Bookstores [Was: Re: Going OT [Was: Re: Replacing PBXes with Open Source]]

[Fred]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 12:58, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:39:44 -0400
> Jon maddog Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
> 
> > I will have to agree with Ben.  Despite the fact that I too love the
> > feeling of pages turning between my hands, and I love taking that book
> > out under the tree, or into the hammock in the back yard, there are
> > economies that will force printed books out of existence.
> Great post.
> I too prefer books. I am uncomfortable reading large amounts of online
> text. Maybe if I had one of Thad Starner's wearables with high
> resolution glasses, I could join Maddog under the tree with a computer. 
> Years ago I learned how to use an abacus. I still have it somewhere.
> It's much closer to Linux than Windows since you never get a blue screen
> of death with it :-)

I fondly recall my slide rule I used to carry around with me everywhere
when I was in 6th grade on. Now, almost no one would want to use a slide
rule for anything.

Having said that, I will also say this. I have spent a good portion of
my career designing user interfaces. The user interface of a thing IS
the experience of a thing.

Someone had mentioned that the reed organ is not built anymore, but has
been supplanted by the canned samples in synthesisers. But if you think
of it, the *user interface* of the two are quite similar.

But, despite the advent of the Casio Keyboards of the world, we still
have real pianos. There is something about the sound of a grand piano,
for instance, that will never be quite captured electronically. Plus
pianos are deeply embedded in our culture, and that "cultural meme"
replicates itself nicely every time there is a gathering around a good
pianist. You can't beat that. So there is more to a thing than just the
user interface, even though the UI plays an important role.

Now, let's talk about the user interface aspects of dead-tree books vs.
e-books.

It's the feel, its the smell. It's the sound the turning of a page
makes. The crispness of the letters and pictures, if any. The weight,
dead-tree books are very durable, too. They can go everywhere you do,
get chewed by the dog, get kicked by the kid, and they will still be
usable.

The e-book, on the other hand, does not stand on its own. It requires a
computer to render it readable, whether it's a laptop, palmtop, or
desktop. Current computer displays don't do well in direct sunlight,
palmtops are simply too small to read comfortably, laptops can be
dropped or get wet or stolen, and they all require power. There is
something highly annoying about worrying when the power will run out on
the laptop or palmtop, which distracts from the experience. And don't
let your dog chew on it or the kid kick it -- you've got those extra
concerns as well. But you can do text searches and what not.

But then a book with a half-decent index is good too. And the advantage
to the index is that you can browse it in a way you can't with an
electronic lookup. 

Both have their places. To save cost on dead-tree books, we don't need
to use trees at all, but hemp. And that can happen as soon as a certain
government gets its head out of its ass.

And even with technical manuals and reference books, when grokking them
I prefer the dead-tree version. I can grok them anywhere, especially
places I would not want to take my laptop. But for regular reference
uses, I prefer the on-line manuals with the search capabilities. And so
I find myself using both.

Same with GUI vs. CLI. I use both, exploiting the advantages of each.
The command-line console will never go away, no matter how "fancy" GUI
gets. And I absolutely adore Emacs which works nicely in either mode.

So before someone can say that "X is going away because Y is so much
better", one has to look deeply at the UI aspects of both X and Y. And
the UI experience will determine if Y is truly that much better than X.
Usually X and Y becomes complimentary rather than competitive.

-- 
Fred -- fred at lrc.puissante.com -- place "[hey]" in your subject.
There are inflows and outflows -- and you're just a little node.