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Category Archives: ebook
What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?
“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?’ (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) – the question gains a new dimension, now that eBook readers reach the price of a decent paper book. That is what a hard-bound book did cost when books became widely available to the general public – a lot of money but somewhat affordable to many. Given the price/value ratio of electronic stuff compared to wood-based stuff, digital books will soon be cheaper than books on paper which will result in books on paper becoming even more expensive.
We are still in the “imitation phase” – we produce electronic books that imitate books on paper – once we get beyond this phase – the question Paper or Plastic will no longer be relevant – in the same way Theater or Film? Radio or TV? Film or TV? Painting or Photo are no longer of relevance.
Digging for the disintegrative nature of digital technologies
Research shows that most people search for their own name first when coming across a new search engine. I’m no exception and for years I’ve had the plan to create a definitive search results page of everything that comes up when I search for my self. Not so much because anyone may be interested in a comprehensive list, more as a means to explore how new, alternative search engines find different stuff. Today I tried deepdyve, a search engine that justifies its existence “because traditional search engines do not deliver the quality results that information-savvy consumers and professionals need.” For $45 per month (that’s $540 per year, more than many people pay for CATV) you get deepdyve Pro, that offers “Dynamic Grouping, Visual Clustering and Venn Diagrams”. The interface offers advanced search but does not recognize “Florian Brody” as a text string and thus returns 90% irrelevant stuff. Their Blog has an interesting mélange of content – most recently an entry on the “unbunding of content“.
I found one critical commentary on a paper I gave in 1995 in a research journal that requires a subscription, but deepdyve offers a detailed view with the complete paper “Contradicion versus Convergence” by Charles Tashiro: “Whether or not we agree with Brody’s late-Romantic argument, it seems strangely out of keeping with the disintegrative nature of digital technologies, their capacity to change and transform, even if completely in keeping with the formalist rhetoric underpinning many of the ideas and presentations at the conference”.
Today – 14 years later – I’m still right 
and hoping that this will change soon. Search engines on the other side have not caught up with the writings of the world and possibly never will, never should.
Reading about Electronic Books on Paper
Mitch Ratcliffe posted a status analysis on eBooks – The first step of a long change on his ZD Net column. I read most of it immediately after I received Mitch’s email with the URL in the afternoon. We have been talking about eBooks longer than most people know they exist, so I owe him a response. I read the first seven comments on the ZD Net blog and started to ponder on the medium / technology / platform question as well as the longlevity of the printed word, commented on by a certain Yagotta B. Kidding (nomen est omen). Books had their long-term and short-term survival problems, mostly from fire and acid in the paper. Many books from the “modern phase” of the 70s when the IBM Selectric together with Copiers became the publishing technology of choice together with most of the stuff created on laser printers will be gone within 100 years. The glue that keeps the carbon particles of the Xerographic process on the paper lets go and the content falls off the page.
Torah Scroll
Maybe eBooks are not books in a similar way Scrolls are not books as we know them today. Scrolls were abandoned over 1000 years ago as they were not practical to use and paper was hard to produce in long rolls. Also page consistency – the fact that a certain word is always on the same page to be read and remembered [add a reference to the ars memorativa here] – was not part of scrolls. Now we’re back to scrolling, soft scrolling, fast scrolling and computer mice with one or more scroll wheels with click-wheel capabilities. Scolls have their place, today mostly in Schul, the Jewish Synagoge, as Sefer Torah, a copy of the Five Books of Moses created under extremely strict rules and written by hand.
eBooks have to repeat the same steps handwritten and printed books had to go through and get out of the early stage of scrolls. In 1989 when we started to work on the Expanded Books Project, page consitency as well as a means to help the reader understand where she is in the book were essential elements, They are still disregarded in today’s eBook attempts.
With no way to take notes on the Web site and mark up passages, I gave in and printed Mitch’s text to fully digest and respond.
Come back and read the next installment in the next few days. And definitely read Mitch’s text.