Why do I have to choose?
I love books. I love the paper ,old fashion, books in a way that I will never love my computer screen. I love the smell of books, I love to hold them and I love to brows my shelves looking for one.
There are many disadvantages for the old fashion books, as Jeff Jarvis describes :
The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore. Print is where words go to die.
But are the words of Shakespeare dead because they are printed? I would suggest that not only the words but Shakespeare himself rich eternity because of the print.
I always believed that the technology and the internet in particular, are about open options not closing them. Why should I give up all that good in books only because we discover a technology that overcomes some of the disadvantages? Why should I have to make a decision between the old and the new? Was theater doomed to disappear when movies made their debut? Is their no value in riding a bicycle when we drive a car?
I would not want to live in a world without books, the one made from paper, and I’m guessing that Jeff Jarvis wouldn’t want that too.
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