reality based
How is the digital inventory of every consumer item identified? With a bar code printed on paper. How is the inventory of knowledge managed? A portion is printed on paper and that portion also is bar coded joining the universe of consumer items. Economic transactions keep the paper book viable and so does its place in the inventory of real things.
digital print 2.0
"Ingram is the owner of Lightning Source, the largest printer of books on demand in the world.
But Lightning Source’s expensive, factory-based equipment which requires the services of
skilled operators, prints titles on demand within the existing supply chain. Lightning sees our
machine, which bypasses the entire supply chain and delivers a finished book directly from the
digital file to the end user, as a forward looking adjunct to their traditional technology. Our
machine is small enough to function in a library or bookstore or school or hotel. It is as easy to
operate as an office copying machine. It prints and binds a high quality perfect bound book in
minutes automatically on demand at point of sale for less than a penny per page and trimmed to
infinite sizes between 8.5/11 and 4.5/4.5 inches."
Jason Epstein
default preservation
The Kindle does not archive. Week old newspapers, blog scrolls and magazines disappear as new material is posted. This is an attribute. Deletion of paper is crucial as well. The difference is that a physical action is needed since the default is preservation. One attractive aspect of the default preservation of paper is that storage does not require media other than the delivery medium.
i-pod moment
" And with the Amazon Kindle selling steadily in the USA, and available soon in the UK,
the talk is of whether the publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’ is finally at hand. Are books, like vinyl records, soon to become a collector’s curiosity? Or will readers remain loyal to paper? "
Read:Write Report (8.2)
Advocates for e-book transmission to reading devices look to an approaching "i-pod moment" when the book reading preference will tip to electronic device delivery. But the equivalence of text and sound delivery should be questioned. Audio delivery, live or synthetic, is transmitted through air. Text delivery is transmitted visually. So the relevant comparative genre for music transmission would be delivery of on-line scores. This is a much smaller enclave of readership and the comparison, between books and musical scores, does suggest disadvantages and attributes of paper based delivery.
Musical performance would be enhanced by screen delivery of scores. The need to turn pages is not appreciated by performers. But note the domain of one-time presentation where device connectivity is an exclusive attribute of screen delivery. In performance the relation of the performer to a rehearsal or annotated paper score could trigger another preference.
Re-readings of all kinds, audio and text based, shift appreciations, associations and meanings of the delivered content. But longer term re-reading is more dependent on media persistence and here the music listener is much more vulnerable than the print reader.
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