![\"\"](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/iBooks-Wood-Shelf.png\")
The ebook owning experience was—and still is—overwhelmingly underserved. As soon as I started acquiring and reading ebooks, I immediately felt disorientated. "What books do I have? Which have I read, and in what state of reading progress are they in? When did I read them, in what context?"
\nI also asked myself "why do I feel this way?" I realized then: these ebooks do not exist in my mental space-time map. Many thousands of years of cognitive evolution, giving us the ability to situate experiences in multiple dimensions of context—space, time, social, semantic—are left unaddressed. My mind is given no cognitive surface area to grasp and weave into memory.
\nFor something as deeply important to human development as books, not to mention written knowledge, this feels like a problem.
\n\n\nSkeuomorph:\nA derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to structures that were necessary in the original.\nCambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1988
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\n\nThe forms of ornament demonstrably due to structure require a name. If those taken from animals are called zoomorphs, and those from plants phyllomorphs, it will be convenient to call those derived from structure, skeuomorphs.\nHenry Colley March, The Meaning of Ornament: Or its Archaeology and its Psychology, 1889
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Before continuing, a few words about skeuomorphism. Simply put, in software interface design, skeuomorphism refers to an approach whereby the software tries to mimic the "physical world" experience it is digitizing.
\nWith ebooks, this means something like representing a collection of ebooks in a UI that mimics physical bookshelves. The first versions of Apple Books did this, and some apps out there still do.
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Often falling esthetically somewhere between kitschy and the uncanny valley, the use of full-on skeuomorphism is generally avoided now. Too often, however, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and these deeper cognitive "hooks" I mentioned earlier are left unaddressed, unused, un-leveraged.
\nWith libra.re, I try to explore all that, without resorting to faux-wood panelling, page curls and the like. The materials I want to sculpt digitally are time, place, relationships, context… any meaning we can put in form. Some of these already have established UI patterns: maps, timelines, social networks… But these don't feel "natural" to the domain of book. Besides, I feel like the possibilities are not yet exhausted, especially for multi-context, hybrid information situations.
\nFor example: how to present in a quickly graspable way the history of my experience with a specific book? From the moment I learned of it (from whom, how, where), to acquiring it; the multiple sessions of reading and perhaps annotating it; the conversations about it or the ideas I gleaned from it; how it connects to a broader theme I was researching at the time.
\nMy first impulses were perhaps obvious: pull my ebook library into physical space, and sneak up behind skeuomorphism.
\nA physical book not only contains the knowledge and ideas within it, but it is also a totem of them in the physical world. We interact with the object constantly even when we are not engaging with the thoughts within it, i.e. reading it.
\nIt is there, on the table, by the bedside, in your bag, on the shelf, in the corner of your eye…
\nThe very first piece of code I wrote for this project generated a PDF of ready-to-print "collecting cards" of the ebooks in my library. The front of course displayed the book cover, with whatever available metadata & stats I had access to on the back side.
\n![\"The](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/Meaning-of-Money-Totem-Card.png\")
I could carry the card around, as a totem of what I was reading. Leave it lying around…
\nI could display these on my actual book shelf, with ebooks I was currently reading prominently showcased in a little card holder.
\n![\"Living](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/Book-Totems-Display-Mockup.jpg\")
However, as neato! as it was, the overhead of generating and managing these cards was beyond what my motivation could muster. Especially as my collection exploded.
\nIt was a great experiment, but as an everyday, real (and marketable) "thing"… the costs outweighed the benefits. This value would need to be fulfilled another way.
\nPerhaps to be revisited…
\nAt its base, libra.re is a web app that lists my ebooks and displays relevant information about each one in various ways. Some of the ways it does this are pretty standard—lists of books grouped and sorted according to criteria I set.
\nWhen you list a bunch of ebooks on a webpage, or in an app, it's pretty easy to just dump the cover image, title and author name on there and call it done.
\n![\"Cover](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/GenericCoverSizes-Illustration-same.png\")
But there's a glaring omission in basically every version of this out there.
