The book that’s a web-in-a-box.

I was fiddling around at building small databases in Borland’s Delphi. And because I’m aware of living in a time of fast conceptual shifts or newly emerging or transfigured metaphors ...I was struck by something that was not, itself, new and was not considered very remarkable since I’d seen only one remark here and there. It seems that, for workers in Delphi, anyway, a database is not a thing, not a file. The one remark was that some databases are files, or great superfiles that contain subfiles.

A database, it seems, is a directory on a disk in which the files associated with it are kept. Some files may be kept elsewhere, but they can be tied to files in the directory in some way so that the database management system can get them. The database, then, is a container of sorts, but in a loose sense, like a corral. And in our emerging world, it can be a lot looser than a directory and some links. The directory may give way to simply being a server (computer) “out there” somewhere. Or a distributed complex of servers. A database might be something seemingly ephemeral, like a horizon disk on the open cyberseas.

Most other things on my desktop were things. A WinHelp help-file, for instance, was a file. Inside, it was more complex. There were topics, contents, indexes. Somewhat like the innards of books. Then, Adobe Acrobat’s .pdf files contained books. Publishers even published reference manuals and journals in WinHelp files. Books that were just books didn’t seem to be around to draw my attention. A book had to be inside something. It could be in a word processor or desktop publisher file to be read inside the application until printed. And there were the “read anywhere” .hlp and .pdf files.

With web publishing, HTML’s manuscripts, and books with CDs containing whole chapters that would not fit into a bind-able stack of pages or on-line copies of other books the publisher was hawking ...the image of the really loose leaf book floated down before my eyes. No “ringed” binder, but just a web of webs of linkings. The “binding” as a whole was pretty much invisible. You could get some organization surfaced in tables of contents or reference lists of some sort. But the book wasn’t there until you opened it and started reading in it. You’ve seen those books in the kids’ section of a bookstore. You open the book to a pair of pages and an “edifice” comes up out of the gutter. A three dimensional model. Well, the books written in HTML’d eText are sort of like that. Move around in a book like that and you come to know, or get the heft, anyway, about how things hook up, what c’n be pulled in when (or where). Live readers have always had this sense of a book’s whole content. You can’t remember where in the book a passage you want to check was, but you know it was on the right hand side near the top. You can almost (but not quite) read it with your mind’s eyes and will recognize phrases from it or from the page’s quadrant.

Still, the eBook, to give it some sort of generic name, needs to be a bit more handle-able than that. You ought to be able to pick it up in your virtual hand, or your physical one if you c’n shoot it onto, say, a floppy disk. More to the point, it’s a lousy idea to have bits and pieces lying about ready to fly into the page gutters and become those edifices. Particularly over long periods of time and in the vicinity of other eBooks.

One solution is to make the covers out of the same materials as the pages. So the book or binder is a web page (scroll). To get a little shape, it can be a frameset page. It organizes some of the innards including things like tables of contents and indexes that organize the rest. My eManual, which can be opened from the Help menu with a few extra clicks, is this kind of a book. It’s not fancy. A top frame is a title page and copyright page. A left frame is a table of contents. No glyphs, no collapsible tree toc (though I’ve done that in HTML tocs). I use those client-side form buttons because I like them, though they are a bit big and, in a stack, can seem a little clutzy. The main frame is for reading (which is what books are for). To make that even easier, I have a full window option. That opens another browser window without all the toolbars and such for a clean reading copy. If you get different pages in the reading frame and click on Full window without having closed it, the pages are stacked in there and you can move among them with Forward and Back keys, Alt+ left and right arrows.

Zip up all the pieces of your book, and you’ve a handle-able copy. When you want to read it, unzip it in a “reading” room (directory). Among other things you don’t use up HDD clusters for a lot of piecemeal books lying around in storage directories. Use good (file) labels and pull a book off a shelf (book directory) into the reading area when you want to read it.

In our HTML’d world...

...we’re going to have personal libraries made up of eBooks, eZines, eJournals, ePapers (sigh!, a lot of e-, eh?). And we’ll have virtual dens or studies that merge with our physical ones assuming there’s a computer near the leather chair or on your lap. Nope, not a paperless office (or den). Paper and screen aren’t competing. The browser end of the distributed typewriter will put the “interface” copy on either. for that matter, the eTypewriter will put the “engine” (manuscript) copy on either. That’s for your “doubled” reading, in which you get more fuel for your insighting (—> inciting) ...or, “in-seeing” reading. Read the manuscript, with its comments, marginalia that’s not passed along, semantic tags, and whatever else, of the writer, is there, maybe even link-innards and other hidden material. What you read where, screen, chair, or john, will depend on what’s to be read and what else you’re doing while reading.

