Some exceptional examples of handmade zines…

Abbey Hendrickson, Andrew Neyer, Evah Fan

… and pretty much everything else in the handmade section on Book By Its Cover. Beautiful.

Obviously, the only way to distribute these is by hand or post, and therefore swapping zines with other makers is a staple of the scene. Knowing firsthand the amount of care and skill that has been lavished on these, surely adds another level of appreciation for the work, something I doubt sending an eBook zine could match, sadly. I’ll be writing about the impact the digital format has had on the zine aesthetic, and how they are shared, soon.

I’ll also be posting some of my ideas about my ongoing research on eBooks and the other resources available on Bookleteer. My personal interest on the subject of the eBooks began to take shape while conducting some research on a previous Proboscis project called Snout (read Measure Once, Cut Twice here) . It got me wondering about how people who work in cultural organisations create and disseminate information about their work. This is a particularly interesting challenge because, for the most part, the production, distribution and dissemination of information by and about arts organisations has taken-on negative connotations.

For example, there is a growing (and entirely credible) perception that publicly funded arts and creative organisations in the UK and elsewhere are facing pressure from government stakeholders and other funding bodies to “instrumentalise” and “deliver value for money” rather than focus on the work of making art. In an article entitled Auditing Culture (2004) Eleonora Belfiore claims that arts organisations “have found themselves forced to turn to the “rationalised rituals of inspection”” as the result of a “legitimacy void caused by the the erosion of cultural authority that followed the diffusion of theories of cultural relativism” (Belfirore 2004: 195). In other words, arts organisations have had to get better at generating reams of information that articulate and justify organisational aims and objectives that are consistent with the aims and objectives of stakeholders while also delivering on their promises to “be more inclusive” or “encourage audience participation”.

But the problem with this view is that this information is only generated for the benefit of funding bodies and without any meaningful ties to the actual work being done within these arts organisations. I would prefer to think about this kind of work as information practices rather than as “measuring impact” or as “providing evidence”. Once we move past framing this work within the intentions articulated by policy or funding bodies, it is possible to understand the creation and circulation of information as a practice; what Leah Lievrouw calls informing-as-praxis. That is: examining how the work of producing, distributing and interpreting information as practices in themselves are embedded within particular social, political and cultural environments and developed as part of these artists’ creative work rather than simply as an obligation to funding sources or a board of directors. I’m not arguing that the pressures that Belfiore and others have identified don’t exist, rather that these pressures are part of a more complex picture of cultural and creative practices.

The eBooks and how they are designed and used by Proboscis and their collaborators represent an interesting opportunity to take a closer look at how informing-as-praxis takes place between cultural and creative organisations. I’d be interested to hear anyone’s reactions to this approach and would love to any recommendations of authors you think might be relevant.

During my research into how Bookleteer might be used in the D.I.Y publishing community, particularly zines, (independent publications with a small circulation) I stumbled across several zine libraries, collections that have been created by, donated to, or purchased by the curators. These prove to be a fascinating archive of creativity and talent, often perfectly capturing the zeitgeist at the time of publication. A zine library is an important concept, as zines are generally not designed to be preserved. Most have very small (many in the hundreds at most) one-off print runs, due to costs of production, small specific audiences, and their transitory nature.

Zineopolis, housed within the University of Portsmouth, was started after a group zine project by Illustration Degree students. Although currently only accessible by students of the university, there is a comprehensive online index, with previews of the publications.

The Women’s Library at the London Metropolitan University has a collection of zines created by women, spanning a wide range of topics, particularly feminism, and has some examples of the Riot Grrl movement.

56a Infoshop Social Centre has an archive of zines related to revolutionary politics, women, and gay issues.

These are all physical collections, and can only be read on-site, unfortunately. If these zines were scanned and uploaded to the Diffusion library as eBooks, they could be read and recreated by anyone, then recirculated, either via sending the file, or by print. Future zine creators, using Bookleteer, can offer their zine as an online eBook, sharing it with interested parties or sending to distant locales where it can be distributed, in places where large scale printing and binding is not possible or viable, or the content is hampered by censorship.

I’ll be exploring how the digital format will impact the current zine aesthetic, as well as looking at zines that are already being produced as e-books, and their reception by the community, in the near future.

