On The Anniversary Of My Last Post
I am finally prompted to write again. For xmas this year, my big gift was a Nook. It came as a surprise, because I thought I was about a year away from such a thing, and wasn't sure whether it would be an e-reader or a tablet. The choice has been made for me, and I am about to begin acquiring e-books to read.
The last leap forward I made in the communication revolution was about five years ago, when I acquired a light laptop, started this blog, and opened a Facebook page. Those moves added clutter: new channels, more of the same, less overall command of the flow of information and communication. Is acquiring an e-reader another move in the same direction?
I made a decision to stop accumulating books last year. No place to put em. No time to read em. But I continued to pick up books nonetheless--physical books that I buy or that get sent to me for one reason or another, and electronic or pdf versions that I download from, say, gigapedia. If I could snap my fingers and convert them all into an electronic format stored on a portable device, I think I would, even though I love physical books. Just to simplify.
But I would have waited another year, mostly because of newspapers. 2011 may be the year when a viable electronic option for newspapers finally appears. Web-based versions simply lack voice and form, and hold my attention for only a fraction of the time I'll devote to a print edition of even a crappy newspaper, like my local daily. The tablet version of newspapers is better, but still mostly an article-by-article thing. The page is as important to my experience of a newspaper as the album side is to my experience of recorded music. After around 30 years of digital music, there is still no analog for the album side, so it might be that the newspaper page will never be successfully replicated in the digital universe. And newspaper folk are much less interested in innovation than music folk. Probably all the tablet will do to enhance digital news is to give news organizations a second chance to construct a paywall.
Will I pay for digital news? No. Not today, at least. And it wasn't included in the gift.
I am finally prompted to write again. For xmas this year, my big gift was a Nook. It came as a surprise, because I thought I was about a year away from such a thing, and wasn't sure whether it would be an e-reader or a tablet. The choice has been made for me, and I am about to begin acquiring e-books to read.
The last leap forward I made in the communication revolution was about five years ago, when I acquired a light laptop, started this blog, and opened a Facebook page. Those moves added clutter: new channels, more of the same, less overall command of the flow of information and communication. Is acquiring an e-reader another move in the same direction?
I made a decision to stop accumulating books last year. No place to put em. No time to read em. But I continued to pick up books nonetheless--physical books that I buy or that get sent to me for one reason or another, and electronic or pdf versions that I download from, say, gigapedia. If I could snap my fingers and convert them all into an electronic format stored on a portable device, I think I would, even though I love physical books. Just to simplify.
But I would have waited another year, mostly because of newspapers. 2011 may be the year when a viable electronic option for newspapers finally appears. Web-based versions simply lack voice and form, and hold my attention for only a fraction of the time I'll devote to a print edition of even a crappy newspaper, like my local daily. The tablet version of newspapers is better, but still mostly an article-by-article thing. The page is as important to my experience of a newspaper as the album side is to my experience of recorded music. After around 30 years of digital music, there is still no analog for the album side, so it might be that the newspaper page will never be successfully replicated in the digital universe. And newspaper folk are much less interested in innovation than music folk. Probably all the tablet will do to enhance digital news is to give news organizations a second chance to construct a paywall.
Will I pay for digital news? No. Not today, at least. And it wasn't included in the gift.
posted by jnerone at 1:55 PM
0 comments
