Read the original interview in Italian here

The ELR is very pleased to include this interview with Gino Roncaglia in the interviews of the series #ELRPUB. ELR readers have gotten to know him through the #ELRFEAT series in which the interviews with George Landow and the interview with David Kolb appear. Roncaglia’s findings are based on a long experience in academia, but also as a collaborator and co-founder of important projects such as Liber Liber and Progetto Manuzio. His observations on history, the market and the use of new media in schools enrich the #ELRPUB series with valid arguments and new ideas.

ELR: Gino Roncaglia you have been working for almost 20 years as a university lecturer at the University of Tuscia in the field of digital publishing and e-learning. How did your interest in the use of information technology in publishing and teaching come about?

Gino Roncaglia: The interest in information technology was born during university studies. I graduated in philosophy, with a thesis related to the history of logic; professor of logic at Sapienza – and then co-supervisor of my thesis – was Carlo Cellucci, a very good teacher, at the time very interested in logic programming. For his courses I started to study some programming languages (LISP, PROLOG, C…) and to use the first computers (at the university there was a PET CBM, while personally I had first a Sinclair ZX 81, then a Commodore 64 and an Amiga 1000). Addressing the interest in computer science to the fields of publishing and teaching was then quite natural, since I have always been involved in books and publishing, even for family imprinting. At home we have all always read a lot, and the same passion for teaching is a family feature: both my father and brother were university professors, while my mother taught Italian and history in high school.

ELR: In 1993 you founded together with Marco Calvo, Paolo Barberi, Fabio Ciotti and Marco Zela the cultural association Liber Liber dedicated to sharing and spreading knowledge online. How did the Proggetto Manuzio, named after the famous Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio, develop?

Gino Roncaglia: The project was born in 1993 on MC-Link, which at the time was a BBS (Bulletin Board System) mainly Roman, from an exchange of e-mails between Pieralfonso Longo and Marco Calvo on the Gutenberg Project, the direct precursor of the Progetto Manuzio, started about twenty years earlier by Michael Hart in the United States. At the beginning of the 90’s Fabio Ciotti was working with Giuseppe Gigliozzi, one of the pioneers of Italian humanistic computer science, who unfortunately died prematurely, on a degree thesis linked to projects for the digitization of some literary texts; these were the first texts made available to the project. My contribution was initially limited to a suggestion to make known and finance the initiative: to hold courses on the use of the Internet at an ARCI headquarters, which had existed for some time but was only just beginning to be discussed in Italy. The courses were a success, and from the handouts of those courses was born the first edition of a manual – Internet ’96 – that Laterza (assuming some risk: at the time the subject was strictly for professionals …) agreed to publish. That manual then went through six different editions and several reprints, selling a total of about seventy-five thousand copies. The idea of the courses was discussed in a bar in San Lorenzo, if I’m not mistaken, we were Marco Calvo, Paolo Barberi, Fabio Ciotti, Marco Zela and myself, on the same occasion that we decided to set up the Liber Liber association.

Personally, I thought that the Progetto Manuzio could be useful above all to make people understand the potential of digital, but I imagined that it would soon be supported and gradually replaced by larger digitization projects run by universities, libraries and research centers. I never thought it would survive twenty-five years. The fact that the Progetto Manuzio is still active and widely used is a truly remarkable result: thanks to Marco Calvo, who has continued to follow it, but also testimony to the country’s persistent delay in digitizing the texts of our cultural heritage.

ELR: This year you published a book entitled “L’età della frammentazione. Cultura del libro e scuola digitale“ (The age of fragmentation. Book culture and digital school). What is it about?

Gino Roncaglia: The book discusses the relationship between digital, school and book culture. It would like to be a book to some extent political and ‘militant’, because it proposes strategies linked to what seems to me today to be a fundamental training need: to help the new generations to develop skills in the use of digital tools and information that not only go in the direction of fragmentation, granularization, unpacking of content, but also address the problem of their recomposition into complex and articulated forms. Today, the competences linked to the management of complexity are often sacrificed in the name of what seems to me to be an unfounded myth: the idea that digital is natively, essentially, necessarily fragmented. This is not the case: in digital it is possible (and indeed necessary) to create also structured and complex contents, and the competences linked to the management of complexity are and will be increasingly important in the new information ecosystem. In the light of this basic thesis, I try to discuss topics such as the evolution of the web, the construction of new learning environments capable of integrating traditional and digital resources and content, methodologies for the use of digital in teaching, the function and future of textbooks, the new role of school libraries and the idea of ‘augmented reading’.

