Comments on OnFiction: The Scroll and the Codex

Thank you Richard for your comment about highlight...

2011-12-02T07:49:50.292-05:00

Thank you Richard for your comment about highlighting and making notes in margins. Perhaps this facility will come along with newer iterations of e-readers, at least if enough people want to do it.

Thank you Carole, for your comment. Like you I pro...

2011-12-02T07:46:28.260-05:00

Thank you Carole, for your comment. Like you I probably need to get an e-reader. One question raised by my colleague, Raymond, is "Are they for reading or are they for shopping?" My partner, Jenny, read about a book she found interesting and it took her about one minute to get it on her Kindle.

Thanks Carolyn, for this comment. I know what you ...

2011-12-02T07:42:04.947-05:00

Thanks Carolyn, for this comment. I know what you mean about getting a bit fed up hearing all these arguments for the physical book. Many of them are anxieties for the jobs of publishers and booksellers, as well as for the pleasures of book-shop browsing and the like. The reason I found Grossman interesting was that to my mind he raised the question of what each kind of technology, for instance codex, film, Kindle, etcetera, might be optimized for. The bicycle, for me, is rather good for going three or four miles at three or four times the speed I could walk. Your arguments are right, I think. All the same, the codex does seem to me to have established a niche which is likely to remain for a while.

While it is true that you can highlight and make n...

2011-11-29T11:11:27.619-05:00

While it is true that you can highlight and make notes with a Kindle e-reader, you cannot do that with the iPad.
www.marksinthemargin.com

As someone who loves and marks up books regularly ...

2011-11-28T13:09:04.873-05:00

As someone who loves and marks up books regularly (now in pencil with annotated tags instead of highlighters), I vote for the Codex, but I appreciate Carolyn's explaining the advantages of an e-reader as well. I need to get one, but I'll never live without my bookshelves surrounding me. It's the height of lexical pleasure, separated by category: poets, books about poets, mysticism, neuroscience, French literature, Celtic studies, matriarchal myth, women's studies, women's fiction and reference books.

I do love books, the physical object, I mean. I ow...

2011-11-28T11:18:26.430-05:00

I do love books, the physical object, I mean. I own a lot of books and more than a few are rare.

But boy, am I getting tired of reading paeans to the object written by people who won't acknowledge the shortcomings of the book and obviously have never used the technology they're complaining about.

It's not true that the open page format of a page means you can find a specific passage. That's why we invented bookmarks, post-its and highlighters. These inventions overcome the problems with locating specific text in a text-rich book.

All those issues are natively solved in a digital text on a reader. You can bookmark, make notes and highlight, and you can do that without altering or defacing the text, by the way. You can search for text and be immediately taken to the relevant location(s). A good digital text will have hyperlinks that allow you to navigate between a table of contents and the text.

Even without a proper table of contents, you can navigate forward or backward and return to where you left off reading. You can also check how far you are into the book, as well.

I have no argument with talking about the physical book as a work of art, they often are. They have beauty and meaning in that beauty.

But, a print book is not, in fact, superior at doing the first job of a book: allowing a human to parse, navigate, comment upon, enter and re-enter the text.