For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around me to understand how bad things were in New Orleans.

The power of this kind of record is part of what makes me agree with Paul Carr’s assessment: what I’ve gained in immediacy and community via Twitter, I’ve lost in preservation, longevity, even permanence.

It’s this kind of thing that has me torn between the precious little time I have for this kind of writing and the desire to keep those thoughts somewhere I might get back at them five years from now.

I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new WordPress 3.0 plugin developed by the One Week | One Tool workshop, sponsored by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. The plugin is designed to take you from blog to book — or, even better, from many blogs to many kinds of book-like outputs. I’ve only just begun playing with it, but can easily imagine it become a key part of my Intro to Digital Media Studies class, and I can also see its utility in repurposing thematically-linked blog posts in more permanent, more “official” form.

Huge congratulations to the Anthologize team, and I look forward to watching — and participating in — the project’s further development.

My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?

As the 2009-10 president of Pomona College’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, I was supposed to deliver the address at our commencement weekend initiation ceremony. I accidentally double-booked myself, though, by agreeing to speak at a one-day conference at Dartmouth; somehow, I’d forgotten than the initiation ceremony was Friday evening, rather than Saturday evening. Needless to say, I felt awful when I suddenly realized what I’d done — and of course the realization came in the middle of the night, waking me up from a dead sleep.

Anyhow, this is how I managed to get myself out of this goof: the first such presidential address delivered via video. Fortunately, the topic I’d planned worked well with the mediation. And now I get to share it with you.

(Incidentally, the bad audio sync is semi-intentional; when I realized that the sound and image were off just a fraction, I figured hey, the YouTube aesthetic seems appropriate here.)

Finding myself yesterday felled by some nasty bug or another, I wound up spending the day in bed. And I can now say with certainty that the iPad is the best device yet invented for the lying-around-sick day.

I had a range of video options available to me, both TV series I’ve imported via iTunes and streaming video from the ABC Player, and I spent a while listening to music via the iPod app, but mostly (and contrary to some people’s expectations), I read.

I read the second half of a book I’d started in the iBooks app, and I read all of a book I downloaded in the Kindle app. (Okay, they were really light reading. But still!) Both were utterly pleasant to read, and the backlit screen did not bother me at all. In fact, when I was quite unceremoniously awakened at 1 am by the onset of this bug, and once I’d processed that I wasn’t dying but nor was I going back to sleep, either, I picked up the iPad and read for a while with the light off. It was wonderfully reminiscent of reading in bed with a flashlight as a kid, but way more convenient.

Both applications function well. And as I pointed out last week, both have a nice range of markup tools built in, though the Kindle’s annotation capability is more advanced than that of iBooks. And Kindle’s definitely got selection (and, by and large, price) on its side. But I still feel as I did on my initial encounter with the two apps — the iBooks landscape orientation, which presents two facing pages of text, is vastly preferable to Kindle’s, which presents one very wide column. And this matters a great deal when you’re reading in bed, as the landscape orientation presents a lower center of gravity, and thus a more stable means of holding the iPad, than does portrait.

In any case, I read up a storm, I listened to some music I hadn’t heard in a while, and I kept mostly on top of my email, or at least the most important things that landed in my inbox. And I discovered that on-screen typing, at least in the landscape position, becomes much easier very very quickly. (Though I’m annoyed beyond belief that the apostrophe key is on the numbers-and-punctuation screen of the keyboard. Most contractions typed without an apostrophe will auto-correct, but of course possessives won’t.) And web-browsing on the iPad — well, I wouldn’t exactly call it “magical,” but it’s awfully nifty.

Anyhow, I’m happy to be back up and around, and sitting at the desktop again, but a day of putting the iPad through its paces has me pretty convinced of its place in my device ecosystem.

From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age of Print. Ted has opened a wiki for the project, through which interested volunteers can help him clean up the text for audio conversion. Instructions and details are available on the wiki.

This is an exciting project, not least for its attempt to manage the labor involved in creating a public resource that will be given away freely. I hope you’ll get involved.