ELR: How did you personally experience the transition from paper to digital publishing?

Gino Roncaglia: I’ve always been very curious about the idea of digital reading, and I started very early to write in digital (I replaced the typewriter with the Commodore 64, using one of the first word processing programs: the now forgotten PaperClip). The idea that digital devices could also be used to read was quite natural, even if at the beginning, in the absence of digital devices the size of a book, digital reading was identified with reading on the computer. ‘Lean forward’ reading, perhaps suitable for situations of active reading and accompanied by writing but very uncomfortable, for example, for reading a novel, which usually takes place in ‘lean back’ mode, relaxed backwards. The portable reading devices have turned the situation upside down: I’ve tried already those of the first generation, such as the Rocketbook, the Gemstar, the Cybook, the REB 1100 and 1200. However, the screens were still very poor, the batteries did not last long, the protection mechanisms were a nightmare (in part, they continue to be) and the first generation of players was not very successful. It was better for Kindle and its successors; I have a good collection of those too. But we’re still a long way from the ideal reading device.

ELR: A short web search on electronic books shows that the history of digital publishing began around the year 1993 when two Italians, Franco Crugnola and his wife Isabella Rigamonti, created the first electronic book and when the poet Zahur Klemath Zapata published ” Murder as one of the fine arts” by Thomas de Quincey in DBF (digital book format). When do you think the history of digital books began and what are some of the highlights of the history of digital publishing?

Gino Roncaglia: Ah, you can find a lot of start dates, but in my opinion the story starts much, much earlier than 1993. In a certain sense one could say that the first work in the field of digital publishing was the pioneering work of Father Busa, who in 1949 contacted IBM to propose the use of electronic computers as a tool for encoding texts (and in particular the texts of Thomas Aquinas). The result is an ambitious project, the Index Thomisticus, now accessible through the web and that already in 1980 could boast the digitization of 56 volumes of texts by Thomas and other Thomist authors. And then, of course, there is Michael Hart’s Gutenberg project, launched at the beginning of the 1970s. As I mentioned, in Italy there was the Progetto Manuzio, born in 1993, then the e-books for the first generation of e-readers, between 1998 and 2001. Other important moments include the spread of Kindle and readers based on electronic paper and electronic ink (since 2007: Sony Librie was launched three years earlier but had had very little success), the transition from the OEBPS format to its successor, ePub2, the spread of tablets (since 2010), the transition from ePub2 to ePub3 … As you can see there are stages related to the hardware of reading devices and stages related to encoding formats. And it is a story that continues, both on these two sides and through the evolution of the market.

ELR: In 1997 Project Gutenberg, which started in 1971, reached the number 1000 of books published with the e-book #1000 “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. How has the market developed and how have electronic books been sold and disseminated in the 20 years from 1997-2017?

Gino Roncaglia: The market has developed unequally in different countries. In fact, despite the expectations (at the time considerable), the first devices of the period 1998-2001 were not able to build a numerically significant market: the birth of the e-book market occurs only from 2007, with the launch of the Kindle; and the market grows initially especially in the United States, where Amazon is an already established presence and promotes the Kindle not only as a reading device for e-books but also as a means of access to its ecosystem for reading (also made up of recommendations, reviews, discounts …). It is the Amazon ecosystem as a whole that wins the first challenge, more than the Kindle as a specific device. And it is above all this ecosystem that brings in a few years the share of digital reading in the United States around 25% of the market. Europe has followed rather slowly, and we are still far from those figures. In recent years, however, the market has remained fairly stable: the share of digital reading has grown much more slowly, and if anything, the internal segmentation of digital reading has changed: more and more books published by independent or self-published publishers are being read digitally, while the digital market share of the major publishers in recent years in the United States has remained steady, if not even decreased. In Italy we follow at a distance, and the digital market is marked above all by the effect of discounts and special offers: only books offered at prices much lower than paper sell discreetly. But the limitations of reading devices – for example, compared to annotations – and the very complex management of protections, which prevent the simple passage of an e-book from one device to another, slow down growth. This certainly does not displease publishers: the mechanism of returns in Italy makes them highly dependent on physical bookstores, and e-books have been perceived – and continue to be perceived – as a factor that could undermine this balance. Also for this reason, publishers have little interest at the moment in stimulating the growth of the digital publishing market, except in sectors with very specific characteristics (such as academic and scientific publishing).

