future of the book news

***hand-held fulfillment device

Comparison

Comparison of Kindle and I-phone. The added note here is that book reading is a Kindle decoy to acclimate the habit of taking along an Amazon shopper.

***edge

"What if the format of a book is specially matched to the way we think? I doubt it. It may be sometimes true that the length and pace of book is perfectly fit to certain arguments, but when that happens, it is a happy coincidence. There is nothing about the amount of content that fits into a hand-held paper presentation that has any special importance to the human mind. Nor is it easy to argue that printed squiggles have some privileged channel to thought. Reading is an unnatural act, a trick that we have learned to move ideas across space and time." Danny Hillis

"So the key, as I see it, is understanding the biases of the medium—as McLuhan would advise. We might learn to see our movement from one dominant medium to another less as a net gain or loss, but rather as a shift of landscape that can be exploited quite positively if we take the time and energy to honestly survey the characteristics and opportunities of the new terrain." Douglas Rushkoff

Edge

All from a magnificent forum on Edge Thanks to Nicholas Carr for inciting such an exchange!

The destiny of the book is to allocate context to screen reading. A shift of landscape in our patch of savanna.

***momentum in Peru

commentary

Here is a commentary on the last two weeks in Arequipa.

***paper Wiki

it

You heard it here first; print books counterpoint screen books perfectly. The distinctive attributes of the print Wiki are legibility or immediacy of meaning (no loading, network or screen drawing), haptic efficiencies of hands prompting the mind and persistence or default preservation. Screen books are self-indexing, but, surprise, print is self-authenticating; you see what you are missing. Just as with print book centuries old, new times and cultures will dependably read new meanings from an immutable reference.