Why ebooks are a different genre from print | Books | guardian.co.uk - 1 views
-
There are two aspects to the ebook that seem to me profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader's relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.
-
Marc Garneau on 03 May 13Well, this is a paragraph worth discussing in detail! I don't buy it. Unfortunately, the rest of the article tries to provide evidence to these points, and again, for me the post falls short.
-
-
The ebook gathers a great deal of information about our reading habits: when we start to read, when we stop, how quickly or slowly we read, when we skip pages, when we re-read, what we choose to highlight, what we choose to read next.
-
This is certainly a concern from the perspective of a Library Media Specialist taxed with maintaining patron privacy. It will be interesting to see how libraries handle this with the publishers once the publishers are truly on-board with selling ebooks to libraries. In the meantime, if you want your privacy with an ebook, turn off the sync features and turn off the WiFi on your device as you read.
-
-
readers remaking the text, much in the manner of the fan reaction to The Phantom Menace, The Phantom Edit.
-
This is a concern for the future, for this author of this post. eBooks could also become self aware and set up a bot net to take over the world's tablet devices and start WWIII, but I'm not going to start losing sleep over that, and I'm not going to stop reading ebooks out of fear of this either. ;-)
-
- ...4 more annotations...
-
The printed book – the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction par excellence – is astonishingly stable over time, place and reader.
-
This is a good point. Digitizing the history of books is going to be important and best NOT left up to money-orientated corporations like Google or Amazon. The Library of Congress, Project Gutenberg, and other not-for-profit groups with goals of preserving the future. Publishers need to get on board with digitizing their pasts as well. Want to read Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird in ebook format? Tough.
-
-
Could the e-reader support texts that could be read only if more than one person were reading it – and what issues of trust might that raise?
-
Could there be texts that no one reader has access to in their entirety, and if so, what communities of interpretation might grow up around them?
-
In this case, TV and film are far ahead of publishers