T. Casey thinks it’s a big deal to be mentioned in a book. And I think he’s right. If not a big deal, then at least a medium deal. There’s something still magical about a book as opposed to anything that might be viewed on a screen. If there weren’t something special about it, the University of Michigan would not have installed a book printing machine in its undergraduate library. It prints out copies of books in its digital collection while patrons wait.

The question of which book that machine prints out – a scanned version, and if so, which edition, or if not scanned (OCR-ed instead), does that really count as printing “the book” – those are issues I’ll leave to others. For my purposes, whatever book comes out of that machine, it’s some book. And if you’re mentioned in it, it ought to count as being mentioned in a book. Whatever that’s worth. Probably not much. And maybe it shouldn’t be much, if Bill Tozier is right about the place our current understanding of print has taken us:

I want our understanding of print to die. Our mythology. The authority of texts and citations, the abusive misapprehension of what constitutes scholarship and knowledge in our global culture. The notion of fact, of “it’s true because it’s in a book” and “I don’t have to talk to you and explain what I mean because I cited the paper in my bibliography.” Lazy people talk about books they’ve never read, cite articles in journals they’ve never heard of, as signals of their status and erudition.

Yes, T. Casey will be able to trade on the laziness of folks who say, “T. Casey really could’ve shot J.F.K, and I know that, because it’s in Bugliosi’s book.” But even if we strip away the mythology, and the misappropriated authority afforded to printed texts, there’s something left still, I think, for the simple thrill someone might feel for being mentioned in a book. So I think T. Casey should at least be be appropriately thrilled for his mention in Bugliosi’s book.

Because … quite frankly, I feel thrilled to have been mentioned in a recently published book about human power. This past Saturday, I pedaled over to the Remodel Green Expo at Eastern Michigan University where the author of The Human-Powered Home, Tamara Dean, was selling and signing copies of her book. It can be purchased online as well. She had come to the event all the way from Viroqua, Wisconsin, where she lives a human-powered lifestyle in a rammed earth home. There’s a picture and description of my laundry spinner on page 201. And the only thing I had to shoot to get in there was a photograph.

Tamara Dean signs her book for me: "Dave, Thanks for your contribution and for coming to the presentation. May your muscles never fail you! — Tamara"

At a cost of about only $10 per book, the entire digitized collection (as it currently stands) could be recreated in physical form by an Espresso Book Machine for $20 million. Put a different way, for the $700 billion price tag of the currently proposed bailout of our core financial institutions, we could instead reprint the digitized collection of the UM library 35,000 times. At 5-7 minutes per book, that project would, on a low estimate, take one Espresso Book Machine [70 billion]*[5 minutes], or 665,905 years.

Here at The Chronicle, we’ve got nothing but time, but we have a less ambitious project in mind: We’d like to find somebody in the next few weeks who wants a specific book printed off on the Espresso Machine, who would let us tag along and document the event. That is to say, we’d like to come as close as we can to spotting a “reprinting in the wild” of a book in the digital collection. Hanging out in the Shapiro Library and setting upon patrons who have a digital gleam in their eye, pestering them to “Let us see, c’mon pretty please, let us see the book, let us touch the book,” seems like a horribly inefficient approach, not to mention one that might cause library staff and patrons undue stress. So we’d like to ask in advance if you’re planning to get a book printed on the Espresso Machine: Can we please watch? We promise not to get in the way.

Or if you find yourself in the library and spontaneously decide to print off a book, we’re nothing if not agile here at The Chronicle, and could probably be on site in under half an hour.

Contact information is elsewhere on this website.