“Bob Stein is the professional maniac who is not afraid to go off and do something that seems absolutely absurd to everyone else who does not have his vision. People like Bob make things happen. He is the publisher born before his time, born before the printing presses were good enough to do the things he wanted to do.”
THE ORACLE (Paul Saffo)
After a brief introduction by Prof. Michelle Citron, Stein began his January 26 lecture with a bold statement:
“Let me start off by saying that this thing we call book, it will disappear, and be gone. It will only exist as an art object. The question is not ‘What is a book?’, but instead, ‘What does a book DO?’ Future books will not be in print, they will be interactive. The book as ink on paper is going away. There, now that I’ve got that out there, we can move on.”
With an audience composed of students and faculty from Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts program; Chicago book artists; and librarians from the Chicago community, Stein’s statement on the viability of books as objects seemed designed to upend perceptions, along with any form of the status quo. Stein made clear his opinion that the future of the book is about interactivity, pointing out how previous expectations of the editor/gatekeeper’s role as responsible for actively compiling and organizing vast amounts of information has been turned upside-down. Stein sees the world wide web as a huge, open-access database, with millions of eyes accessing and contributing to the shared information database, without the need of intermediary “guardians of knowledge.”
Stein discussed his work with networked texts, and the use of virtual marginalia, which he sees as the next step in the book as a process. He believes that writing as discourse is rapidly transitioning from the isolated printed page (“producer-driven” media) to networked screens, linked to a space that is populated by many contributing and interacting users (“user-driven” media). He sees his new project “Social Book” as the next step in the book’s evolution: No longer the book seen only as an object, but as “a vehicle used to move ideas around in time and space.”
Read more about Stein’s work at The Institute of the Future of the Book.
