Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Evolution of Reading In the Digital Age

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-wait-until-we-need-to-patch-our-books dept.

Doofus writes "'Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused.' is the subtitle of Craig Mod's thoughtful discussion aboutthe evolution of reading material from printed dead-tree to flowing digital content. I stumbled upon his blog post from a related NYTimes article, Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print. He breaks reading material down into two basic categories: 'Formless,' in which the content and meaning of the writing has no dependency on presentation, and 'Definite,' in which layout and presentation play a role in conveying meaning. Mod makes the point that as digital presentation improves, devices such as the iPad will bring authors newer and improved platforms upon which to display Definite content. Despite this, he says, some works will be better consumed in physical print because 'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects.'"

18 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Definite and Formless by deniable · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Also known as PDF and anything but PDF. PDF and fixed layout where it's needed, but please stop producing novels as PDF. They don't reflow nicely on smaller screens.

  2. Problems.... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The main problems with e-readers is A) books are expensive B) there are no libraries. How many people actually -buy- all the books they read? Yes, occasionally there is the odd book where the waiting list in the library would give me a copy sometime in the next decade and I will buy a book. Or the odd book on sale at Barnes and Nobel for $3 that is a hardback, and occasionally I wish to annotate a classic work of literature so I will buy it, but for the rest, I just go to a library. As for newspapers, I generally don't read any. I don't see the point. Any community event traditionally advertised in the local paper is easily found via Facebook or Twitter. National or international news is best found online where you can see all sides of the story rather than the one or two expressed via print media. It allows for more specialized interest stories, good luck finding a newspaper with coverage as complete as even Endgadget. Newspapers also rarely follow up stories or allow for user feedback except for some cherry picked editorials.

    In short, E-Readers aren't going to replace print media when it comes to literature and print is already dead for most people under 40 for news.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Problems.... by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The main problems with e-readers is A) books are expensive B) there are no libraries.

      You forgot DRM.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    2. Re:Problems.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      So does no DRM. What's the point on putting an expiration on something that won't affect other people? It's not like physical books where there are finite copies on the shelves.

    3. Re:Problems.... by maztuhblastah · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, DRM enables e-book libraries. There are quite a few libraries actively loaning out e-books.

      And that, dear reader, is an excellent example of why our entire notion of copyright and intellectual property is horribly, horribly wrong.

      The *only*, I repeat: *only*, reason for a library to lend books was so that more than one person might access them over a period of time. Lending is a vestige of when information was inseparably bound to the media upon which it was printed; lending and late fees were necessitated by the scarcity of the good itself.

      We live in a different world now, one in which that scarcity is purely artificial. The purpose of public libraries -- to use public funds to provide public access to books and the like -- remains the same. Our notion of copyright, however, has shifted from that of an incentive to contribute towards a society's creative output to a sense of entitlement. At first, copyright functioned to reward those contributors with a limited-term grant of exclusive rights to their contribution. Those same contributors now view it as their god-given right to profit from said contribution in perpetuity. Worse still, this corruption of copyright's purpose has endangered the modern function of libraries by encouraging the use of restrictive technologies to enforce a limitation which has no reason to exist in the modern world, save to line the pockets of those responsible for said corruption.

      Please, I beseech you, do not think of DRM as an "enabler" of public libraries. Rather, see it for what it is: an artificial restriction on public resources designed to wrest control from the public, to limit access to societal contributions, and to discourage the distribution and dissemination of culture -- all in the name of maximizing profits for the select group of individuals responsible for manipulating the legal and public concepts of copyright.

      --
      The real litigious bastards...
    4. Re:Problems.... by maxume · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Simple: Gaining consent within the existing legal framework.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    5. Re:Problems.... by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      C) The readers themselves are expensive (but then, over time this will probably change)
      D) They are more easily damaged.
      E) Books never run out of battery.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    6. Re:Problems.... by causality · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I might have read your comment more closely if it wasn't written in an obviously preachy tone.

      As it is, you missed me. Sorry.

      I didn't find the tone too preachy, perhaps because I've seen far worse. I'd call the GP's post "impassioned" not "preachy", myself. As in, it contains a bit more feeling than a bunch of mathematical equations, but quite a bit less than anything I would consider calling "zealotry". Considering that people who want copyright reform generally view the current system as profoundly unjust and exploitative, I believe GP was rather restrained in his approach.

      Even if I thought it was the worst example of pontification ever written, that would never stop me from deriving all possible useful information from it, or from understanding why the author was motivated to write that way. It's not personal, but honestly when I see posts like yours, the first thought that occurs to me is "get over yourself" because it contributes little or nothing. Not everyone is a good writer, and not all good writers agree on how to best reach an audience. Therefore, it makes sense to be willing to give people some slack on this, especially when they're not seeking advice on composition.

      The irony is that you're being rather condescending yourself (as if to say "your style isn't worthy of me") while complaining about his tone. At the same time you seem to believe that losing you as an audience is a great loss for which you are sorry; maybe this is a "bandwagon appeal" meant to imply that your disdain represents the majority of readers. It's just the truth that not everyone is going to write in a way that you can personally appreciate. You have no choice about this.

