"ebooks" should not be "books"

Cory Doctorow writes "It seems to me that electronic books are different from paper books, and have different virtues and failings." He largely attributes the current "failure" of ebooks to the fact that copyright laws and publishers/authors that those laws are supposed to protect have not caught up to, or in some aspects even acknowledged, the onset of a new paradigm - namely the proliferation of information technology, and the connectivity and file-sharing capabilities it has brought.

I agree with Doctorow in that there is something inherently paradoxical in the way publishers distribute and market ebooks today. Take, for example, the e-textbooks that are sold in the Cal Student Store. The benefit of making anything digital lies in its increased maneuverability and convinience. In order for ebooks to be beneficial, they need to be fully searchable, easily copied and quoted, and accessible anywhere. However, these commercial ebooks can only be viewed through a web-browser with internet access after a password protected log-in, the text and images cannot be copied, and they can only be printed one page at a time. So what is the end product? Something very close to a paper printed book, only it is projected on a compute screen, with none of the added functions a computer is capable of providing. This situation is analogous to someone computing 5 + 5 on a modern supercomputer. We don't need an alternate version of printed books; simple paper will suffice for that function, just as it has for centuries. The computer wasn't invented to mimic the function of paper books, and to limit its functionality is like limiting the functionality of a super computer to only perform the functions of a pocket calculator. Furthermore, this attempt by publishers to enforce their copyright not only leads to no additional benefit for the reader, but it is in fact crippling the usability of ebooks. Instead of just opening a paper bound textbook, we now need to start our computers, find internet access, log onto the site, etc. etc.

What we need is an entire paradigm shift. We don't just need to loosen our paranoia of copyright infringement, but also need to rethink the entire concept of a "book" in an electronic context. The name "ebook" is somewhat of a misnomer, because it has the capability of being something completely different from a "book". The traditional book, by the restrictions placed on it by its simple media of paper and ink, have been largely sequential. But electronic books do not have this restriction. No longer should we need to read "explanations of this idea is given later on in the book" or "see footnote". With the power of hypertext, a book should resemble not a tree-like structure, but a brain map of interconnected thoughts. And who is to say a published "ebook" cannot contain a link to Wikipedia to explain relevant context? What about the incorporation of audio, graphics, video, and other multimedia content into a "book"? Who is to say that a ebook file of a chemistry book cannot contain rotating 3D graphics of a molecule, or that a ebook of Shakespeare's plays cannot contain a interactive image of the stage set?

I believe we need to let go of the idea that "ebooks" are "books". True, they are "books" in the sense that it contains text that conveys some kind of information. But other than that, placing the restriction of "books" on "ebooks" cripples the functionality of this new form electronic media.

I Am Blogging It: Maybe I'm destroying it

At the end of Henry Jenkins' article titled "Blog This!", he begs of the reader, "So blog this, please" (181). As Jenkins states in the article, blogs are becoming ever more popular as people are posting, well, just about anything. Jenkins argues that bloggers are "...expanding the range of perspectives and, if they are clever, creating order from the informational chaos"(180). Comparing bloggers to the "committees of correspondence" that distributed revolutionary texts, Jenkins attempts to show that bloggers have the power to "shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media" (181). I agree that blogs give a very wide range of opinions on vast amounts of information and have shaped and will continue to shape the media landscape. I don't agree, however, that me blogging, as I am now, will help blogging or the Internet at all. I believe it will make the Internet worse.

There are many blogs I read, have read, and genuinely enjoy. However, for every blog I enjoy there are hundreds of thousands of blogs that I will never get a chance to read, and the vast majority of these blogs will be of no value to me. Thanks to search engines such as Google, we typically do not get lost in a jungle of pointless blogs, most of which have a few introductory posts and since then have been forgotten. Even if a gem is randomly found within the vast maze of the Internet, unless it is already a large and well known blog that is embraced by a large audience, it would be very difficult to find again unless the reader bookmarks it, which most readers probably wont. Between typing the sentence before this and this sentence, I attempted to find my friend's blog that was a dream journal; I could not. A new blog following an article's advise on an evening in boredom will just further dilute the readership of blogs. It will be made, published, and forgotten to be ignored by the few web surfers that happen to drift by. "Stuff White People Like", a blog my friend used to read religiously, has only had 9 blog posts in 2009. In the previous year It had posted over a hundred times and was popular enough to prompt a book release. I haven't heard my friend speak of the blog for many months now. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but a simple Google search about dead blogs leads to a mass of blog posts about dead blogs.

The most successful blogs, in my opinion, are typically those that are run by multiple people that are committed to continuing the blog. Individuals creating blogs and posting their opinions on random topics generally tend to clog up the Internet, even if it is well maintained due to the fact that most people don't want to pend time reading about a random person that they never heard of talking about random topics. Successful blogs such as Cute Overload, Make Zine, Gizmodo, Gawker, Smashing Magazines, Mashable, Google blog, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Blog, Fail Blog, etc. are all about specific topics. Although the topics each blog covers varies greatly, a blog that is good for the Internet must be liked by the users of the the Internet. If someone wants to have opinions on a subject, creating a decentralized personal blog without a community is a waste of time and weakens the image of blogging as a powerful tool. Joining the community of daily readers, engaging in comments, and communicating with committed blog writers is a more effective way of strengthening blogging. Unless there really are not enough blogs that talk about how one politician is superior to another, the formation of a blog for such a topic is unnecessary.

http://xkcd.com/635/

- Joshua Ziesmer

Missed Class Monday

I was wondering if anyone could fill me in on some of the main points emphasized on Monday (with respect to the readings or otherwise), as I missed that lecture.

It would be greatly appreciated!

