future of digital books
"Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.
Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company.
But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes."
behind the curtain
"And, more to the point: One of my key concerns with Google is that it is a black box. Something that means so much to us reveals so little of itself."
Siva Vaidhyanathan
poise
The most graceful
page on the web.
fear of the fear of change
The first readable screen was the night sky, points of light on a black field. Observers of the night sky began to construe patterns, then omens and cosmographies and astrophysics based on readings of the night sky. Screens still work best in the dark and provide a whole domain of reading. Other reading surfaces work better in reflected light.
Screen reading advocates fear the stasis of continuities of bionic reading. They fear that there may be no particular linkage, or supercession scenario between different reading modes. Most particularly they fear that there may be persistent exclusive attributes and disattributes in any reading mode that has been around for a long time.
l.s.d.i. and l.s.d.p.
The Council on Library and Information Resources
white paper, "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization", concludes that while libraries can hope to preserve the vast bit streams of mass imaging projects, the "enduring access of enabling on-line discovery and retrieval of material" is complex and uncertain. Pro-active preservation effort is needed, but this report assigns no specific role to preservation departments. This fact alone suggests a tentative state of the problems.
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