On 3/7/2012 8:00 PM, Max Orhai wrote:
Well, I for one dislike e-books (and honestly I don't care all that
much for computers either!), so I could add a few things off the top
of my head to this summing-up:
- Real books don't need power, are readable outdoors without eyestrain
(more than can be said for the iPad and its imitators), and print is
capable of displaying full color graphics at any resolution (unlike
the grainy greyscale Kindle and imitators). This isn't "aesthetics",
it's just pragmatic old-fashioned usability. Maybe technological
advances will make e-books as usable as real books someday; I'm not
holding my breath.
well, this is a merit.
I don't claim digital forms are all good, but they aren't all bad either.
- The "connectedness with history" thing goes forward as well as
backward. I've lived through so many rapidly-obsolete technologies
that I can't even count them, but I can read a fifty-year old book
without even thinking about bit-rot, broken links, dead components, or
emulation. I expect much longer lifetimes from my books than from any
electronic device.
on one hand, devices will come and go, as will most file formats.
but, on the other, I mostly use a programming language (C) which existed
for nearly a decade before I was born, and ASCII is nearly the same age
as my parents...
it is possible that they will remain for generations into the future
(and maybe HTML and some other modern formats will go along with them,
maybe outliving nearly everyone which is currently alive...).
however, yes, data doesn't have the same level of "proven reliance" as
do things like printed text, where people still have several thousand
year old books written in languages like Greek and Aramaic and similar.
whereas current magnetic film and similar has a lifespan of maybe a few
decades.
printed pages may well make sense for long-term archival storage as well
(possibly stored in special boxes, which are themselves designed for
long term durability...). then any distant future archeology people can
use their equivalent of a flatbed scanner to get the data back out of
the pages.
another possibility (though I am less certain of its long-term
durability), would be to store the data in the form of a very long
scroll wrapped around a central spindle, and stored essentially on giant
reels. a worry though is that possible degradation or damage could
compromise the integrity of the scroll, causing it to snap if read (with
a giant reel-to-reel reader, there could be fairly high tension involved).
although less convenient, special boxes seem safer, although there is a
possible risk that if the box came open somehow (say, lid came off and
it fell on the floor), all of the pages could get out of order...
although, one could employ something resembling a 3-ring binder, or
maybe even punch and suspend the pages on both sides, with some ideally
non-corroding metal.
- On the "simplicity" angle, one of the most superior things about
real books, in my opinion, is that they don't have a "user interface".
You just read them, and they behave like everything else in the
physical world, sparing your cognitive resources for their actual
information content. (Bret Victor has a nice rant about that at
http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk <http://worrydream.com/#%21/MagicInk> )
- Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign
and affordable.
but, has the drawback that one has to print every copy of every book in
existence.
a computer can easily contain far more books than a person could likely
ever reasonably amass in print form, or for that matter reasonably store
or transport.
- And don't even get me started on intellectual property and its
abuses! If I want to loan, resell, or give away my books, it ain't
nobody's business.
IMHO, information should generally be free.
things like standards documents and documentation for things and similar
should ideally be free of charge (and free to redistribute) for anyone
who wants to do so.
fiction is likely different, since in this case, this could be the sole
product of the author, and they need to make a living somehow, and also
the contents of fictional books are less critical (limited access to a
piece of fiction is fairly unlikely to adversely effect an individual,
but limiting access to knowledge and factual information is far more
likely to result in harm).
- The relatively high expense of getting a book printed means that
books are still generally higher quality sources of information than
websites, although perhaps this is being eroded too with all the
print-on-demand self-publishing.
I think it depends.
although there is some crap on the internet, a lot of good information
can be found as well, especially in the form of standards documents
(from ISO or ECMA or W3C or others).
OTOH, despite being fairly expensive, I have seen stuff which is fairly
obviously crap in some of the required textbooks for college courses
(some fairly solidly worse than the usual "teach yourself X in Y
units-of-time" books), with the major difference that a "teach yourself"
book is something like $15, rather than more like $150 for typical
college textbooks...
one of the worse I saw was primarily screenshots from Visual Studio with
arrows drawn on them with comments like "click here" and "drag this
there", and pretty much the whole book was this, and I wasn't exactly
impressed... (and each "chapter" was basically a bunch of "follow the
screenshots and you will end up with whatever program was the assignment
for this chapter...").
and the teacher didn't even accept any homework, it was simply "click to
check yes that you have read chapter/done assignment, and receive credit".
not that I necessarily have a problem with easy classes, but there
probably needs to be some sort of reasonable limit.
nevermind several classes that have apparently outsourced the homework
to the textbook distributor.
sometimes though, it is kind of difficult to have a very positive
opinion of "education" (or, at least, CS classes... general-education
classes tend to be actually fairly difficult... but then the classes
just suck).
a person is probably almost better off learning CS being self-taught,
FWIW (except when it is the great will of parents that a person goes and
gets a degree and so on).
unless maybe it is just personal perception, and to others the general
education classes are "click yes to pass" and the CS classes are
actually difficult (and actually involve doing stuff...). sometimes
though, the classes are harder, and may actually ask the student to
write some code (and I know someone who is having difficulty, having
encountered such a class, with an assignment mostly consisting of using
linked-lists and reading/writing the contents of text files).
Anyway, I probably wouldn't have replied to this post at all except
that I wanted to let you all know about an especially relevant project
which is trying to raise money to publish a book. I joined Kickstarter
just to support this thing, and I am very reluctant to "join" websites
these days. If you were at SPLASH 2010 in Reno, you might recall Slim
from his Onward! film presentation. I think he's really onto
something, although his language is a little touchy-feely. Please,
check it out. If you believe better design is a necessary part of
better computing (as do I) then please consider a pledge.
http://kck.st/whvn03
(Oops, I just checked, and he's made the goal! Well, I've already
wrote this, and I still mean it, but perhaps with a little less urgency.)
-- Max
ok.
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Mack <m...@mackenzieresearch.com
<mailto:m...@mackenzieresearch.com>> 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 <mailto:m...@mackenzieresearch.com>
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-book
>>
>
> thoughts:
> 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...
>
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