Books the Next Generation—

Reading on the Electronic Frontier

The Information Superhighway and Private Households:Case Studies of Business Impacts / W. Brenner, L. Kolbe, (Eds.). (Heidelberg: Physica, a branch of Springer,1996). X, 427 pp. 110 figs. ISBN 3-7908-0907-1

Read the essay in digital form (download pdf)

Today reading has successfully made the transition from paper to the dynamic medium of the computer screen and is becoming a common experience in the world of electronic media. And while the computer industry does everything to convince us that "multi"media will be the glorious future of electronic communication we convey most of our concepts by writing and reading, be it on the computer, be it on paper. The electronic book as a platform to read on a dynamic medium is still in a very early stage both in software and hardware and may look dramatically different from what we expect it to be at this stage. Still the book is the primary source for text and thus a container of memory.

This paper looks into the quality of private memory and its impact on our dealing with electronic media.

Florian Brody