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Sheesh, what do people have against ebooks? And where do they all get the same fetish for fondling paper? You can't grep dead trees. Books just aren't as effec
by wnight 15y ago
Sheesh, what do people have against ebooks? And where do they all get the same fetish for fondling paper?
You can't grep dead trees. Books just aren't as effective. You also can't store tens of thousands of paper books on a tiny USB stick.
- colanderman 15y agoYou also can't build redstone computers out of Lego bricks. Capability wasn't the author's point.
- CountHackulus 15y agoYou can certainly build a computer out of legos. Or at least a Difference Engine, and what really is a better introduction to computability than making your own calculator? http://acarol.woz.org/difference_engine.html http://acarol.woz.org/difference_engine.html
- wnight 15y agoBut capability is the point of books. If you want a work of art buy a sculpture/etc. There's a huge undercurrent of people who romanticize books, I was asking where/why they came from.
- colanderman 15y agoThe author answers your question in the article: "In the real world the physical book has a meaning of its own: it's the book your wife gave you as an anniversary present, it's the book your late father got part way through and you dare not remove the bookmark he left in place, it's the children's book read and read until the pages are torn and worn. These physical remnants augment the book with personal meaning."
- wnight 15y agoSure. You'd likely have as many sentimental books as you'd have sentimental tie-clips, rings, photos, favorite songs, etc. But why do some people romanticize nearly all books?
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoI have a couple of books I bought at library book sales years ago that are over 100 years old. I enjoy them more for their possible history than for the actual stories. The penciled-in notes, the owner's names before they were donated, the library stamps, etc. All these things give the books a sense of being "things" in their own right, with their own history, and that gives me pleasure. Make sense?
- wnight 15y agoQuite. I always wonder at the history behind left-over bookmarks, marginal notes, etc. I'd be happy seeing a scan though. Happier actually because I could flip through other scans of other marginal notes in other copies of the same book, comparing handwriting by decade, seeing if the same things confuse or inspire multiple people, or whatever. Stuck on a dead tree it's going to get lost, scanned in and indexed it's data.