Inside (literally) The Book

As part of the curriculum for the MLIS program at Pitt, we are required to prepare discussion of a book for orientation. The title of this book is Everything is Miscellaneous. The book itself is written in a Saganite tone except that it's not quite as thought provoking as the universe. However, some of the points it makes about information are good to think about.

Just in the first chapter, it discusses how iTunes has revolutionized the organization of music sales by making everything miscellaneous and allowing the users to decide what are the most popular/downloaded items; more explicitly, focusing more on the track rather than the album. Having read and understood this I seemed to agree with their argument that before online music stores, music sales were all about the economic benefits of the album. Without going into all of the consequences of this within the music industry (i.e. artists' recording habits, singles vs. albums) I thought about how ground-breaking this was for the information age. Now, I'm honestly not a big fan of Apple being a corporate, manipulative giant, but they seem to have grabbed a corner on the market.

Likewise, Google Books has increasingly become the top choice to find printed content of many professionals. However, this is still very much in codex format. There are still pages with a limited amount of text on them. Yes, eBooks have certainly influenced booksellers and readers alike, but what about the apparently everlasting novelty (no pun intended) of the printed book? If we make the argument that many people enjoy holding a tangible object or the smell of old or new books, we can always counter that with eReaders and scratch'n'sniff stickers or the fact that - let's be honest - the majority of readers prefer electronic media. It is easily accessible to those who are tech savvy enough to at least use a word processor.

Where am I going with this? Well, my immediate thought was an analogy between albums and books. Of course, these are very different types of content with different purposes, and information architecture should - I believe - always be aware of the type of information it is grouping together, but I've found - at least in academic settings - that there is more of a focus on the author or a specific article. This is actually somewhat like the microsizing of weblogs (Twitter) only it focuses more on a specific topic as part of a bigger picture whereas tracks of an album don't necessarily have to relate to one another. There is a bit more codependency as far as books go - especially if it's a chronicle. However, not all books are like this. And I feel that breaking down and re-synthesizing these types into new media would be beneficial for the content and more accessible to the reader/researcher. This should be considered in any digitization process.

In the future, I imagine a world where all literature and knowledge (printed or otherwise) is easily and readily accessible to everyone. For free would be nice, too.

Photo credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk