As I admitted in our recent Thanksgiving article, I love next-generation display technologies like E Ink. And I hate it when specialists get up in arms over a popular misappropriation/redefinition of one of their pet technical terms (e.g., "well actually, you ignorant rube, the Mahler symphony that's currently playing is a piece of late romantic—not 'classical'—music"). But these feelings notwithstanding, I firmly believe that the term "e-book" is an unfortunate misnomer and that the newly launched Kindle's pretentious positioning as a modern reinvention of the book is just hype and hyperbole. It's also indicative of a general ignorance that most of us who live in the electronic age have about the elaborate, collaboratively developed information architecture of the technology that we often refer to as "dead tree."
In short, electronic "books" are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the "book," then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.
Format: books versus documents
From the very beginning of bookmaking down to the modern era, calligraphers and typographers have designed books to be read in facing-page format. The density of the type, the size of the margins, the arrangement of diagrams and captions and headings—all of the visual elements of the printed page are put together by a bookmaker into a composition that's designed to be taken in as a complete, two-page whole. To display a book like Gutenberg's first Bible by offering the viewer only one page at a time is like displaying the Mona Lisa by showing the top half first, then the bottom half. In other words, e-book readers that show one page at a time are presenting to the reader a piece of functional art that has been mutilated and crippled.
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In short, electronic "books" are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the "book," then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.
Format: books versus documents
From the very beginning of bookmaking down to the modern era, calligraphers and typographers have designed books to be read in facing-page format. The density of the type, the size of the margins, the arrangement of diagrams and captions and headings—all of the visual elements of the printed page are put together by a bookmaker into a composition that's designed to be taken in as a complete, two-page whole. To display a book like Gutenberg's first Bible by offering the viewer only one page at a time is like displaying the Mona Lisa by showing the top half first, then the bottom half. In other words, e-book readers that show one page at a time are presenting to the reader a piece of functional art that has been mutilated and crippled.
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LinksMarker is a Web 2.0 content management system
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