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 <[email protected]> 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.
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