This room, my first conference panel at the Marriott, has a table for bloggers. That’s great. It means that my typing won’t bother people.
Discussion Group of Bibliography and Textual Studies
This is a live blogging of the session.
Alan Galey, U of Toronto, asst prof on the Faculty of Information (interesting): “The Enkindling Reciter: Performing Reading and Concealing Texts in the E-Book Demos”
tech issues immediately apparent, will be significantly problematic if not available
e-books as emerging symbols of reading
proliferation of e-books, proliferation of demos (often with tech difficulties)
subtext of the Apple iPad introduction
shows Steve Jobs reading the iBook’s portion of the iPad intro
alone on a black stage, alone, in a chair, with a projection that shows the audience what he is doing
Jobs sits forward when he is changing pages.
in a form presumably identical to all other copies (This is particularly relevant to me. See notes later.)
Jobs says this is new, but a book. Has transactional electronic signals… Editors, publishers, etc. are part of publications all the time.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge “role of the enkindling reciter”
Different relationship between the work/reading and the author/reader.
This quote is supposedly where the name of the Kindle came from.
Disclosure: I own Macs. While I do not own the iPad, I own a Kindle.
Reading has become an intensely public application.
ebook, The Sentimentalists (novel)
won a major award
published in October, 2009
first published by Gaspereau Press
The book was originally published in 800 copies. When the book won a major award, Gaspereau did not want to reprint a mass market edition. Douglas & MacIntyre did a mass market reprint
Before D&M started the mass market reprint, The Sentimentalists was published as a Kobo e-book.
Kobo version uses the Gaspereau cover.
Title page also looks like the Gaspereau page.
History of this book happened why we watched.
What can we learn by taking The Sentamentalists as an object of bibliographic investigation.
Not reading the same novel.
Typeface of Gaspereau has a note in the book in the text. Ends with the note on typography.
Note on the type appears in the e-book as well. But the typeface is not Eric Gill in the e-book.
The note has become a textual fossil or a deception.
Methodological: How do we go about answering questions? Textual changes? Application programming?
Beyond straightforward textual bibliography, the nature of the textual scholarship is changing with the new technologies.