One thing I think that is being overlooked in this discussion is that by virtue of belonging to this mailing list, we are ALL of us demographic outliers and don't really represent the larger, "normal" population, thus our personal impressions of concepts like "ease of use" are completely skewed with regard to the larger population.
A couple of the comments I read on this thread really drive this home to me: One person said something like "..I routinely send eBooks by email…" and another said something like "…an EPUB book can be constructed with a simple text editor…" Both are very true statements, when taken in the context of the eLiterati that populate this list. By contrast, several weeks ago I watched my father-in-law struggle for a couple of hours trying to figure out how to buy a book on Amazon and read it on the Kindle Fire we gave him. …and he is a person who spends several hours a day web browsing and emailing with his various ePenPals. My conclusion is that ease of use MATTERS and even things we eLiterati consider "simple" aren't yet simple in an absolute sense. Heck, this entire topic assumes that a person can READ. If we are to look deeply at something that is "better than a book" the assumption of literacy ought to be open to challenge as well. ... Someone else emphasized the ease of keeping very large research libraries of reference material easily accessible in electronic form. Again, a true and powerful point, relative to the kinds of folks on this list. For many of us, research is a casual and normal part of either our vocational or avocational existence. For much of the REST of society, however, research is something that is confined to well-defined periods of their lives, not casually integrated into day-to-day life -- so having the Library of Congress in their back pocket is not interesting or useful to them beyond the "gosh gee wow" factor. As I look around people I know who are "not in the CSCI/IT biz", what I see is that there are only a couple of ways they encounter reading material: - Public signage - Time-sensitive periodical information (news/blogs/etc) that give them current topical information directly related to their active interests and current public affairs. - Research material related to some special project they have undertaken (and which they encounter seldom enough that they don't mind going to a library or to a school to do their work because the nature of the work sets them outside their normal routines anyway.) - Recreational reading. Of those three categories, only the second and last are meaningful to them in the context of a tablet or eReader, hence questions of aesthetics and cognitive dissonance relating to media ARE pertinent. All of this makes me feel that we have not yet begun to understand the right answer to "replacing the book". … This discussion reminds me of the eternal debate between emacs / simple IDE programmers and Rich IDE/Visual programmers because it comes down to the same fundamental: admitting to ourselves that tool design should be driven by the points of view of the people who are trying to accomplish the work rather than by the laws of the mise-en-scene of the work. Further, that there is usually more than one point of view and that those points of view are often mutually inconsistent and incomplete. (Okay, I'll stop here before I fall off into a discussion of non-turing-complete languages and partial functions.) On Mar 9, 2012, at 2:50 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 11:34:21AM -0800, Max Orhai wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan <martino...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>>> >>>> - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign >>>> and affordable. >>>> >>> >>> That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and >>> environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of >>> ebooks. > > I would like to point out that there are research libraries with some ~million > electronic volumes available which can be owned by single inviduals or groups > and yet occupy only one modest (~10 TByte) NAS box less than 2 kUSD. > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc