blurb for a SHARP thread
The outright comparison of the readability of the same page image of text as presented in a print book or on a screen can at least consider legibility, navigation and persistence. Here legibility would not be resolution, but screen drawing times and errors as contrasted with the visibility of the print presentation. Navigation comparisons would introduce manual versus software manipulation. Here haptical considerations embedded in our ability to retain conceptual content as prompted by physical examination plays its role. On the side of screen presentation the mimic of page turning and advancing is perceived as interference to comprehension. Finally, comparisions of persistence overtime certainly favor the print medium.
As a book conservator advocating the continuing role of print in the context of digital publication, I have been considering such comparisons. Digital advocates, especially those imagining the superseding of print, seem to construe changes in communication technology as modification in reading behaviors. If there is a causal relationship it must be inverted. The parent reading modes are at work in configuring technologies such as the cell phone or teleprompter.
beginning end of a SHARP thread
“I just heard on the Belgian radio that Yahoo is going to digitize
American literature that is in the public domain. We have heard the
plans of Google, Chiracs imperative to do the same in Europe etc.
What is the ratio behind al this? So far I have read nothing about the
choice of editions, copies, how they are edited and so on, as if Fredson
Bowers has lived for nothing. The whole proces reminds me of the monks
that penned down classics in the middle ages with just an inkling of
knowledge of what they were actualy writing down – giving the editors
work for centuries. The difference is of course that they wrote it down
on sturdy parchment, while digital texts are the most fragile things
that I know of. We do not have to worry about the editors in the future
since all this nonsense will evaporate long before the last book is
gone.
But why? For who? I have never met anyone yet who was able to read more
than two screens of a text on a computer. All the e-books and digital
paper things are duds and will be for a very long time (it is easy to
follow their rather funny history in the recurring optimistic hopes of
their makers that they will be perfect ‘three years from now’- a proces
that started about ten years ago and will go on for at least twenty
years more).
Well, researchers will be able to find a
corrupt quote without having to
walk to the library. Glueing them to their desks will certainly narrow
their views and shorten their lives. People who are in comparative
studies will have a field day, being able to search for the same word in
different texts from different periods etc. and thus create a deluge of
unreadable articles on the smallest particles that can be found in any
literature. But what is in it for the rest of us?”
Paul Dijstelberge
bookhistorian Amsterdam – Netherlands