less is more
“What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.” William Powers NYT
Constraints as attributes also plays into the functionality of hand-held readers. Here the haptics of touch screen present a wild card since they will engender a whole new finger based navigation. But it is also apparent that book readers may be allured by book reading alone, void of any connectivity, live link or non-text distraction.
“I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.” Alberto Manguel, PBS
transplant
The battery in the nook konked-out. I talked to “digital support” at Barnes and Noble with industrial spying in mind and he did say it has happened before. His suggestion was to go into the store and swap out the battery from the “display nook”. He wasn’t too concerned that this would impair the demo.
I went into the store. After a bit of passing around a person came out of the office. He said that he had one returned from a person “who didn’t like it”. I put the battery from the returned nook in and mine then worked fine. It had the connotation of an organ transplant.
Of course there is the question if a person can continue living if disconnected. Yes, but only in a limited, real state. I do know that a frozen nook is not engaging.
advent of the codex
The swirl of influences at work during the period of popularization of the codex format are attractively expressed by Stephen Emmel in his short article; “The Christian Book in Egypt, Innovation and the Coptic Tradition”. He points to three layers of innovation; the technological innovation of the format itself, the linguistic innovation of a written form of Egyptian language based on Greek alphabet and the spiritual innovation of the communal monastic movement. All of these innovations of later Antiquity are well evidenced by real codices from the middens of Egypt.
This conceptual grasp is now extended with a Roger Bagnall restudy of the advent of the codex; Early Christian Books in Egypt. Given the Emmel and Bagnall multi-dimensional and comprehensive review it is surprising that another sidetrack of influence is suggested. Strangely this suggestion also verges directly on correlation of codex format and early Christian texts which is a correlation that Bagnall gracefully and systematically diminishes in favor of wider Roman influence.
The sidetrack is the influence of a practice of exchange of folded and tied papyrus letters. Bagnall makes it clear that the earliest devotional life of the sectarian pre-Christians, before the turn of the fourth century, must necessarily have existed prior to institutional organization of any centralized Church. For the earlier period, and later periods as well, there is tradition and papyrus that evidences the exchange of letters between isolated congregations and their folded and tied format is confirmed by surviving artifact. As content extended to theology and liturgy is it too much to guess that the folded and tied letter acted as a default exemplar of codex format? Archaic methods of reading, copying and redistribution of early gospel can include this mimic and then refinement of the physical attributes of a folded and tied papyrus letter.
Google settlement, whatever…
“While Google and others are making these books discoverable online to a general audience, the University of California along with other peer institutions is creating a robust shared access and preservation service for our mass digitized books, one that adheres to professional standards, through our partnership in a ground-breaking enterprise called the HathiTrust. If you haven’t heard of HathiTrust yet, you soon will. No UC library user need go to Google to search the full text of our books, or to find accurate bibliographic information, or to view and download those that are in the public domain; s/he can go to http://catalog.hathitrust.org/ and be reassured that those books will be there, in ever-improved versions, for the long-term. HathiTrust now numbers 5.4 million volumes from 26 libraries and is growing at a rapid rate, all searchable, all viewable if in the public domain (or otherwise rights-cleared), and all designed to inure to the long-term benefit of the nation’s libraries and their users. The digital library of the future resides not with Google, but with us. And we are building it today.” Ivy Anderson