15th Century Email = eBooks With Pages
Over the weekend, I saw a video on Youtube entitled “15th Century Email” (which kind of reminded me of the medieval helpdesk video that made the rounds last Spring). With its premise that someone in the 15th century would use a computer to compose a message, but then hand over the entire laptop in order to have it delivered by a messenger on horseback, seems to me as silly (and anachronistic) as our modern day eBooks — formats and/or devices — that do everything they can to retain the print-book model of turning pages. Because why, in a virtual world, would you mimic the constraints of the physical one? (After all, what makes flying so much fun in Second Life is that you can’t do that in real life.)
In the “15th Century Email” video, the guy understands the technology enough to use it (when he makes a mistake, he knows to use the DELETE key to correct his mistake), but instead of just correcting the one mistake he then erases the entire letter and starts from scratch, the way you would crumble up a piece of paper and start all over again. And when eBook programs try to keep the experience of “turning” virtual pages, it shows they’re reacting the same as the man in the video; they understand (and want to exploit) the idea of electronic reading and digitization, but the fact that they retain the idea of turning “pages” means they’re missing out on the bigger experience. Once eBooks and digital reading can get beyond this thinking, the book will then be truly redefined, and the idea of reading will be finally revolutionized. Until then, like “15th Century Email,” we’re just using new technology in an ancient way.
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Yet more electronic anachronism…
Perhaps inspired by the now-legendary medieval helpdesk video, a riff on 15th Century email: This is snagged off the Textologies newswire, and the comments added by Print is Dead blogger Jeff Gomez don’t pull any punches on the significance of……
There it is! The hardest part of change is not using a new tool, it’s changing the way you think and behave - great post!
Exactly. I didn’t become a big ebook reader until I started using a reader (Mobipocket) that continuously scrolls the text automatically. Once you get the speed set correctly, you realize it’s a much more natural way to read than turning pages ever was.
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Well, ebook is great because you get it right then and there. But there is a DRM catch. I just got an ebook in pdf I need urgently – I got it but it turns out I’m not able to print it. Finding that out only after I bought it is a bit of a rip-off, to say the least. Stunned, I’ve done some search and it turns out that happens a lot. So I found software (Copistar) that lets you print it - and I’m posting this in case you are stuck with the same problem.