Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
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). 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. 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. ;) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
One thing I think that is being overlooked in this discussion is that by virtue of belonging to this mailing list, we are ALL of us demographic outliers and don't really represent the larger, normal population, thus our personal impressions of concepts like ease of use are completely skewed with regard to the larger population. A couple of the comments I read on this thread really drive this home to me: One person said something like ..I routinely send eBooks by email… and another said something like …an EPUB book can be constructed with a simple text editor… Both are very true statements, when taken in the context of the eLiterati that populate this list. By contrast, several weeks ago I watched my father-in-law struggle for a couple of hours trying to figure out how to buy a book on Amazon and read it on the Kindle Fire we gave him. …and he is a person who spends several hours a day web browsing and emailing with his various ePenPals. My conclusion is that ease of use MATTERS and even things we eLiterati consider simple aren't yet simple in an absolute sense. Heck, this entire topic assumes that a person can READ. If we are to look deeply at something that is better than a book the assumption of literacy ought to be open to challenge as well. ... Someone else emphasized the ease of keeping very large research libraries of reference material easily accessible in electronic form. Again, a true and powerful point, relative to the kinds of folks on this list. For many of us, research is a casual and normal part of either our vocational or avocational existence. For much of the REST of society, however, research is something that is confined to well-defined periods of their lives, not casually integrated into day-to-day life -- so having the Library of Congress in their back pocket is not interesting or useful to them beyond the gosh gee wow factor. As I look around people I know who are not in the CSCI/IT biz, what I see is that there are only a couple of ways they encounter reading material: - Public signage - Time-sensitive periodical information (news/blogs/etc) that give them current topical information directly related to their active interests and current public affairs. - Research material related to some special project they have undertaken (and which they encounter seldom enough that they don't mind going to a library or to a school to do their work because the nature of the work sets them outside their normal routines anyway.) - Recreational reading. Of those three categories, only the second and last are meaningful to them in the context of a tablet or eReader, hence questions of aesthetics and cognitive dissonance relating to media ARE pertinent. All of this makes me feel that we have not yet begun to understand the right answer to replacing the book. … This discussion reminds me of the eternal debate between emacs / simple IDE programmers and Rich IDE/Visual programmers because it comes down to the same fundamental: admitting to ourselves that tool design should be driven by the points of view of the people who are trying to accomplish the work rather than by the laws of the mise-en-scene of the work. Further, that there is usually more than one point of view and that those points of view are often mutually inconsistent and incomplete. (Okay, I'll stop here before I fall off into a discussion of non-turing-complete languages and partial functions.) On Mar 9, 2012, at 2:50 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 11:34:21AM -0800, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. I would like to point out that there are research libraries with some ~million electronic volumes available which can be owned by single inviduals or groups and yet occupy only one modest (~10 TByte) NAS box less than 2 kUSD. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Thanks, interesting link. But I have some questions and comments: _ How much does an e-reader last? The article says: This means an iPad owner would need to offset 32.4 printed books during the iPad’s lifetime to break even in terms of the carbon footprint of reading those books. But as far as I know, it doesn't say what the iPad's lifetime is, so I don't know how many books per year that means. By the way, an iPad is not more of an ebook reader than a desktop is. I would say that only e-ink devices (or something just as good in terms of visual comfort) deserve to be called e-book readers. _ Hey, we forgot about newspapers and magazines! : If you are also offsetting printed magazines and printed newspapers with the iPad then the number of books you would need to offset to break even could be much lower. _ Now this is cheating: If a person would normally share a printed book with others, buy some used printed books, or borrow many of the printed books from the library then the numbers would need to be adjusted to account for that. That's a bit like saying that physical exercise makes you fat, because you get hungry and you eat more. Even if people ended up wasting more because they read *a lot* more, that wouldn't affect the economic and ecologic impact per book, which was the issue at hand. For my part, I don't even conceive of e-readers as a replacement for paper books. In my case, they are a replacement for laptops and desktop when it comes to reading long texts. I don't buy paper books any more, because I don't have any spare room for them. