[Once new, new york]
Was challenged about the virtues of the old-style paper books over eBooks. Just give you this hint (warning: if you’re one of these victims, you may not be interested). #3 in particular is one which is often overlooked. See, e.g., the first lines of the quote in this piece. There was even some scientific proof somewhere a couple of months ago about how touchable books were more like landscapes to the brain, enticing to explore the full meaning of the text in all its non-linear relations, whereas ebooks only appealed to the most dumbed-down rational functions of character processing with only a thin line to semantics extraction. Link requested.
Which is similar to what Bruce Schneier indicated (see under Privacy, anonymity, authentication in this summary) about human interaction.
So, for the uninterested traveller who wants to travel light and is bored by not caring to really look around and learn from the environment, ebooks may be handy. For those interested in preserving elements of high culture, caring about good print (and other physical quality aspects), and caring for one’s books, is a quality of the person. If you want flat info, join the Shallows. Your identity will be lost after the Singularity moment has functionally passed. If you’re enthousiastic about anything new that dumbs you down even further, do not assume everyone will want to join or everyone wants to be dumbed down to your levels just for the sake of keeping up. There’s many that don’t rush head over heels into destruction or disruption before it has been established to bring improvement and only after some little time find out somethings irrecoverable were lost!
3 thoughts on “Books, over ebooks”