On 3/9/2012 7:59 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 03:00:35PM -0800, Casey Ransberger wrote:
Books? First, the smell. Especially old books. I have a friend who has a
Kindle. It smells *nothing* like a library, and I do think something is lost
there.
Some people get olfactorically imprinted on dead tree
during their formative years. I personally like the smell
having basically grown up in libraries, but it's not
integral to the experience (and easily simulable, in
principle, for someone who would care to bring a cryotrap
into a library, and GC-MS the results thereof to be
able to synthesize the most relevant fragrances --
you could even encapsulate the result in the
polymer skin of an ebook reader to be given off
during use).
yeah. I personally don't really much like libraries, nor get much from
the smell.
it is much like the smell of money: some people like it because (because
it is associated with money and wealth, somehow?...). many other people
think money tends to smell nasty.
there are some smells I find more preferable, like the smell of coffee:
maybe because smelling coffee soon often leads to drinking coffee?...
likewise for food: smell food, eat food...
but, I have lived most of my life in a world where the internet is
readily available and most desirable information has been available online.
It's also, ironically, the weight of them. The sense of holding something *real* that in turn holds
information. When you move, it takes work to keep a book, so one tends to keep the most
"important" books one has, whereas with digital we just keep whatever we have
"rights" to read, because there's no real expense in keeping. We also can't really share,
at least not yet. Not in any legal model.
You can have heat maps of things you access, or
order items on virtual bookshelves. As to legality of
sharing: nobody cares. It's not enforcible, anyway.
yeah.
there is also a fair amount which is free to download and free to share.
many people and companies often only ask money for the printed versions:
expensive Intel docs in printed form;
free Intel docs in PDF form;
...
granted, it is not always so:
ISO wants money for PDFs;
...
granted, I am not talking here about "online bookstores" or
device-specific formats, which exist, but I don't really deal with them
(I don't actually have an e-book reader device, so am generally free of
what hassles exist with proprietary e-book formats...).
presumably, a "better" solution is generic text/HTML/PDFs/...
PostScript could be nice, if there were decent viewers for it.
also possible is "Office Open XML" or "Open Document Format", both of
which would allow e-books to be read in roughly the same form as in a
word processor.
Second: when I finish a book, I usually give it away to someone else who'd
enjoy it. Unless I've missed a headline, I can't do this with ebooks any more
readily than that dubstep-blackmetal-rap album we still need to record when I
buy it on iTunes (or whatever.)
Funny, I send ebooks as email attachments just fine.
yep.
email attachments work, and don't require physical proximity.
physical proximity works, when people have social contacts.
otherwise, requiring physical proximity is an inconvenience.
sending something via the USPS is also far less convenient than passing
a physical object (one has to buy stamps, wrap it, write the address,
and take the resulting package either to the post-office or to a drop
box). how convenient is this? not all that convenient.
by comparison, an email attachment is trivially simple.
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