Sunday, January 08, 2006

Paper books

Gen commented:
"On E-books: a practical and useful instrument for a quick read. But I prefer to hold an (ancient) book in my hands, smell it (!) and file through the pages filled with photographs and other pieces of art."

Indeed many feel this way, justifiably.
On the other hand, as Scott McCloud says: "If you take away the ideas held in the books, what do you have but dead trees?"
In other words, our emotional experience of any medium is colored heavily by the experience of the ideas which we experience through that medium. Sure, some paper books are beautiful objects. But I have read wonderful books in cheap paperbacks also. and I am sure that within ten years there will be premium e-book readers which will also be very beautiful objects, and which will be the new objects on which readers
will transfer their emotional experience of the ideas they read on them.

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