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On 3/7/2012 8:00 PM, Max Orhai wrote: Well, I for one dislike e-books (and honestly I don't care all that much for computers either!), so I could add a few things off the top of my head to this summing-up: - Real books don't need power, are readable outdoors without eyestrain (more than can be said for the iPad and its imitators), and print is capable of displaying full color graphics at any resolution (unlike the grainy greyscale Kindle and imitators). This isn't aesthetics, it's just pragmatic old-fashioned usability. Maybe technological advances will make e-books as usable as real books someday; I'm not holding my breath. well, this is a merit. I don't claim digital forms are all good, but they aren't all bad either. - The connectedness with history thing goes forward as well as backward. I've lived through so many rapidly-obsolete technologies that I can't even count them, but I can read a fifty-year old book without even thinking about bit-rot, broken links, dead components, or emulation. I expect much longer lifetimes from my books than from any electronic device. on one hand, devices will come and go, as will most file formats. but, on the other, I mostly use a programming language (C) which existed for nearly a decade before I was born, and ASCII is nearly the same age as my parents... it is possible that they will remain for generations into the future (and maybe HTML and some other modern formats will go along with them, maybe outliving nearly everyone which is currently alive...). however, yes, data doesn't have the same level of proven reliance as do things like printed text, where people still have several thousand year old books written in languages like Greek and Aramaic and similar. whereas current magnetic film and similar has a lifespan of maybe a few decades. printed pages may well make sense for long-term archival storage as well (possibly stored in special boxes, which are themselves designed for long term durability...). then any distant future archeology people can use their equivalent of a flatbed scanner to get the data back out of the pages. another possibility (though I am less certain of its long-term durability), would be to store the data in the form of a very long scroll wrapped around a central spindle, and stored essentially on giant reels. a worry though is that possible degradation or damage could compromise the integrity of the scroll, causing it to snap if read (with a giant reel-to-reel reader, there could be fairly high tension involved). although less convenient, special boxes seem safer, although there is a possible risk that if the box came open somehow (say, lid came off and it fell on the floor), all of the pages could get out of order... although, one could employ something resembling a 3-ring binder, or maybe even punch and suspend the pages on both sides, with some ideally non-corroding metal. - On the simplicity angle, one of the most superior things about real books, in my opinion, is that they don't have a user interface. You just read them, and they behave like everything else in the physical world, sparing your cognitive resources for their actual information content. (Bret Victor has a nice rant about that at http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk http://worrydream.com/#%21/MagicInk ) - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. but, has the drawback that one has to print every copy of every book in existence. a computer can easily contain far more books than a person could likely ever reasonably amass in print form, or for that matter reasonably store or transport. - And don't even get me started on intellectual property and its abuses! If I want to loan, resell, or give away my books, it ain't nobody's business. IMHO, information should generally be free. things like standards documents and documentation for things and similar should ideally be free of charge (and free to redistribute) for anyone who wants to do so. fiction is likely different, since in this case, this could be the sole product of the author, and they need to make a living somehow, and also the contents of fictional books are less critical (limited access to a piece of fiction is fairly unlikely to adversely effect an individual, but limiting access to knowledge and factual information is far more likely to result in harm). - The relatively high expense of getting a book printed means that books are still generally higher quality sources of information than websites, although perhaps this is being eroded too with all the print-on-demand self-publishing. I think it depends. although there is some crap on the internet, a lot of good information can be found as well, especially in the form of standards documents (from ISO or ECMA or W3C or others). OTOH, despite being fairly expensive, I have seen stuff which is fairly obviously crap in some of
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On 3/8/2012 7:51 AM, David Corking wrote: BGB said: 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. Take a look at both Wikibooks and the booki project (which publishes flossmanuals.net) so, apparently, yes... a mystery is why, say, LCD panels can't be made to better utilize ambient light Why isn't the wonderful dual-mode screen used by the OLPC XO more widely used? it is a mystery. seems like it could be useful (especially for anyone who has ever tried to use a laptop... outside...). back-lights just can't match up to the power of the sun, as even with full brightness, ambient background light makes the screen look dark (a loss of color is a reasonable tradeoff). my brother also had a Neo Geo Pocket, which was a handheld gaming device which was usable in direct sunlight (because it used reflection rather than a backlight). apparently, there is also a type of experimental LCD which pulls off color without using a color mask, which could also be nifty if combined with the use of reflected light. personally, I would much rather have an LCD than an electronic paper display, given a device with an LCD could presumably also be used as a computer of some sort, without very slow refreshing. like, say, a tablet style thing which is usable in direct sunlight. likewise, ones' e-books can be PDF's (vs some obscure device-specific format). 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). Apple Preview, and perhaps other PDF readers, already do this. except, like many Apple products, it is apparently Mac only... it seems like an obvious enough feature, but Adobe Reader doesn't have it. I haven't really though to check if there were other PDF viewers that could do so. Have fun! David ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for several years. Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days. -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Here's a study which is a little more careful. Basically, it comes down to how many e-books your expect to read over the life of your device. Baseline for an iPad (considering only carbon emissions from manufacturing) is about 100 books. http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/documents/ebooks.pdf -- Max On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Max Orhai max.or...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.comwrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for several years. Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days. -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com mailto:martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from electronics and similar), one could maybe: grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and reused); maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive), or lacking a better (cost effective) option, simply discard it. the idea for a magnetic-field separation could be: feed material through a plasma arc, which will basically convert it into mostly free atoms; a large magnetic coil accelerates the resultant plasma; a secondary horizontal magnetic field is applied (similar to the one in a CRT), causing elements to deflect based on relative charge (valence electrons); depending on speed and distance, there is likely to be a gravity based separation as well (mostly for elements which have similar charge but differ in atomic weight, such as silicon vs carbon, ...); eventually, all of them ram into a wall (probably chilled), with a more or less 2D distribution of the various elements (say, one spot on the wall has a big glob of silicon, and another a big glob of gold, ...). (apart from mass separation, one will get mixes of similarly charged elements, such as globs of silicon carbide and titanium-zirconium and similar) an advantage of a plasma arc is that it will likely result in some amount of carbon-monoxide and methane and similar as well, which can be burned as fuel (providing electricity needed for the process). this would be similar to a traditional gasifier. but, it is possible that in the future, maybe some more advanced forms of manufacturing may become more readily available at the small scale. a particular example is that it is now at least conceivably possible that lower-density lower-speed semiconductor electronics (such as polymer semiconductors) could be made at much smaller scales and cheaper than with traditional manufacturing (silicon wafers and optical lithography), but at this point there is little economic incentive for this (companies don't care, as they have big expensive fabs to make chips, and individuals and communities don't care as they don't have much reason to make their own electronics vs just buying those made by said large semiconductor manufacturers). similarly, few people have much reason to invest much time or money in technologies which are likely to max out in the MHz range. but, conceivably, one could make a CPU, and memory, essentially using conductive and semiconductive inks and an old-style printing-plates (possibly, say, on a celluloid substrate), if needed (making a CPU probably itself sort of resembling a book...). also sort of imagining some here the idle thought of movable-type logic gates and similar, ... granted, such a scenario is very unlikely at present (it would likely only occur due to a collapse of current manufacturing or distribution architecture). any restoration of the ability to do large scale manufacture is likely to result in a quick return to faster and more powerful technologies (such as optical lithography). apart from a loss of
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
And inks are not clean either. I live in Ashland, Mass which is large superfund cleanup site. http://www.colorantshistory.org/Nyanza.html Inks and dyes are nasty. I used to work in the printed circuit industry (my first Smalltalk job!) and so I've seen firsthand how toxic it can be to make computer boards. I won't try to guess what's more toxic to the environment (and to people). My understanding is that China is currently just about the most polluted place going. They're paying a steep price for their economic boom. -Carl From: fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] On Behalf Of Mack Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 5:12 PM To: Fundamentals of New Computing Subject: Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book Just a reminder that paper-making is one of the more toxic industries in this country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_pollution Paper itself may be simple and eco-friendly, but the commercial process to produce it is rife with chorine, dioxin, etc. not to mention heavy thermal pollution of water sources. So there are definitely arguments on both sides of the ledger wrt eBooks. -- Mack On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:54 PM, BGB wrote: On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from electronics and similar), one could maybe: grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and reused); maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive), or lacking a better (cost effective) option, simply discard it. the idea for a magnetic-field separation could be: feed material through a plasma arc, which will basically convert it into mostly free atoms; a large magnetic coil accelerates the resultant plasma; a secondary horizontal magnetic field is applied (similar to the one in a CRT), causing elements to deflect based on relative charge (valence electrons); depending on speed and distance, there is likely to be a gravity based separation as well (mostly for elements which have similar charge but differ in atomic weight, such as silicon vs carbon, ...); eventually, all of them ram into a wall (probably chilled), with a more or less 2D distribution of the various elements (say, one spot on the wall has a big glob of silicon, and another a big glob of gold, ...). (apart from mass separation, one will get mixes of similarly charged elements, such as globs of silicon carbide and titanium-zirconium and similar) an advantage of a plasma arc is that it will likely result in some amount of carbon-monoxide and methane and similar as well, which can be burned as fuel (providing electricity needed for the process). this would be similar to a traditional gasifier. but, it is possible that in the future, maybe some more advanced forms of manufacturing may become more readily available at the small scale. a particular example is that it is now at least conceivably possible that lower-density lower-speed semiconductor electronics (such as polymer semiconductors) could be made at much smaller scales and cheaper than with traditional manufacturing (silicon wafers and optical lithography), but at this point