\nHow big is this book? Is it a real chonk that requires a real investment in time and effort? Something I can feel some accomplishment in saying "oh yeah I finished that beast"? Or is it something I can breeze through quickly?
\n![\"Cover](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/GenericCoverSizes-Illustration-sized.png\")
Ebooks of course don't have any real size. They mostly flow into whatever form factor you read them on. File size is unreliable since it measures how much data is in the file, which includes things like cover images, fonts, styles. A short text of say 50Kb might have a 20Mb cover image (I've seen much worse). So the book's file size is not what we want to rely on here.
\nThe sizes of physical books across editions can vary also depending on decisions made by the publisher and their designers. For example, a smaller pocket edition of a book has a reduced page size, which inflates the thickness and page count. Typography and layout choices like size, leading, kerning, margins, paragraph spacing all have an effect as well here. Book design takes into account many aspects, and there are some rough standards of what works—for general legibility, cultural forms, contemporary styles, or different genres and markets–but what we end up with, the book in our hand and our shelf, is our experience of that particular book. There is no set, absolute measure of a book's size.
\nHowever, the intrinsic quantity of a book lies in it's contents. The measure of a book's "weight and size" is necessarily based, no matter what, in how many characters—letters, spaces, punctuation—it is made of. "War and Peace" is just a big ol' book, no matter how it is packaged.
\nIn digital world, it is trivial to get character and word counts for a text. And, interestingly, most publishers do actually indicate a page count, usually based on the paper version of the same edition. This metadata is often included or at least available, and there are tools which can calculate a rough page count.
\nI currently use such page counts. The sense that somewhere in the process some logical "real world" heuristic was applied is reassuring. How do I know that asking the computer to give me a brute letter count for an ebook won't include the HTML markup used in the code?
\nSo ok what does this get me?
\nBased on page counts, I can scale the cover thumbnail sizes and give a sense of thickness.
\n![\"\"](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/Librare-Ebookshelf-Pagecount-Sizing.png\")
This is the most obvious thing, but also one the most engaging. An audible gasp is usually the response when showing someone this for the first time.
\nI think it's easy to understand why: the development of human cognition around spatial perception and object recognition is several hundred thousand years deep. Displaying ebooks with size differences roughly matched to their content provides not only a sense of their intrinsic nature (a real tome vs. a pamphlet) but also provides another dimension–I call it "cognitive surface area"—for our minds to grasp and enmesh the object in our experience, and thus our memory.
\nThis was the point why I started this exploration. I had no memories tied to my experiences with my ebooks, beyond what I may have retained from simply reading them.
\nI love gazing at my e-bookshelves just as much as I love gazing at my "real" bookshelves. The memories and thoughts and serendipity that both evoke are now roughly equal.
\n", "date_published": "2024-07-04T00:00:00Z" } , { "id": "https://libra.re/studio/about/the-story-so-far/index.php", "url": "https://libra.re/studio/about/the-story-so-far/index.php", "title": "The Story So Far", "content_html": "![\"Living](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/librare-live-with-ebooks-3.jpg\")
Before I dive into it in subsequent posts, I want to share a bit of the story of how this project came to be. What compelled me to start? Why am I doing this?
\nThere’s gonna be a lot of “I” and “my” in here, inevitably. Your patience and indulgence are much appreciated.
\nBooks have surrounded me all my life. I’m one of those people who’s bookshelves are an important part of their world. I have always had books lying around, stacks and piles here and there, multiple tomes in varying states and stages of reading-ness.
\n![](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/librare-get-excited-and-jailbreak-things-kindle.jpg\")
\nMy first eink reader device was a 2010 Kindle DX, the dark grey one with the keyboard. I kinda ignored it for a while. I was too busy pursuing a career as a designer, then at Nokia. It was an amazing time for me. I got to dance with world-class designers, in an “insight and foresight” culture. It refined how I think about and approach design: critically and inquisitively.
\nAs my time at Nokia wound down, I started reading more again. I dusted off the Kindle, got a few ebooks. And… I found myself completely lost and disoriented in the experience, almost immediately.
