The Evolution of Reading In the Digital Age

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.'"

Comments

Definite and Formless

[deniable]

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.

Problems....

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Problems....

[TubeSteak]

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

You forgot DRM.

Re:Problems....

[maztuhblastah]

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.

iPad

[Dan East]

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?