I thought I'd share this article, , partly for its perspective on the historical significance of eBook phenomenon -- and partly for what the article ignores and does not say.
From the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books ... creen.htmlFrom Scroll to Screen"Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes."
excerpt:
Quote:
But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.
"Codex" is referred to earlier in the article -- essentially it is a bound collection of flat pages or leafs (aka, a book).
What the author seems to ignore is multimedia pubs -- the kind of thing you would create in Flash or with Opus. Of course it is somewhat hard work to write a novel or other 'content'... it is definitely a greater undertaking to produce a multimedia work. But maybe the Android and the slew of new Tablets will prompt the demand for MM and a rich user experience.
Cheers
Login
FAQ
Search
