Providing a physical library of paper books might seem unusual for research on the Future of the Book. As one can imagine, in the future we will not use the paperbound book, we will read information as electronic text: off the screen of a computer or on e-paper from a digital reading device. We have yet to become completely immersed even though e-books were first introduced in the late 90s.
However, the paperbound book that we know today has existed for more than nineteen hundreds years.
The texts in the Forms of Inquiry Reading Room consider the book of the future as a medium for transferring information; a vehicle for moving knowledge in time and space.
The paperbound book is a three-dimensional object which you can hold in your hand, with a cover, pages and spine. Information is ordered into hierarchies on the table of contents, there is body text with indicated footnotes, an index and margins for personal notes. Single pages following after each other establish a neat linearity.
Taking the book as object, it is worth considering how spatial memory contributes to the paperbound book’s capacity to store and share information. Spatial memory relates to how the brain gathers information about the physical location of objects in the environment around you. It is the learning of item locations. If you read a book and place it back on your shelf, when you return to it a few months later you will not only remember where the book is on the shelf, but also the locations of specific passages within the book itself, and whether a certain image was on the left-hand side.
The book as object functions as an indicator of where you are within its content, near the beginning or towards the end—a result of its inherent linearity.
This quality becomes lost when you read the same text on a screen.
As an object, a book can only enclose a definite amount of content; digital forms have the potential to contain much more, even incorporating hyperlinks which lead to still further information.
The Future of the Book is not only restricted to the physical and the digital, publishing and printing methods have produced new realms in which books can exist. One such development is print on demand, a method which has brought book production to a larger market, unhindered by costs.
The texts chosen for the Forms of Inquiry Reading Room examine these ideas and also explore different forms the book of the future may take.