On 3/7/2012 5:11 PM, Mack wrote:
I am a self-admitted Kindle and iPad addict, however most of the people I know are "real book" aficionados for relatively straight-forward reasons that can be summed up as:- Aesthetics: digital readers don't even come close to approximating the experience of reading a printed and bound paper text. To some folks, this matters a lot. - A feeling of connectedness with history: it's not a difficult leap from turning the pages of a modern edition of 'Cyrano de Bergerac' to perusing a volume that was current in Edmund Rostand's time. Imagining that the iPad you hold in your hands was once upon a shelf in Dumas Pere's study is a much bigger suspension of disbelief. For some people, this contributes to a psychological distancing from the material being read. - Simplicity of sharing: for those not of the technical elite, sharing a favored book more closely resembles the kind of matching of intrinsics that happens during midair refueling of military jets than the simple act of dropping a dog-eared paperback on a friend's coffee table. - Simplicity. Period. (Manual transmissions and paring knives are still with us and going strong in this era of ubiquitous automatic transmissions and food processors. Facility and convenience doesn't always trump simplicity and reliability. Especially when the power goes out.) Remember Marshall Mcluhan's observation: "The medium is the message"? Until we pass a generational shift where the bulk of readers have little experience of analog books, these considerations will be with us. -- Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com
it may depend a lot as well on "the type of reader" as well as "the type of book being read" vs ...
for example, personally most of those aspects above would not matter much to myself:
I mostly read for information, and so care little about "appearance" or various subjective/experience aspects of reading (except maybe physical discomfort due to lack of a good sitting position or similar).
history: for the most part, this notion seems strange to me, I can't really relate that much. I have occasionally been faced with feelings of nostalgia, but these are usually momentary and passing.
admittedly, I have thought sometimes about cultures or locations my ancestors may have lived (say, places like Ulster / Ireland, Scotland, or Israel, ...), or thought about things like "what if a person from now could time-travel to such-and-such time and place, and tell the people there and then about the here and now, what would the result be?" (like, going to the Victorian Era, telling about modern times and showing them modern stuff, and maybe everything would start going all steam-punk or something?...).
simplicity of sharing: granted. rarely does anyone I know IRL know or care about much of anything I am interested in. "hey, have a look over this here copy of the 'Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual'.". then people are likely to look over with an expression of "what?...".
I guess maybe it is more convenient for people who have those around them having common interests (like, a group of people all unified by a common hobby or interest or similar). then maybe people will have more of a reason to share books, or, for that matter, have some reason to talk to them, besides maybe just "well, you are there, now what? care much about programming?". well, and besides maybe seeing females and trying to interact with them or something... except that this all turns out to be pointless as well... generally, there is not a whole lot to gain from trying to interact with anyone in a social setting (despite theoretical potential gains, it generally all turns out to be fairly pointless).
simplicity of use: I have doubts here. a tablet or e-book reader is not particularly complex to use, and will work in a black-out (provided it is charged up). nevermind if one still needs a light source, at which point a device with a back-light will show advantage over a book requiring a flashlight or some other light-source to see.
granted, it is very possible someone like myself does not represent the "typical reader demographic". granted, I have never really been much into fiction, I guess because I lack whatever experience many other people are getting out of it, personally tending to mostly just experience "words on a page" and trying to "see" anything tends to require expending considerable mental energy (my inner-world seems to consist in large part of text and info-graphics, and if I try to read fiction, this is what I see... I don't really see the story or the events, I mostly just see the text and what it says).
so, for fictional/fantasy/... I have tended to prefer visual media (anime, TV, games, ...), since these tend to provide the stimulus up-front (everything that happens, one sees directly, so no need trying to burn mental energy imagining it...).
I guess how things go will depend mostly on the common majority or similar. it is likely similar with books and programming:people who like lots of books and reading, will tend to like doing so, and will make up the majority position of readers (as strange and alien as their behaviors may seem to others); those who like programming will, similarly, continue doing so, and thus make up the majority position of programmers (as similarly strange and alien as this may seem, given how often and negatively many people depict "nerds" and similar...).
ultimately, whoever makes up the fields, controls the fields, and ultimately holds control over how things will be regarding said field. so, books are controlled by "literature culture", much like computers remain mostly under the control of "programmer culture" (except those parts under the control of "business culture" and similar...).
or such...
