Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> The issue is not necessarily about books as much as it is about the
> stuff inside the books.
> ...
> Books -- codexes -- are a particular type of technology. ...
>...
> But all of this is really a transport medium, a container for the content.
>
One distinction, I think, is important: Not every book is a
self-contained unit or requires to be regarded as a whole. If it is a
novel or other narrative, yes, a biography, not necessarily, a
volume of essays, articles or speeches much less, a dictionary
certainly not. And heck, library catalogs started out in book format,
but this became impractical early on. Today, the book format is
becoming inadequate and inferior for ever more content types.
Where "book" stands as much for the content as for the container, as it
still does for most of fiction, the outlook for survival may be the
longest. Where what you need is only a fraction of the content, you
are much happier now if you can find it online and you don't care about
the book object it may be locked in at all. (Sometimes, though, to your
disadvantage.)
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri May 08 2009 - 09:57:13 EDT