bgrier
on
It's not like I've never read a book before, but for me the act of picking up a tome and reading it is happening less frequently. In fact, I usually search for an electronic version of any content before I pick up a book.
Now the thing that I found rather curious was this (and it's probably old hat to any student born after 1985). I was looking for a particular paragraph to reference in a document I was working on. I found my reference, and then immediately was frustrated because I wanted to 'bookmark' it, then 'cut and paste' it into my document, and also file it away for future reference.
But, since it was an analog text, none of this was possible.
Which leads me to my point -- this year's CES had a huge number of eBook readers on display, from a wider variety of manufacturers. All promising to hold thousands of documents and books, available to you at the touch of a finger.
But what about all the old-school text that's still tied up in dead-tree editions? Sure, Google is on a huge scan-the-world's-libraries mission, but will that get 'everything' and make it all available to us all? Perhaps, for a slight fee.
And you know, that may not be such a bad thing. Technology has made it much easier for us to process information in ways we never even knew we wanted -- look how the spreadsheet has evolved from a simple ledger program with a few innovations (Visicalc).
Who knows what having all the worlds texts available to us in a 'net connected eBook reader will enable. For me, it means having reference at my fingertips. Should I need the information, I simply look it up. Here, let me Google that for you.
But then again, what does that gain me, other than the ability to move from one task to another as I follow a 'recipe card' from the Internet. Have I really 'learned' anything? Other than how to look something up.
It's one thing to have the keys to the library. It's another to have the *knowledge* of the books in the library. I wonder which is preferable.
You must be a registered user to add a comment here. If you've already registered, please log in. If you haven't registered yet, please register and log in.