On 3/7/2012 3:24 AM, Ryan Mitchley wrote:
May be of interest to some readers of the list:
http://nplusonemag.com/bones-of-the-book
thoughts:
admittedly, I am not really much of a person for reading fiction (I tend
mostly to read technical information, and most fictional material is
more often experienced in the form of movies/TV/games/...).
I did find the article interesting though.
I wonder: why really do some people have such a thing for traditional books?
they are generally inconvenient, can't be readily accessed:
they have to be physically present;
one may have to go physically retrieve them;
it is not possible to readily access their information (searching is a
pain);
...
by contrast, a wiki is often a much better experience, and similarly
allows the option of being presented sequentially (say, by daisy
chaining articles together, and/or writing huge articles). granted, it
could be made maybe a little better with a good WYSIWYG style editing
system.
potentially, maybe, something like MediaWiki or similar could be used
for fiction and similar.
granted, this is much less graphically elaborate than some stuff the
article describes, but I don't think text is dead yet (and generally
doubt that fancy graphical effects are going to kill it off any time
soon...). even in digital forms (where graphics are moderately cheap),
likely text is still far from dead.
it is much like how magazines filled with images have not killed books
filled solely with text, despite both being printed media (granted,
there are college textbooks, which are sometimes in some ways almost
closer to being very and large expensive magazines in these regards:
filled with lots of graphics, a new edition for each year, ...).
but, it may be a lot more about the information being presented, and who
it is being presented to, than about how the information is presented.
graphics work great for some things, and poor for others. text works
great for some things, and kind of falls flat for others.
expecting all one thing or the other, or expecting them to work well in
cases for which they are poorly suited, is not likely to turn out well.
I also suspect maybe some people don't like the finite resolution or
usage of back-lighting or similar (like in a device based on a LCD
screen). there are "electronic paper" technologies, but these generally
have poor refresh times.
a mystery is why, say, LCD panels can't be made to better utilize
ambient light (as opposed to needing all the light to come from the
backlight). idle thoughts include using either a reflective layer, or a
layer which responds strongly to light (such as a phosphorescent layer),
placed between the LCD and the backlight.
but, either way, things like digital media and hypertext displacing the
use of printed books may be only a matter of time.
the one area I think printed books currently have a slight advantage (vs
things like Adobe Reader and similar), is the ability to quickly place
custom bookmarks (would be nice if one could define user-defined
bookmarks in Reader, and if it would remember wherever was the last
place the user was looking in a given PDF).
the above is a place where web-browsers currently have an advantage, as
one can more easily bookmark locations in a web-page (at least apart
from "frames" evilness). a minor downside though is that bookmarks are
less good for "temporarily" marking something.
say, if one can not only easily add bookmarks, but easily remove or
update them as well.
the bigger possible issues (giving books a partial advantage):
they are much better for very-long-term archival storage (print a book
with high-quality paper, and with luck, a person finding it in 1000 or
2000 years can still read it), but there is far less hope of most
digital media remaining intact for anywhere near that long (most current
digital media tends to have a life-span more measurable in years or
maybe decades, rather than centuries).
most digital media requires electricity and is weak against things like
EMP and similar, which also contributes to possible fragility.
these need not prevent use of electronic devices for convenience-sake or
similar, but does come with the potential cost that, if things went
particularly bad (societal collapse or widespread death or similar), the
vast majority of all current information could be lost.
granted, it is theoretically possible that people could make bunkers
with hard-copies of large amounts of information and similar printed on
high-quality acid-free paper and so on (and then maybe further treat
them with wax or polymers).
say, textual information is printed as text, and maybe data either is
represented in a textual format (such as Base-85), or is possibly
represented via a more compact system (a non-redundant or semi-redundant
dot pattern).
say (quick calculation) one could fit up to around 34MB on a page at 72
DPI, though possibly 16MB/page could be more reasonable (with some
redundancy and ECC data, or a little space to provide info such that
humans can know "just what the hell is this?"). this would fit a DVD
worth of data (4.5GB) in about 300 pages.
also, in worst case, at 72 DPI, it is at least possible that humans
could start decoding the data by hand if needed (since the dots could be
more easily seen absent magnification or a microscope).
or such...
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