Michael Hart wrote:
Bowerbird wrote:
when black ink is splashed onto a white page of paper, the result is nothing more than a "picture" of the book. but somehow, for over 500 years, that has been enough.
It's so simple that even Mr. Bowerbird's rhetoric cannot confuse the issue:
A picture of the pages of a book, even if complete and OCRable, is simply not a a full text eBook.
1. It takes many times the drive space.
2. It takes much more download wire time.
3. You can't do ANY of the things you can do with full text,
EXCEPT THE MOST IMPORTANT. . .YOU CAN READ IT.
But the expense in time and money is much larger, and it's much harder to write research papers.
By Mr. Bowerbird's logic, a pre-Gutenerg book would be as useful as a post-Gutenberg book.
Michael hits the nail on the head. The important thing is that in the digital realm, we are no longer constrained to the physical limitations of ink on pressed sheets of pulped cellulosic materials (also known as paper.) Thus, it makes no sense to be constrained in our thinking to the pre-digital world. Nor should we be satisfied with only trying to mimic that world. That is, we need to think of what digital texts could be, and all the various things that they may accomplish, when not constrained as paper books have to be constrained. Therefore, the most important question we should ask is: "What are ALL the things we'd like digitized books to enable?" The full answer to this question establishes a clear list of requirements that our digitizing processes, formats, metadata, and reading systems need to meet. Of course, what I just said is patently obvious. But many of these discussions tend to digress back to "how to emulate paper books" rather than on "how to surpass paper books." I'm happy to see Michael try to push the discussion back into "what can digital books do that paper books cannot do." Jon Noring OpenReader Consortium