On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:13 PM, BGB wrote:On 3/7/2012 3:24 AM, Ryan Mitchley wrote:May be of interest to some readers of the list: http://nplusonemag.com/bones-of-the-bookthoughts: admittedly, I am not really much of a person for reading fiction (I tend mostly to read technical information, and most fictional material is more often experienced in the form of movies/TV/games/...). I did find the article interesting though. I wonder: why really do some people have such a thing for traditional books? they are generally inconvenient, can't be readily accessed: they have to be physically present; one may have to go physically retrieve them; it is not possible to readily access their information (searching is a pain); ... by contrast, a wiki is often a much better experience, and similarly allows the option of being presented sequentially (say, by daisy chaining articles together, and/or writing huge articles). granted, it could be made maybe a little better with a good WYSIWYG style editing system. potentially, maybe, something like MediaWiki or similar could be used for fiction and similar. granted, this is much less graphically elaborate than some stuff the article describes, but I don't think text is dead yet (and generally doubt that fancy graphical effects are going to kill it off any time soon...). even in digital forms (where graphics are moderately cheap), likely text is still far from dead. it is much like how magazines filled with images have not killed books filled solely with text, despite both being printed media (granted, there are college textbooks, which are sometimes in some ways almost closer to being very and large expensive magazines in these regards: filled with lots of graphics, a new edition for each year, ...). but, it may be a lot more about the information being presented, and who it is being presented to, than about how the information is presented. graphics work great for some things, and poor for others. text works great for some things, and kind of falls flat for others. expecting all one thing or the other, or expecting them to work well in cases for which they are poorly suited, is not likely to turn out well. I also suspect maybe some people don't like the finite resolution or usage of back-lighting or similar (like in a device based on a LCD screen). there are "electronic paper" technologies, but these generally have poor refresh times. a mystery is why, say, LCD panels can't be made to better utilize ambient light (as opposed to needing all the light to come from the backlight). idle thoughts include using either a reflective layer, or a layer which responds strongly to light (such as a phosphorescent layer), placed between the LCD and the backlight. but, either way, things like digital media and hypertext displacing the use of printed books may be only a matter of time. the one area I think printed books currently have a slight advantage (vs things like Adobe Reader and similar), is the ability to quickly place custom bookmarks (would be nice if one could define user-defined bookmarks in Reader, and if it would remember wherever was the last place the user was looking in a given PDF). the above is a place where web-browsers currently have an advantage, as one can more easily bookmark locations in a web-page (at least apart from "frames" evilness). a minor downside though is that bookmarks are less good for "temporarily" marking something. say, if one can not only easily add bookmarks, but easily remove or update them as well. the bigger possible issues (giving books a partial advantage): they are much better for very-long-term archival storage (print a book with high-quality paper, and with luck, a person finding it in 1000 or 2000 years can still read it), but there is far less hope of most digital media remaining intact for anywhere near that long (most current digital media tends to have a life-span more measurable in years or maybe decades, rather than centuries). most digital media requires electricity and is weak against things like EMP and similar, which also contributes to possible fragility. these need not prevent use of electronic devices for convenience-sake or similar, but does come with the potential cost that, if things went particularly bad (societal collapse or widespread death or similar), the vast majority of all current information could be lost. granted, it is theoretically possible that people could make bunkers with hard-copies of large amounts of information and similar printed on high-quality acid-free paper and so on (and then maybe further treat them with wax or polymers). say, textual information is printed as text, and maybe data either is represented in a textual format (such as Base-85), or is possibly represented via a more compact system (a non-redundant or semi-redundant dot pattern). say (quick calculation) one could fit up to around 34MB on a page at 72 DPI, though possibly 16MB/page could be more reasonable (with some redundancy and ECC data, or a little space to provide info such that humans can know "just what the hell is this?"). this would fit a DVD worth of data (4.5GB) in about 300 pages. also, in worst case, at 72 DPI, it is at least possible that humans could start decoding the data by hand if needed (since the dots could be more easily seen absent magnification or a microscope). or such..._______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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