Digital Books

Monday May 31

"If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end."

Sven Birkerts Gutenberg Eulogies

As an introduction to digital books, I'm back to the first topic and the arguments that arose to the question What Is a Book? I suggested that a book was an object until we read it...the enjoyment being in the reading and how we feel about the story, regardless of the subject. After considering other answers and with more thought I again answered the question, describing the feeling of a book in two separate ways.

: The physical book: the feel of the paper, the smell and weight of a book, the appearance and the comfort we get from the physical entity that is a book.

: The Psychological book: how we feel about the book, how the story, poems or information contained within the book make us react emotionally.

There is a definite difference between the meanings. A book that affects us emotionally will do so regardless of how we read it, from a battered paperback, leather bound first edition, a talking book or an EBook. We have become used to the comfort of owning and reading books, we love them, the whole physical sense of a book seems to outweigh the contents and because of this the idea of EBooks to many of us is abhorrent. I can't see a time when I will want to curl up with an electronic book, no matter how user friendly they become, even though I know the reading matter won't change with a different format. Nicholas Negroponte suggests in his essay Books without Pages that there will come a time that electronic books will replace the feel of paper and smell of leather...not, I hope in my lifetime. Perhaps he is right, but it won't happen any time soon, maybe when generations who have grown up with EBooks completely outweigh those of us who are used to books it could happen. It wouldn't be the first time, take Fpos cards, I had a bank book 17 years ago, and now very few people do, plastic has become the acceptable currency, there is even a version of Monopoly with plastic cards and no cash...

Thursday June 3

Reading through Sven Birkerts Gutenberg Eulogies and Brigitte Frase's comments in her Cassandra Complex it makes me wonder if there is any even ground on the subject of computers, not just that they will or will not take over books! I tend to agree with Birkerts that computer generated news will probably overtake newspapers for news and information, even I read the news online, only reading the local newspaper we get free. But then it does cost us twice as much for the West Australian here than it does in Perth and it doesn't arrive on the shelf until 9.30am!
I don't think there can be any right or wrong with the pro and anti computer versus books; obviously computers are the way of the future but they are expensive and electricity is expensive, so any major take over certainly wont happen in third world countries. People like books, they like glossy magazines and they like to be able to keep them. As I discovered yet again this morning, the computer, particually the internet is unreliable, loosing hours of work is likely to happen any time. Imagine being halfway through a great ebook and the system drops out...
No I think technology has a long way to go before the good old book can be taken over by the computer. Computers certainly have their place but so do books, an ebook would look pretty ordinary on a coffee table...