On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 03:00:35PM -0800, Casey Ransberger wrote: > Books? First, the smell. Especially old books. I have a friend who has a > Kindle. It smells *nothing* like a library, and I do think something is lost > there.
Some people get olfactorically imprinted on dead tree during their formative years. I personally like the smell having basically grown up in libraries, but it's not integral to the experience (and easily simulable, in principle, for someone who would care to bring a cryotrap into a library, and GC-MS the results thereof to be able to synthesize the most relevant fragrances -- you could even encapsulate the result in the polymer skin of an ebook reader to be given off during use). > It's also, ironically, the weight of them. The sense of holding something > *real* that in turn holds information. When you move, it takes work to keep a > book, so one tends to keep the most "important" books one has, whereas with > digital we just keep whatever we have "rights" to read, because there's no > real expense in keeping. We also can't really share, at least not yet. Not in > any legal model. You can have heat maps of things you access, or order items on virtual bookshelves. As to legality of sharing: nobody cares. It's not enforcible, anyway. > Second: when I finish a book, I usually give it away to someone else who'd > enjoy it. Unless I've missed a headline, I can't do this with ebooks any more > readily than that dubstep-blackmetal-rap album we still need to record when I > buy it on iTunes (or whatever.) Funny, I send ebooks as email attachments just fine. > ;) _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