      The choice you have is whether a style you dislike is going to be an obstacle for you. You can determine whether a thing like that is going to stop you from participating in an otherwise good discussion, from responding to a post that otherwise makes a number of good points. The GP either has a valid point and a defensible position, or he has no such thing, and this is independent of the tone and style with which it is expressed.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
  3. Re:Print is dying. Digital is surging-Nobody confu by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Um, I don't think any "merchants" are confused. It is the publishers that are confused. Book stores as a whole have embraced E-Readers, look at Amazon and the Kindle and Barnes and Noble and the Nook. Other than Borders and a few other stores, the rest basically specialize in cheap books, something that E-readers lack (and pre-1920s works only get you so far) and book exchanges.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  4. Not yet by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If we get to the point where leaving your reader behind in a public place isn't any more likely to result in theft than leaving a book, readers will be well positioned to overtake printed books.

    I think that day is still far off.

  5. embrace their physicality? by derGoldstein · · Score: 3, Insightful

    'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects'

    A) Leave the iPad out of this. We're talking about consuming text which isn't printed on paper, and we've been doing that since even before the *gasp* kindle.
    B) Is this some kind of metaphysical crap? "they're complete objects"? WTF does that mean? I've been reading Descartes' Discourse on the Method off the screen of a netbook. Does this mean that somehow the information that I've consumed isn't "real enough"? If I printed that out on paper, read it, and then burned the paper, would that have made the content "embrace its physicality"?

    Either I'm missing something, or this is a serious case of "get off my lawn".

    --
    Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
  6. iPad by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do people get paid to throw Apple branding around like this? Are any of these issues in any way unique to, or only now forthcoming because of, Apple's late entry into the tablet computing market?

    --
    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:iPad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      While it is a distinct possibility, I think it's more likely that it's just cult of Mac.

      That is, until Apple does it, it is irrelevant and unimportant. It's born of the fact that Apple is a major brand that commands control of what's "hip" and "cool" so anything they do is a hot topic that needs to be discussed at every opportunity [to prove how cool and with-the-times you are]. Ironically, this will usually involve talking about how great Apple's products are and how nothing like it existed before — Reality Distortion Field [Willful Ignorance] FTW.

  7. Re:The new canvas by MollyB · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem I see with content creators using this new canvas is that it subtracts from the freedom of the reader's imagination. In other words, it replaces an idea (a story) with a specific representation of that idea, which is rather like having a book author at your side jabbing you periodically to see if you 'get' it.

    "Stop poking me, Mr. Dawkins! I'm just using 'Goddamit' as an interjection."

  8. There's a bigger shift at hand by ErichTheRed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Although the format change is a big part of this, the real change afoot is the amount of effort it takes to publish something. In the past, with the exception of self-publishing, the only way to get your work out there was to pitch your idea to a book publisher, who would then decide what was and was not print-worthy. Today, I can go to blogspot.com, sign up for an account, and spout off about anything I want, making it accessible for the world to see.

    That means big changes for the publishing business. I'm actually not thrilled about paper books going away; it's not easy for me to read a sceen, even a Kindle screen, for hours on end. But the publishers and bookstores are really terrified. I could defintiely see Barnes and Noble or Borders turning into something like a coffeehouse/social club, marketing e-books and e-media, and still making money off of ancillary stuff. Problem is that you can't support thousands of places like that. Time, Random House, McGraw-Hill and all those guys in New York are probably shaking in their boots. Eventually, they're going to have to find a way to make money on something that's easy to disseminate and hard to resell. It's similar to the music industry...they've been on the same talent search --> contract --> album --> hit song(s) --> concert revenue --> album business cycle forever. Now publishing has to switch to something else from talent search --> contract --> book --> sales revenue --> book.

    It's also going to be extremely difficult to make a living writing material. I really love to write, but I know it's not a sustainable career. Those of us with the itch to write have had magazines to submit articles to, but even that might dry up. The worst change IMO is going to be journalism. Instead of a newspaper of record, we're going to have thousands of bloggers, all with their own agenda, Twittering and blogging all over the Web about current events. I really think investigative journalism is going to go downhill, which is bad. You need to pay reporters to go out and spend the time digging up actual facts, not posting opinions. That's how we get the conspiracy theorists sneaking into the mainstream with things like Obama's citizenship being questioned.

  9. Re:iPad's Killer App by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Textbooks. They must have diagrams and a lot of them also require colour.

  10. Re:battery life by godrik · · Score: 2, Insightful

    or perhaps, you should get a real e book reader instead of using a mobile phone to do that...

  11. Books are tangible objects by itsdapead · · Score: 2, Insightful

    B) Is this some kind of metaphysical crap? "they're complete objects"? WTF does that mean?

    I don't know why people are talking about pop-up books: all books are tangible. Your "copy" of a book is forever linked to a physical object that, as time passes, becomes different from all other instances of that book.

    Can you imagine someone paying $1m for a first edition of an ebook download? (that's just a recent, extreme example that happens to be a comic book - people cherish rare editions of books of all kinds, even when the content is widely available elsewhere).

    Imagine you were giving someone a gift or a presentation? Which would be better: (a) hardback copy of their favorite author's latest work with a suitable inscription or (b) an iTunes gift card.

    How will future authors cope at book signings? Hey, Mr Pullman, could you validate this X.509 certificate and write it back to the SD card? Its not for me, you understand, its for my daemon...

    My 1979 paperback copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide" (the yellowed and dogeared one) is certainly a "complete object". It's still got the price tag on the back (80p!?)

    ...and what is that funny stain on page 30 of "American Gods"... :-)

    --
    In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.