I love the idea of sucking out relevant content. I love the idea of text being relevant. Text-taking-precedence means text-as-information, usable information. I love the idea of information being flexible, searchable, applicable. The information publishers (e.g., Cengage/Gale) are way, way ahead of university presses in terms of producing text as information in database formats and online formats, text-suck-outable formats. It’s really kind of funny, and this is why you probably think of university presses as quaint (not your word, I know): we are considered prestigious for publishing scholarship that helps professors attain tenure and that we all say deserves to be out there to be read by even a few hundred readers, yet we’re slow to adopt changes that will propel that text to a larger audience.

I’d like to hear more about your project. It looks like you’re working with the University of Minnesota library system. What’s that like, working with the librarians?

I have no argument with what you’re saying. What I was getting at is that I consider design as a vehicle for content. Still, I like to have our books look and feel good, and that’s beyond design as a vehicle. Readers look beyond text with bad breaks or crashing quotes. Most of us even overlook errors of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I feel mildly annoyed and self-righteous when I see them, but I move right along, because I know they are unavoidable with the pressured workflow at a publisher.

What I was pointing out was the difference between book as text and book as package. Until I became responsible for the look and feel of our books (always collaborating with others, of course), I paid very little conscience attention to lamination, paper weight, and color. Now I do, and perhaps as a result I have less time and energy to devote to adopting innovations. Perhaps less motivation too–because people will always buy books. They’re a lovely and convenient package.

My current project is connecting bibliographic references with spatial or geographic context. The first ‘bibliospatial’ system as far as I know (http://harvestchoice.org/). By simply sucking out the geospatial references in the text we can produce maps and associated data which are directly relavent to the content of the article.