presence
Screen reading advocates find print books inconvenient when they should understand them as essential. Screen reading is counterpart to print reading; they derive from each other and feature surprisingly counterpart and interlocking attributes. Why is this obvious interlock invisible? It is not improbable that automotive travel engendered road maps or gps devices, but that print books engendered screen books as a counterpart development is frequently overlooked.
At if:book the print book is conceded to have “presence” and so its continued role in context of digital delivery is explained and dismissed. But beyond presence, specific print attributes of fixity, navigational and haptic refinement, materiality, and reliable re-access across time, all pair nicely with screen attributes of immediacy, automated search, electronic delivery, and live content. Another crucial pair of inter-functioning print and screen attributes is revealed by the self-authenticating nature of the print book contrasted with the self-indexing nature of the screen book.
Just such factors are relevant to the future of books. Forget about legacy and what has gone before; now the issue is assimilation of screen books and print books into a single transmission mechanism. Let’s go directly to the
work ahead.
new kind of science
Steven Wolfram, author of the self published, self designed and awesome compendium of science
yet to come that visualizes time and space as dimensions of information, will now engineer the
next generation Google engine.
“The thing that truly sets Wolfram¦Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.
Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute.”
fotb to pbi
We will participate in the 26th session of the
Paper and Book Intensive sabbatical. We will investigate the four P-modes of the book: papyrus, parchment, paper and phone.
canticle for kindle
“Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to Amazon Kindle 2.
We built Kindle 2 with the goal of creating an exceptional and hassle-free reading experience. Kindle Team
It is interesting that the Kindle 2
prospectus includes a critical, one star, review. Evidently the auto-review postings are unmoderated. (see Gadget Queen at the bottom of the scroll). Anyone prompted to a one-click purchase is quickly dissuaded.
This must be a post-apocalypse advertising world as in “Canticle for Leibowitz”. The 1959 futurist novel visualizes rudimentary cultures mystified by the accidental survivals of paper documents. Since post electrical life would certainly have no evidence or suspicion of digital culture, the antique visualization is still authentic.