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 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... > >> _______________________________________________ >> 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