So I did, after a minor delay (produced by the Apple truck not showing up to the bookstore on time), get my hands on my new iPad. I spent most of day 1 just getting it set up, figuring out which of my iPhone apps I wanted to put on the iPad, what of my media I wanted to have on it, what new iPad-specific applications I wanted, and the like. The most complex part of that set of transactions was figuring out how to get my app-specific data onto the iPad; apps that sync directly with desktop or with cloud-based services were pretty easy, but others, not so much. And then I spent some of the end of day 1 and much of day 2 playing with the thing itself.

I haven’t attempted much that’s new with it yet, mostly just poked about in the various media players and readers. And if I wind up using the iPad for nothing other than that, I’ll be very happy with it. The native iTunes video player, “Videos” (which I was at first a little surprised to see has been separated out from “iPod”) is as great as you’d expect — load it up with some mp4 video and go. And so far the streaming video players — the free ABC player is the only one I’ve tested as yet — aren’t bad. I had two issues with the ABC player, one of which had to do with the fact that my wireless bandwidth was being used for other purposes at the time, so the player could only get a smallish bit of the pipe; the other, however, is a little more troubling, as the player doesn’t seem to allow you to back up and rewatch a minute or two if you missed something. Whatever, though: it’s a great quality screen, and the apps will provide access to lots of stuff as long as you’ve got wireless available.

One of the first things I downloaded, of course, was the iBooks app, and I of course installed the Kindle app as well. iBooks is pretty nifty, as you’ve seen in the demos; you have a nice shelf for all your books, which spins around to take you to the store. The store’s selection is fairly limited at the moment, though I’m sure that will grow. Even better, importing any DRM-free EPUB book into iTunes will synchronize it with the iPad, so it can be filled with Project Gutenberg goodness. The Kindle app (which now comes in a universal version for both iPhone and iPad) of course has selection in its favor over the iBooks store, not to mention automatically synchronizing with the app on your iPhone as well as the desktop version. One thing that iBooks has in its favor, however, is layout. As some folks have noted, when you hold the iPad in portrait mode, you see one page of the book, which you turn by swiping — and the back of the page you turn is blank. But if you hold the iPad in landscape mode, you get the full recto/verso of the book, which I’ll confess to liking quite a lot. I recognize that this is part of the rear-view mirrorism of “iBooks,” but it’s pleasing to the eye to have right and left facing pages as an option, and to have pages turn rather than slide to the next screen.

I absolutely see myself focusing more and more of my book buying on this device, for no other reason than convenience: I’m about to head off for a year’s sabbatical on the other side of the country, and if I can minimize the number of books I need to ship, more power to me. What I’m going to find myself considering over the next weeks, though, is what kind of books I want to buy digitally, and what I’ll still want to have in print. The hard copy issue for me isn’t the “book in the bathtub” thing, though I will confess to having a long-standing room-full-of-books-on-shelves fetish; it’s more about the specifics of the ways that I read, and particularly the ways that I mark texts up.

The iBooks app does allow for text highlighting; double-tap on a word, stretch the highlighted area to contain the passage you want to highlight, and click — well, click “bookmark,” which is seriously counterintuitive. Bookmark? What happens, though, is that the passage gets highlighted (in a niftily hand-drawn looking way); tapping on the highlight then lets you change its color. The reason these highlighted passages get referred to as “bookmarks,” I think, is that if you call up the menu on a page you’re reading and click the table of contents button, you’ll see a “bookmarks” option, which lists all of the passages you’ve highlighted, along with the date and time you highlighted them, and the color you highlighted them in. So the seriously anal among you could develop color-coded annotation practices. Not that I would do any such thing.

What the Kindle app has over that, of course, is the ability to create pop-up annotations in addition to highlights, something seriously lacking in iBooks as yet. But what I miss in both cases is the feeling of actually marking the page itself, of responding to the text in its margins in a way that remains visible. I cannot help but assume that one of these readers will develop stylus-markup ability soon, and whichever does may well earn my loyalty. (And purchases.)

The last thing that I’ll say on this for now is that I also purchased the GoodReader app, which allows for the import and reading of a range of other kinds of documents, most notably pdfs. It’s got a great reader-like interface for those kinds of documents — including, say, pdf versions of books made available by publishers. But like iBooks and Kindle, it doesn’t have good markup capability.

So, as I suspected, the iPad is thus far a great media consumption device — which is great, because I consume a lot of media. But what it allows me to do with that media is thus far a bit limited. I’m counting on the app developers out there to start pushing on those limits, to find more flexible ways for users to write back to the texts they’re reading.

So yes, I did pre-order an iPad, or actually pre-reserve one with my college’s bookstore. And I intend to pick it up first thing tomorrow morning. And I absolutely cannot wait.

This is not a cool thing to admit in at least some of the circles I travel in. The open source/open content folks I know are understandably concerned about the iPad’s status as a tethered device, closed to programs and content not Apple-approved. I get that, and I’m concerned about it, too. At least for the couple of hours it’ll take before somebody posts a jailbreak for it, the iPad will be a closed system.

Except: there’s that web thing. While web apps on the iPhone haven’t been quite as flexible as one might like them to be, those difficulties have been due at least in part to the restrictions on browser window size, and in part due to the inconvenient crashiness of Safari. I have no sense, of course, that the latter problem will be fixed on the iPad, but the former certainly will be. And not having to use restricted mobile versions of web apps might change the game entirely; using Gmail in all its non-mobile glory might make me not care that it’s a web app. And as more and more of the stuff I do becomes browser-oriented, there’s decreasing cause for me to be concerned about the restrictions Apple places on the app store.

The other concern that many folks I know have voiced is that the iPad isn’t just tethered; in Jonathan Zittrain’s term, it’s appliancized. It’s a device primarily meant for consumption rather than production. And the more we allow our computers to devolve into appliances, the less likely they are to be generative devices, devices that allow for unexpected uses, for productive surprises, for hacking.

I agree with that logic, generally, but not as applied to the iPad in particular. The iPad is indeed primarily meant for consumption — which means that it can’t really replace the computer, and indeed shouldn’t. At least not yet, in any case; the iPad as it will be released tomorrow is a device that one can program for, but not yet a device that one can program on.

But that doesn’t mean that it will always be so. As Stephen Fry reminds us in his article in Time, the Mac was at its release “derided as a toy, a media poseur’s plaything and a shallow triumph of style over substance,” but the creativity that the Mac inspired transformed the landscape of personal computing; similarly, the iPhone was seen “as a plaything, but it transformed the smart-phone landscape.” None of us have any way of knowing what people will do with their iPads as yet, but don’t count ingenuity out. Engaging devices have a way of producing unexpected results.

I also take issue with the consumption/production divide that, as Matt Kirschenbaum pointed out this morning, is being reified by much of the technorati’s response to the iPad. On the one hand, I want to say “what’s so bad about consumption, anyhow?”; I’ve never been upset with my television for not allowing me to broadcast. And on the other hand, I also want to note the myriad ways that consumption has always led to production, has always been a necessary stage on the way to production. Writing is something we should all aspire to, but writing without reading is an impossibility. Devices that can provide for more engaging reading — and I mean that in the broadest sense, not just in the interaction with text but with images, audio, video, games — will inspire new kinds of writing, new kinds of creative production, in forms that we can’t as yet even imagine.

Play is inspiring. And as of tomorrow morning, I hope to be inspired, in new ways.

A quick note: I’m (at least in theory) participating in today’s Day of Digital Humanities festivities. “In theory,” alas, because the conference I’m attending is wi-fi-less. Nonetheless, I’ll post when I can; you can keep up with my DH-ness here, and with more general Day-of-DH doings by following the aggregator blog or the Twitter hashtag.

A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circles. In case you haven’t seen it:

I saw this video when DK first posted it, and have been thinking about it since then, mostly because I’ve been trying to figure out what makes me crazy about it.

When I watched it again yesterday it started to hit me: couched in the “hey, maybe social media isn’t going to kill reading after all; hey, maybe we really do need to start thinking about a new business model” stuff is an essentially conservative message about the ongoing primacy of the book. That only by reading everything exactly backward can you turn “books are dying” into “books are not dying!” That either the kids today only care about pop media crap or they care about reading, with no possibility that they can care about both, or that what appears to be pop media crap might in fact be important.

I dunno. It’s clever. It’s very nicely designed. And I’m happy it’s undoing some of the “kids today” rhetoric. But I’m not sold on the message overall. I genuinely believe that publishing has a future, but my feeling is that the future is going to look more like this video than like the book as we have known it. And no amount of running the tape backward will change that.