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Below. On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:13 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: 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); ... 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. 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. 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.) ;) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Indeed, now that you mention it, there's a paper factory not too far from where I live...well, far enough, fortunately. By night, with its huge vapor clouds and red lights, it looks like the gates of hell. And you know what, it smells accordingly, tens of miles around. On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com wrote: Just a reminder that paper-making is one of the more toxic industries in this country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_pollution Paper itself may be simple and eco-friendly, but the commercial process to produce it is rife with chorine, dioxin, etc. not to mention heavy thermal pollution of water sources. So there are definitely arguments on both sides of the ledger wrt eBooks. -- Mack On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:54 PM, BGB wrote: On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from electronics and similar), one could maybe: grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and reused); maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive), or lacking a better (cost effective) option, simply discard it. the idea for a magnetic-field separation could be: feed material through a plasma arc, which will basically convert it into mostly free atoms; a large magnetic coil accelerates the resultant plasma; a secondary horizontal magnetic field is applied (similar to the one in a CRT), causing elements to deflect based on relative charge (valence electrons); depending on speed and distance, there is likely to be a gravity based separation as well (mostly for elements which have similar charge but differ in atomic weight, such as silicon vs carbon, ...); eventually, all of them ram into a wall (probably chilled), with a more or less 2D distribution of the various elements (say, one spot on the wall has a big glob of silicon, and another a big glob of gold, ...). (apart from mass separation, one will get mixes of similarly charged elements, such as globs of silicon carbide and titanium-zirconium and similar) an advantage of a plasma arc is that it will likely result in some amount of carbon-monoxide and methane and similar as well, which can be burned as fuel (providing electricity needed for the process). this would be similar to a traditional gasifier. but, it is possible that in the future, maybe some more advanced forms of manufacturing may become more readily available at the small scale. a particular example is that it is now at least conceivably possible that lower-density lower-speed semiconductor electronics (such as polymer semiconductors) could be made at much smaller scales and cheaper than with traditional manufacturing (silicon wafers and optical lithography), but at this point there is little economic incentive for this (companies don't care, as they have big expensive fabs to make chips, and individuals and communities don't care as they don't have much reason to make their own electronics vs just buying those made by said large semiconductor manufacturers). similarly, few people have much reason to invest much time or money in technologies which are likely to
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Yeah, true enough, the conventional paper and ink industries are pretty nasty. But, search for nontoxic printing or nontoxic ink or environmentally safe paper, and you get real-world products which just cost marginally more than their poisonous counterparts. Try searching for nontoxic computer by comparison. There aren't any major electronics manufacturers where you live because they're all located in places with even more lax environmental regulations. As to the cost of distributing brand-new paper books, I notice that e-books are consistently priced at about ten percent less than the hardcover paper versions, by which I infer that either e-books are much more profitable for the publishing companies, print distribution doesn't cost more than ten percent of the cover price, or some combination of these two factors. According to the Author's Guild website, publishers currently pay about 25% of receipts in royalties for e-book sales, versus a long-standing 50% for paper books... they're optimistic about the long run, though. I do read a lot of ephemeral documents on my computer. Web pages, pdfs, email, and the like. I don't miss the magazines and newspapers that the web has replaced for me, and I think that's a pretty clear win in terms of environmental impact, since I need the computer anyway. Maybe if the Kindle or iPad was a real, fully-capable, user-programmable computer I might consider using one instead of a laptop. Trying to use a device which is crippled by design just makes me angry, though. Again, not a technical issue at all, but rather a social / economic / ethical one. I guess there are some REPL / IDE apps for Android devices, and the OS can be rooted if the manufactured hasn't locked the bootloader. Google's keeping the sources available, which is laudable. So, if there's a tablet in my future, it will probably be running Android or webOS... or maybe, someday, a descendent of Frank. I can wait. -- Max On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed, now that you mention it, there's a paper factory not too far from where I live...well, far enough, fortunately. By night, with its huge vapor clouds and red lights, it looks like the gates of hell. And you know what, it smells accordingly, tens of miles around. On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com wrote: Just a reminder that paper-making is one of the more toxic industries in this country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_pollution Paper itself may be simple and eco-friendly, but the commercial process to produce it is rife with chorine, dioxin, etc. not to mention heavy thermal pollution of water sources. So there are definitely arguments on both sides of the ledger wrt eBooks. -- Mack On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:54 PM, BGB wrote: On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from electronics and similar), one could maybe: grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and reused); maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive),
[fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
May be of interest to some readers of the list: http://nplusonemag.com/bones-of-the-book ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
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
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