Zines at Zineopolis

]]> http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/physical-vs-virtual-library/feed/ 0 http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/bookleteer-at-be2camp-brum-2010/ http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/bookleteer-at-be2camp-brum-2010/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:25:18 +0000 karenmartin http://bookleteer.com/blog/?p=1801
No pics yet so thought I’d show you Bubblino (via Roo Reynolds on Flickr) of Bubblino who accompanied every be2camp tweet with a flurry of bubbles

Yesterday I presented bookleteer at Be2camp Brum 2010, an ‘unconference’ looking at where Web 2.0 meets the built environment. I was a bit nervous about my talk as it felt so, well, paper-based and analogue! However, going by the conversations I had afterwards I needn’t have worried. Seems like people understood the concept and had some super-interesting ideas for what the eBooks and Story Cubes might be used for.

So thanks to Rob and Laura for all their work organising the event and thanks to the inspiring presenters, twitter commentators and audience. I’ll write more about the talks over the next few days.

This recently published eBook by Julie Anderson and Salah Mohamed Ahmed describes the progress of the Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project in Dangeil, Sudan. Julie is Assistant Keeper of Sudanese and Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and Salah works for the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Sudan and the eBook was written for a conference Julie attended. It was then printed at A5 size using the bookleteer Publish and Print on Demand. Download the A3 / Ledger PDFs here.

The eBook is full of rich details about the site in Dangeil (which sounds huge – 300x400m) and the remarkable and beautiful statues and buildings they’ve uncovered there. Intriguingly the site consists of several mounds covered with fragments of red bricks, sandstone, pot shards and plaster and each mound represents a well-preserved ancient building. It’s even possible to see traces of colour left on the stones.

As well as describing the buildings there are also fascinating insights into the rituals, food, rulers and everyday life of the temple, including the information that the Kushite language, Meoitic Meroitic, is one of the few remaining languages in the world which has not yet been translated. And running all through the book are casual glimpses into the detective work of the archeologist.

The idea is that Salah will now translate the eBook into Arabic so it can be distributed to schools around the archeological site to help them understand what’s going on and what has been uncovered. Which would be very exciting for bookleteer because that would allow us to produce our first eBook using the Arabic font and right-to-left reading that we worked so hard to include!

James Bridle of booktwo.org was one of the participants at the Pitch Up and Publish: Augmented Reading a couple of weeks ago, and he talked a little about the idea of books as symbols and the related BookCube project he’d done using the bookleteer API.

Here, I’ll just give a summary of the project. James has written a post on booktwo.org describing the project which I really recommend you to read because it’s seriously interesting and covers more topics than I describe here…

James started with the idea that the lifespan of a book looks something like the drawing in the image above. There is a short period of the book-as-object acting as it’s own advertisement, then a period of time where you are reading the book and taking in the content, then during the final, and longest, amount of time the book-as-object acts as a souvenir of the reading period.

James has already begun to address the idea of digital souvenirs for eBooks with his bkkeepr project and with the bookleteer API he extended this to create automatically generated Bookcubes. These cubes display the information collected by bkkeepr and includes an image of the book cover. Over time James imagines the Bookcubes to build up on your shelf as a visible and tangible souvenir of your eBook reading. For bookleteer, this is an interesting tangent – instead of being an object to read it becomes an object that marks the fact that reading has taken place – and the content becomes separated from the form.

Giles asked me to help put together some user guides for bookleteer so I took the opportunity of the first Pitch Up and Publish event to see how people went about using bookleteer and to ask them the kinds of problems they encountered. Having worked with the original Diffusion Generator it was really satisfying to see how far the new bookleteer version has come in making the process of creating an eBook or StoryCube an intuitive one.

During the event I took notes on Giles’ introduction on how to use bookleteer and noted down the questions asked by participants. These are the basis of the help guide and faq on bookleteer that you can see when you login to bookleteer.com.

Currently, the user guide describes how to create an eBook in one of the four available formats (shown below). A guide to making StoryCubes will be added soon.

eBook formats Classic Portrait and Classic Landscape

eBook formats Book Portrait and Book Landscape

In the future we plan to add more detail to the help section and divide the user guides and faq into separate pages. If you have any comments on the usefulness of these guides, or how we could make them more relevant to you, or if you’ve had any difficulties in using bookleteer that we haven’t covered, please do get in touch and let us know..

And don’t forget Pitch Up & Publish 2 tomorrow night!

Its been a long road to get this far and the way ahead seems yet more daunting, but its a hugely exciting leap forwards. The future begins now.

Our vague timeline is:
Sept 2009 to January 2010 – ‘alpha’ testing
January 2010 – ‘beta’ testing
Spring 2010 – launch of bookleteer

A big thanks is due to the team who’ve brought this to fruition: Stefan Kueppers (technical direction), Simon Whiteside & Yasir Assam (coding); Paul Makepeace (sys admin) and Carmen Vela Maldonado (illustration).