Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: Indeed, a significant number of publications do not need to be printed in > hardcopy. I would like to see newspapers, magazines, and periodicals > embrace > this technology. >
They are already, and they will go all-electronic when e-book readers improve. I have a Kindle and I think it has some serious limitations. It is okay for novels and history book you read straight through, but for the kind of books you have to page back and forth in, a printed book is still superior. I use a lot of those stick-on notes with a technical book. I found the e-book version of "The Black Swan" annoying because it references previous chapters and examples, and paging back to them was time consuming. My copy of "The Norton History of Technology" has lots of those colored stick-on notes poking out, with notations such as "recreate Newcomen engine." There is something to be said for printed conference proceedings too. I hope that in the future LENR-CANR.org will be able to offer a single Acrobat file suitable for printing on both sides, with all of the papers lined up. We have not been able to do that because of copyright limitations and the fact that some authors do not want their papers uploaded. > However, there remain certain publications that would lose their value and > relevance if never printed again. Art books, for example. > Art books on present day e-book readers and computer screens would be awful because the screen is too small and the color fidelity is bad on most screens. Rotten, actually. At my office I have two screens on one computer, and when I move an image from one screen to the other it changes completely. It reminds me of the joke that NTSC stands for "never the same color." However, the quality will improve in the future and eventually screens will be better than printed books. My office screens are el-cheapo models. Better ones are available, such as the Eizo Coloredge series for $1,700 which artists and graphic designers use. We have one at home. It cost more than the computer! Print technology is pretty awful too. Many years ago I did a test of this. At the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art I purchased 3 printed copies of "View of Toledo," from their best poster down to a post card. I brought all three to the gallery to compare it to the actual painting. All three were way off. Probably, a high quality digital camera today and an Eizo screen would produce better color fidelity than any print technology. A good scanner produces even better color fidelity and detail, although it is limited to small artworks. You can take multiple scanned images and stitch them together with a program such as PanaVue. A few years ago I read that ordinary digital cameras used with top-quality amateur grade telescopes now outperform some of the multi-million dollar telescopes from the 1970s and 1980s. Amateur astronomers are publishing images and even making discoveries that 30-year-old multimillion dollar equipment cannot rival. It would be nice of similar improvements in laboratory equipment would allow easier, better cold fusion experiments, but I do not think that is the case. - Jed
