nevermore
intense and elegant
hand bookbinding
eerie counterpoints
Now such eerie counterpoints of print and screen works should be observed in detail to better understand their interaction for cultural transmission. Going forward disproportionate dependence on a single mode is too hazardous. Cultural transmission has always relied on composite modes and transitional hybrids such as e-book devices, print-on-demand technology, electronic ink, and page and scroll screen navigation all signal momentum toward more mature and elaborate interaction of print and screen.
And they are eerie counterpoints. It is as if the screen is filling a transmission void of print and as if print is founding its own more essential, less ramified, role. So simple competition between the print book and screen book is an illusion; each has a different function and there are exclusive attributes of each.
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authority x files
The historical evaluation of the mutability or stability of print transmission and the appraisal of the role of print in knowledge assembly and the component of print in culture change and individual reader reception, interpretation and valuation all begin to interplay in book studies. And then there are the relations to literary studies, bibliography and history. Finally there is the kaleidoscope of the book itself.
The position of book studies is carefully examined in
An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture, by Leslie Howsam, 2006. And our own Matt Brown is quoted remarking that book studies re-enliven literary research.
e-babel, p-babel
" Why buy an iLiad, Sony Reader or Kindle, with their restrictions, when you can buy a laptop for nearly the same price free of the formatting hassles? Similarly, with the increased use of PDAs and Blackberrys and quick technological improvements in mobile phone technology, which again largely bypass format issues, will the iPod moment for e-readers actually be the iPod?"
Tom Tivnan
The endless saw of the e-book device advocates is their frustration with proprietary DRM formats. There are 3 or 4 related to 3 or 4 devices. But if these proprietary formats were eliminated tomorrow, nothing would change. Screen based reading would remain with the various attributes and limitations that it has already and the larger adaptation of print to screen would continue its course.
Actually e-bable is nothing compared with p-bable where a single paper reading device can only display one content! So the e-babel discontents should pause to ask if there are any attributes, as for example physical libraries, of non-universal device display.
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