ELR: How are digital works stored? What are the strategies for digital preservation?

Gino Roncaglia: When talking about preservation, at least three dimensions must be distinguished: the use of digital as a tool for the preservation of printed works (through the processes of library digitization), the short-term preservation of digital content (also on the user side), and long-term preservation. These are clearly related issues, but each one also has its own specificities, which it is certainly not possible to analyse here. However, we can say that in all three cases we need not only appropriate conservation tools (for example, interoperable repositories) but also adequate policies: a field in which we are still far behind. Metadatation policies (since the good description of the contents is an essential phase of conservation), periodic data transfer policies (to face the obsolescence of the supports and formats), redundant conservation policies (since the possibility of easily creating redundancy is, however, the main advantage of digital in terms of conservation).

ELR: What are the differences between the way of conceiving the layout of an e-book in EPUB format and the way of printing? What do you think are the fundamental aesthetic criteria for the layout of an e-book in EPUB format?

Gino Roncaglia: The main difference is well known: ePub is a format based on a fluid layout, while printing is based on a fixed layout. The fluid layout allows you to select your preferred font and font size and read the same file on devices of different sizes, adapting the page to the screen, but the fixed layout has the considerable advantage of presenting the page as a kind of stable geographical ‘map’, helping storage. When we read on paper, our eyes always consider the corners of the page: they use them as reference points and ‘place’ the text within those boundaries; when we read digitally we tend to scroll the text ‘flag-wise’, and this not only when the page scrolls vertically but, curiously, even when we use a paginated layout, horizontal scrolling. We must therefore improve digital typography, for example by integrating other forms of visual reference into the text to replace those offered by fixed layouts. This is what was partly done in the world of manuscripts and the first printed editions through drop caps and ‘maniculae’. What tools should be used digitally to achieve the same results? It’s a field where a lot of work is still needed, I think, and digital typography is only taking its first steps. It should also be borne in mind that e-books are not (and should not be) necessarily digital replicas of a printed book: they have additional potential (in terms of interactivity, integration of different communication codes, use of animations and data visualization tools…) that we still have to learn to exploit and manage from a graphic and typographical point of view.

ELR: In a recent article of yours, you addressed the themes of the promotion of digital literature and the digital promotion of reading by making a reference to Augmented Reality technology. How do you think e-book technology will develop and how will the way of spreading knowledge change?

Gino Roncaglia: Caution: I’m not talking first and foremost about Augmented Reality, but about augmented reading. Augmented reading is what each of us already does when it accompanies the reading of a book (no matter if on paper or in digital) with surfing the web, for example to search for an image or a map of the places the book talks about, more information about an author or a historical character, comments and reviews from other readers. The network is already today a sort of ‘space of expansion’ for our reading activity. Augmented Reality, on the other hand, is a specific technology, certainly very interesting and of great future but less directly connected to reading, even though it is well possible that applications and tools of Augmented Reality can also be useful. For example, through the use of QR codes, which already today can function as a form of direct reference to network resources. QR codes can thus be printed within a traditional book to include online content, or added by the reader to the book through adhesive or post-it labels.

As for future developments of e-books, it is difficult to make predictions. But I think we need five things above all: a technology that knows how to put together the best of OLED screens (video, bright colors, fast refresh) and e-Ink (reading even in direct sunlight, prevalence of reflected light over the emitted one), an easier and less invasive mechanism of rights management, good standard annotation tools even with stylus, a good availability of standard reading tools even for ‘rich’ formats like ePub3 and its evolutions (including the new publication formats on which the W3C is working), and more attention to research and innovation by publishers.

ELR: How important is it to know the programming languages to create e-books in EPUB format? What advice would you give to those who want to start learning to program?

Gino Roncaglia: To create traditional e-books you don’t need special programming skills (at most, to understand what happens, it is useful to know how a marking language like HTML works, what the components of an ePub package and what style sheets are: technical skills, but not too complex). If you want to add interactive elements and do something more original, it is important to know about Javascript. And to master Javascript you need to know what a programming language is. This is very useful to understand a little better the fundamentals of the digital world. That’s why it’s important to introduce in schools’ practices such as coding, which bring closer to the logic of programming from childhood.