\nWhile many spoke of the eink screen quality, the bookstore selection, or the ecosystem lock-in, I had an additional problem. My discomfort lay, upon introspection, with the broader context of “living with books.”
\nAfter acquiring the 5th or 6th ebook I realized I already didn’t know what I had anymore. I’d forgotten what I had read, if I’d finished anything or if I had any notes. I had only a passing, merely textual and fragmented memory of the books. I also had no memory of reading them: where and when, etc…
\nThere was “no there, there.” The ebooks did not exist in my life, the way physical books always had. To me, that meant they didn’t fulfill their basic value proposition, and I mean that not only in commercial terms.
\nI am not one of those people who fetishizes physical media over digital—quite the opposite. My immediate thought was: “ok, how can information technology address some of this lack of broader cognitive engagement?”
\nHere’s how I phrased it in 2017:
\n\n\nLibra.re is about establishing a certain angle of inquiry. “What sort of rudimentary digital experience that begins to explore recovering some of the tangible, spatial, temporal, social experiences I miss from not having my ebooks in my physical environment?”\nReading and buying aside, this is about the “having” of books, the living with them and their content, my annotations, and my memories of them, of interacting with them, of “having them around.”
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I’ve been building stuff on the Web since the mid-90s, so naturally I started exploring using web-based technologies.
\n![\"eBookShelf\"](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/librare-eBookShelf.png\")
Soon enough, I had built a few experiences which were kinda interesting, kinda compelling. I started to get a real sense of the library of ebooks—the elibrary—I had started to build.
\nI showed what I had done to an old friend of mine—Hugh McGuire—who at the time had already spent considerable effort talking about and building tech for ebooks. He had even published an O’Reilly book about it, and was (and still is) running a web-based ebook publication service. Based on what I’d shown him, and the many excited conversations that followed, we founded the Rebus Foundation which, generously funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, pursued web-based academic textbook creation.
\nA few years later now, and I find myself returning to my old project. Nothing seems to have really changed in the ebook world, and if anything it’s gotten worse.
\nBut I sense something in the air. The time may be right to push the conversation again. So I’ve updated my codebase, refreshed the design… and am ready to start exploring again.
\nThis time, I am going to do it in the open. I can’t have a conversation just with myself and expect things to happen.
\nSo, enough context and preamble. If you’d like to be informed when I start, use the links and the sign-up form in the footer of this page to follow and subscribe.
\nThank you.
\n", "date_published": "2023-08-05T00:00:00Z" } , { "id": "https://libra.re/studio/about/index.php", "url": "https://libra.re/studio/about/index.php", "title": "About libra.re", "content_html": "![\"Living](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/librare-live-with-ebooks.jpg\")
When I began to acquire ebooks, after a lifetime of living with books—and bookshelves and stacks, and piles, and notes, and moments in time, and place, with people—I quickly realized something was missing.
\nEbooks, as they have been made available to us, do not afford the attendant contextual experiences that books in the physical world do. Sadly, they seem to only address the most basic technical—and mercantile—experience of books: read it once, then find another to buy.
\nI built this web-based platform to explore how we might recapture some of those missing experiences… and what novel ones may be made possible with digital technologies.
\nAs you might guess, there is so much. The neurological, psychological, sociological, and cultural dimensions books engage with in our lives easily rival the purely intellectual.
\n![\"Living](\"https://libra.re/studio/about/img/librare-live-with-ebooks-2.jpg\")
While I do intend to share these experiments—and in the future, find ways to collaborate on them!—for now, I can only showcase them. It turns out that actually living with ebooks, especially in any social way, comes very close to contravening digital copyright legislation.
\nThat means that the site you see here is a "limited" version of the webapp I have running locally, just for myself. It is that local version that I will document in various ways, here and elsewhere.
\nIf this interests you, please subscribe and/or follow. I'll start posting stuff soon.
\nAlso, I am always happy to talk about any of this!
\nIn draft:
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