I am a self-admitted Kindle and iPad addict, however most of the people I know are real book aficionados for relatively straight-forward reasons that can be summed up as: - Aesthetics: digital readers don't even come close to approximating the experience of reading a printed and bound paper text. To some folks, this matters a lot. - A feeling of connectedness with history: it's not a difficult leap from turning the pages of a modern edition of 'Cyrano de Bergerac' to perusing a volume that was current in Edmund Rostand's time. Imagining that the iPad you hold in your hands was once upon a shelf in Dumas Pere's study is a much bigger suspension of disbelief. For some people, this contributes to a psychological distancing from the material being read. - Simplicity of sharing: for those not of the technical elite, sharing a favored book more closely resembles the kind of matching of intrinsics that happens during midair refueling of military jets than the simple act of dropping a dog-eared paperback on a friend's coffee table. - Simplicity. Period. (Manual transmissions and paring knives are still with us and going strong in this era of ubiquitous automatic transmissions and food processors. Facility and convenience doesn't always trump simplicity and reliability. Especially when the power goes out.) Remember Marshall Mcluhan's observation: The medium is the message? Until we pass a generational shift where the bulk of readers have little experience of analog books, these considerations will be with us. -- Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:13 PM, BGB wrote: 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
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On 3/7/2012 5:11 PM, Mack wrote: I am a self-admitted Kindle and iPad addict, however most of the people I know are real book aficionados for relatively straight-forward reasons that can be summed up as: - Aesthetics: digital readers don't even come close to approximating the experience of reading a printed and bound paper text. To some folks, this matters a lot. - A feeling of connectedness with history: it's not a difficult leap from turning the pages of a modern edition of 'Cyrano de Bergerac' to perusing a volume that was current in Edmund Rostand's time. Imagining that the iPad you hold in your hands was once upon a shelf in Dumas Pere's study is a much bigger suspension of disbelief. For some people, this contributes to a psychological distancing from the material being read. - Simplicity of sharing: for those not of the technical elite, sharing a favored book more closely resembles the kind of matching of intrinsics that happens during midair refueling of military jets than the simple act of dropping a dog-eared paperback on a friend's coffee table. - Simplicity. Period. (Manual transmissions and paring knives are still with us and going strong in this era of ubiquitous automatic transmissions and food processors. Facility and convenience doesn't always trump simplicity and reliability. Especially when the power goes out.) Remember Marshall Mcluhan's observation: The medium is the message? Until we pass a generational shift where the bulk of readers have little experience of analog books, these considerations will be with us. -- Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com it may depend a lot as well on the type of reader as well as the type of book being read vs ... for example, personally most of those aspects above would not matter much to myself: I mostly read for information, and so care little about appearance or various subjective/experience aspects of reading (except maybe physical discomfort due to lack of a good sitting position or similar). history: for the most part, this notion seems strange to me, I can't really relate that much. I have occasionally been faced with feelings of nostalgia, but these are usually momentary and passing. admittedly, I have thought sometimes about cultures or locations my ancestors may have lived (say, places like Ulster / Ireland, Scotland, or Israel, ...), or thought about things like what if a person from now could time-travel to such-and-such time and place, and tell the people there and then about the here and now, what would the result be? (like, going to the Victorian Era, telling about modern times and showing them modern stuff, and maybe everything would start going all steam-punk or something?...). simplicity of sharing: granted. rarely does anyone I know IRL know or care about much of anything I am interested in. hey, have a look over this here copy of the 'Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual'.. then people are likely to look over with an expression of what? I guess maybe it is more convenient for people who have those around them having common interests (like, a group of people all unified by a common hobby or interest or similar). then maybe people will have more of a reason to share books, or, for that matter, have some reason to talk to them, besides maybe just well, you are there, now what? care much about programming?. well, and besides maybe seeing females and trying to interact with them or something... except that this all turns out to be pointless as well... generally, there is not a whole lot to gain from trying to interact with anyone in a social setting (despite theoretical potential gains, it generally all turns out to be fairly pointless). simplicity of use: I have doubts here. a tablet or e-book reader is not particularly complex to use, and will work in a black-out (provided it is charged up). nevermind if one still needs a light source, at which point a device with a back-light will show advantage over a book requiring a flashlight or some other light-source to see. granted, it is very possible someone like myself does not represent the typical reader demographic. granted, I have never really been much into fiction, I guess because I lack whatever experience many other people are getting out of it, personally tending to mostly just experience words on a page and trying to see anything tends to require expending considerable mental energy (my inner-world seems to consist in large part of text and info-graphics, and if I try to read fiction, this is what I see... I don't really see the story or the events, I mostly just see the text and what it says). so, for fictional/fantasy/... I have tended to prefer visual media (anime, TV, games, ...), since these tend to provide the stimulus up-front (everything that happens, one sees directly, so no need trying to burn mental energy imagining it...).