Your personal elibrary/den will have a tree of stacks for books, journals, correspondences, and other materials ...if the “books” can be picture books, sound-able music books, video-holding books, interactive books. You might have a bank of reading directories (you’ll want more than one book open at a time). Unzip a book and pull it up into ...well, wait. Maybe not directly into a browser from the browser because this can be a clumsy job.

Use eWriter. Pull a book’s frame page (or other master page) into eWriter’s top editor. Tools/Browsers get’s this page up fast. And you can Alt+Tab back and forth, bring up other book pages in eWriter for that “doubled” reading or even to push around for printing if your browser gives you Print Preview. (My Navigator 3.0 does, my Explorer 3.02 doesn’t — so I print from Navigator.)

Personal copies.

It’s easy to forget that everything is shifting as we talk about and imagine the goings-on in different or altered metaphors. The shifting is taking place deep within our conceptualizing and understanding innards. We have a new kind of book, or other publication, to take into our personal libraries, to be our personal copies.

So, let’s ride the shift. This new sort of book or publication allows a greater interaction between reader and read. Suppose, you’ve grabbed source from a paper for your personal library, along with its embedded charts or other materials. Before I get into how this will affect reading, studying, and insighting, I better say something about the shifts in context with legal implications. A printed copy of a book exists in one copy on your library shelf. Anything you write in it, highlight in it, or do to it is obviously “done to it” and is, in any case done only to that one copy. Unless you make photocopies, there’s little chance of this copy of this book going anywhere or to anyone who’s likely to irritate the author or copyright holder.

Your eCopy is a digital dance of bits. It’s at once ephemeral and persistent, infinitely reproducible, and awfully easy to hand off to some correspondent when you’re frustrated trying to get a context around what you are saying. The personal in “personal library” has to disciplined management. Off the top of my head, I’d guess that you can’t readily invite a colleague who’s half way around the globe in to sit down with your printout or computer screen to read your “reading” of something. So, the “handing back and forth” has to be handled carefully, with destruction schedules carefully set. Discourse on levels I’m going to talk about in a moment must be free, but ownership of materials and even the integrity of originals has to receive tender. loving care.

The answer is to write, as you would on the fly-leaf of a book, in two places in a master or first scroll file. This identifies whose personal copy it is, and an informal citation for the original. Good library habits in any case. First, this should be in comment tags at the top of the file and, second, it should be in displayed text at the top of the body section. Any satellite scrolls linked in should likely have an abbreviated note displayed at the top of the body. All this is something. This isn’t going to seem like any great extra activity when you stop and think about what you can do to aid your study or even simple reading given this new type of “book.”

Given a paper book, a reader can use highlighting and underlining, marginalia, including references to other materials or pages, and, then, as my library shows, pieces of paper, both Post-its and ungummed pieces, as well as brochures, carbons of letters, and what-all can be inserted between pages.

Now, given those habits and the new “doubled” reading which includes reading the engine or manuscript copy, it becomes possible do some of your organizing of what you’re taking in out if front of you. You sketch some of your framework thinking as a painter might sketch in pencil aspects of a canvas growing inside.

I got onto this while trying to read a paper on line. It was a summary of what was going on in XML development. It was black text on a dark brown background. Because it had been written in Winword, there were gaps in words where arbitrary line-ends had fallen. And there were other things that made reading on screen difficult. I got rid of the background color by printing it. But, I didn’t want to leave it at that. So, I grabbed the “source” and became a source-eror’s apprentice. I fixed those line endings by running it into eWriter, putting word wrap on, and kicking down through the lines, deleting a space and putting it back in. Then, I decided that since I was going to print it from this source, even though I’d given it a white background in that source, I’d push things around to get page breaks that were useful. And then, I had an idea that, I think now, birthed this notion of a personal copy. I inserted some notes. In BLOCKQUOTES and “blue” FONT COLOR. Nothing very fancy. Now, extend the idea. Some materials will have links, images, and other embedded materials. Others can be added. We can insert “pieces of paper” or link to other, really big, “pieces” And to local spots therein, maybe, if anchors are available.

That’s the birthing of this vision of a 21st century personal copy of a publication. The end of it is out there beyond our imaginations. What we have is live material. It can be rearranged not just for printing, but for reading. If it is a truly digging sort of reading, you can put in anchors and, at the top, a stack of labeled buttons to take you to those anchors. In eWriter, you have a menu item for putting in a stack of client-side buttons by clicking the menu item. You add labels and URLs or anchors.

Presumably, you keep a pristine copy. And maybe more than one “reading” perhaps accumulated over years. You can go back through an earlier reading and, in a “doubled” reading, you can note what was put in during that reading, the anchors and links as well as the immediately present comments and notes. Something noted and not followed up might be useful in a future reading. And there is always the possibility of, then, with these highly active readings settled in, to return to the pristine original, and start a fresh reading, maybe even a “straight through” reading.