofit site ProPublica, which has a generous “steal our stories” policy to encourage the free dissemination of its articles for public benefit.

So will e-readers resemble glass boxes?
If digital devices lock texts under a glass screen, preventing readers from manipulating or sharing words in meaningful ways, we will miss out on some of the benefits of ideas that are mashed up and mixed together, Mr. Johnson says. If, on the other hand, companies such as Apple open up texts for linking, sharing and other Web-like usage, we’ll enjoy fruitful “textual productivity.” People once relied on books to store ideas for future inspiration. Mr. Johnson hopes the serendipitous sharing that enabled will serve as a model for more open sharing of digital texts. Are you listening, Steve Jobs?

Follow @stevenbjohnson on Twitter | Read transcript of talk | See more at CJS New Media blog

Tek Talk offers an early look at Blio, the new touchstone in accessible e-book reading for everyone, Monday, April 5, 2010. This will provide an opportunity to learn more about the exploding world of e-books and the especially exciting e-book reader called Blio just being released by K-NFB Reading Technology.

As publishing of books around the world moves from ink on paper to digital bits and bytes, blind people have mobilized to insist that new products and media being developed must be accessible. Protests about lack of access with the Amazon Kindle have attracted public notice, but now comes Blio, providing a dynamic and accessible presentation of e-books to everyone. Therefore, during this week’s Tek Talk event, James Gashel, Vice President of Business Development at K-NFB Reading Technology will demonstrate how Blio works and explain how this technology is about to make millions of books readily available on computers and mobile devices. Tired of waiting for books to be reproduced or transcribed in to accessible formats? Join us and learn how Blio gives blind people equal access in the mainstream world of books, newspapers, and magazines. Following the presentation, there will be plenty of time for questions from the virtual audience.

Contact: James Gashel

Email: jim@knfbreader.com

Date: Monday, April 5, 2010

Time: 5:00 PM PDT, 6:00 PM MDT, 7:00 PM CDT, and 8:00 PM EDT

and elsewhere in the world Tuesday 0:00 GMT

Approximately 15 minutes prior to the event start time; go to The Pat Price Tek Talk Training Room at:

http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rsc9613dc89eb2

Or, alternatively.

Select The Pat Price Tek Talk Training Room at: www.accessibleworld.org

Enter your first and last names on the sign-in screen.

All Tek Talk training events are recorded so if you are unable to participate live at the above times then you may download the presentation or podcast from the Tek Talk archives on our website at www.accessibleworld.org

If you are a first-time user of the Talking Communities online conferencing software, there is a small, safe software program that you need to download and then run. A link to the software is available on every entry screen to the Accessible World online rooms.

All online interactive programs require no password, are free of charge, and open to anyone worldwide having an Internet connection, a computer, speakers, and a sound card. Those with microphones can interact audibly with the presenters and others in the virtual audience or text chat with the attendees. To speak to us, hold down the control key and talk; then let up to listen.

Accessible World uses News Wires, like this one, to inform people of the topic and times for the many Discussion Groups on Accessible World. The lists are announce only to keep the traffic to a minimum. You can join the Accessible World Announce List, the Tek Talk Announce List or the Sports Talk Announce List by completing the form at: www.accessibleworld.org/mailinglists

Accessible World also provides a Tek Talk Discussion List. This list is intended to give you an opportunity to ask computer related questions, suggest topics to be used in the weekly Monday training programs, or just to interact with others interested in using assistive devices to access computers. You may sign up for this list by selecting the Tek Talk Discussion link on the same page and completing the form.

Accessible World Contacts:
Robert Acosta, Chair
Accessible World
818-998-0044
Email: boacosta@pacbell.net
Web: www.helpinghands4theblind.org

Joann Becker, Events Coordinator
Accessible World
617-487-8795
Email: joannbecker@comcast.net

Steve Hoffman, President
Talking Communities
Email: steve@talkingcommunities.com

The Accessible World, a division of Helping Hands For The Blind, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, seeks to educate the general public, the disabled community and the professionals who serve them by providing highly relevant information about new products, services, and training opportunities designed specifically to eliminate geographic and access barriers that adversely affect them

Daniel Reetz, founder and steward of the DIY Book Scanner community

Tuesday, March 23, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

The DIY Book Scanner community (founded in June 2009) has produced a diverse ecosystem of book scanning hardware and software to address a wide range of human needs, both domestically and internationally. Daniel will motivate these efforts with case studies from the community, and hope to foster discussion on the future of digital books in light of these unmet needs.

Daniel will be bringing and demonstrating how scanner works at this lunch talk.

About Daniel

Daniel Reetz is an artist and a Ph.D student studying visual neuroscience. Since 2003 He has been employed as an artist and as a researcher at the intersection of those interests, working on NIH, NSF, and US D.o.Ed funded projects.

He recently developed a high-speed book scanning system using open source technology, cheap cameras, and garbage. This free and open scanner design won the Epilog Grand Challenge, has been featured in Wired, and is now being improved and instantiated by a group of over 300 DIY’ers who believe that the future of digital books is too important to be decided solely by corporate interests…

Links

• DIY Book Scanner
• Wired Magazine on the DIY Book Scanner
• OnTheCommons: DIY Book Scanner Takes Off

Pictures of the book scanner

Yesterday on NPR, I heard novelist Neil Gaiman ask, is an audiobook really a book? He paraphrased Harold Bloom on behalf of the naysayers: “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

Gaiman followed Bloom’s judgment with his own: “I find that astonishingly unconvincing. I think you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Then audio book director Rick Harris insisted that he wants the experience to be different:

It is not a book. An audiobook is a separate entity. A novel can be seen as many things, and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance. But it is another thing; it is an audiobook that has its own validity, its own limitations, its own strengths. The human voice is unquestionably the most expressive musical instrument there is. Combine those two and you get an audiobook.

To my great surprise, I found myself nodding at this like a Bobble-head. I think commercial audiobooks are something different, not just from printed books, but also from the books I read that were recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind. The production values that commercial publishers foist onto “audio performances” are, well, cheesy. The abridgments, the musical interludes with 101 strings, the histrionic characterizations by overwrought actors — such dramaturgy imposes interpretations on the text that cut the reader out of it.

So the litmus test for determining when a book is a book isn’t whether you see or listen. It’s whether your “relationship” with the text is really yours.

[See Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Rader for an academic perspective on how I read Thomas Kuhn’s  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.]

Whatever one thinks of Google (and all publishers think about Google), there is little doubt that in just a few years, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become the most influential people in the publishing industry, at least in the U.S., taking that distinction away from Jeff Bezos.

… Google is now the defining entity in the information landscape.  To flourish, as best as publishers can hope to flourish, it’s necessary to find a place within the Google ecosystem.  There is no world elsewhere, no little pocket of commerce beyond the reach of Google’s audience aggregation, no opportunity to erect protectionist barriers or to appeal to the legacy of one’s own institutions.  To those who resent Google’s huge bulk and ambition, it has to be said:  Get over it.

… With the invention of the motion picture by Thomas Edison, the book lost its place as the center of the media universe.  All other innovations, from radio to television to the Internet, helped to push the book out further.  Now we live within a media landscape that has no center, but which does have a dominant issue, and that is the matter of online discovery, for which search engines, and Google in particular, are the dominant modes.

For publishers, this is the Google century, or maybe just the Google decades, but either way, not to engage this extraordinary organization is likely to lead to obscurity. Read more

Thanks to Eric Rumsey (Seeing the Picture, @ericrumsey) for pointing me this post.