Notes on the Deviance of Textuality

N. K. Hayles has simultaneously opened my eyes and confused me terribly when it comes down to the notion of “media translation.” I look on my past self as one who naively embraced at face value the oversimplification that physical and electronic representations of text are, in a broad sense, two sides of the same coin. While this is true to the extent that these texts carry the same “actual order of words and punctuation,” the method and styles of delivery incorporated into these two domains collectively and fundamentally alter the interpretation and, therefore, the meaning of the text that is read. This is a point that I had never considered, and while I agree with it in some ways, I am stubbornly resistant in others.

As Hayles noted, electronic text is in the nascent stages of what will almost certainly be exponential growth over the next hundred years and beyond. But, at this point in history regarding the interpretation of different forms of text, I am inclined to ask a fundamental question: so what? In my opinion, information is information, regardless of how it follows its strangled path from the mind of an author to that of a reader. Once a person has read something and has theoretically understood the text and subtext, hasn’t the author’s purpose been fulfilled (here, I am assuming that the author’s purpose would be informative, over experiential)? The manner in which the information is presented will enhance, diminish or leave unscathed the reader’s ability to comprehend the text and subtext based on personal experience and preference (i.e. if a reader despises reading on a computer, they may not glean the same pertinent information from an eBook as they would from the physical analog). Obviously, many writers are interested not only in the information or thoughts they convey but in the manner or style in which they are conveyed in. In such contexts I completely agree that there is much style to be lost in any translation that alters the author’s originally form of presentation.

Hayles also remarks how no physical or electronic text can ever be duplicated on pg. 94. I completely agree with this, but would ask whether or not these differences (say, between “identical” copies of the same edition of a physical book) actually manifest in varied informational interpretation by the reader. I would say that such interpretation of text and subtext would more rely on the reader’s mental facilities and nuanced personal contexts to comprehend and form a customized perception of that information. To give a personal example, I just bought a used textbook from the student store. I opened it up and saw that vast portions of it had been highlighted over. To me, reading text that has been highlighted by someone other than myself is distracting and occasionally perplexing. I will (hopefully) absorb the same information from the book that all my classmates will, but the added distraction may end up diminishing my capacity to do so. In such a way, nearly identical copies of the same book (highlighted and not) could have very different effects.

On an unrelated note, I thought that the following Van Lieshout quote on pg. 111 was very interesting “You do not buy software, you rent a first draft...the buyer has turned into an unpaid beta tester...” I had never thought of it that way. I feel like such a tool!

Lost in Translation

Where I once thought that transferring novels and poetry to the internet was merely a transitional issue, I now believe that I was sorely mistaken. I have read Haiku that were originally written in Japanese and I thought that they were rather simplistic at the time. But later on I realized that there was something lost. Something that cannot transcend the barriers set forth by different languages. Where a poem in German may rhyme very well and flow easily off the lips, once translated to Portuguese, it may sound as if a child who does not understand syntax wrote the poem. The same thing could be argued in relation to the book to e-book issue. Will a hyperlink in the middle of a text ruin how one navigates the text? As noted by some of my classmates, things like hyperlinks will cause them to click them immediately without even finishing the sentence or even the rest of the passage.

Even text online without regards to hyperlinks can be problematic. When people send documents or retype passages for other people to see, errors can be made. And these errors make something new every time. A new work is written when there is simply a minor coding error, almost causing texts to evolve in a sense. Where something in book form says "the olive tree," it can be improperly translated onto a new media source and cause it to say "the oil tree." Granted there is no such thing as an oil tree, it merely serves as a rather crude example of how simple changes can cause different meanings.

The best way to get around the issue of text online would be to merely make some texts exclusively online. There could be authors of books and then there could be another division of authors of eBooks. Online poets could create a niche for themselves and make the internet do things that would be otherwise impossible for the pen and paper poet. Hyperlinks could create new avenues for poets and writers to work with, to make their work more interactive and even allow people to get more of a personal meaning by taking their own avenue (somewhat like those Choose Your Own Adventure). Rather than trying to force the page from a book onto the screen, people should try to adapt to the screen and use it for a different avenue.

Dream Machines, why hypertext is awesome

Dream machines
In Theodore Nelson’s dream machine, I found it very amusing how he hated the whole concept of learning. It is intriguing that Nelson was the one that introduce hypertext, and how it can be used simplifying learning and enhance development. On page 312 of the New Media reader, the diagram of the brick wall and how it represents the teachers and the computer. While hypermedia, can directly get to the students. Taking the prefix, hyper-, it means above and beyond. So Nelson wanted unlimited resources and information that are not affixed to the minimum textbook that teachers are using to teach students. Hypertext/media has made it easier to navigate to what one is searching for because it is not in a linear way but in a web connecting to many different relations.
First, what is a hypertext? It is complicated to describe, but we all seem to know it when we see it."A hypertext system is one in which links may be specified between different places in the text." – John Lavagnino. Books offer a primitive sort of linking process because in that notes in the text may refer to footnotes, which may refer the reader to further texts like maybe five to ten books. For a computer system which is what we are interested in, takes the user straight to the material, or, if you prefer, brings the linked material to the reader.

A second major positive of a hypertext system is that the universe of the hypertext is infinitely expandable and unlike printed text that is limited, one can find many answers and obtain more. So why shouldn’t we use hypertext and get data all at once and in different forms whether it is in video, media, textual, and so forth.

To some a hypertext is not simply a fancy version of a print document, but is a document of a different order, where the opportunities offered by the medium are fully considered and explored. This is what Nelson was trying to argue that hypertext was a revolutionary way to search and achieve. It created the ease of research and learning with a click of a button and that with it come hyper- or infinite knowledge.

Ch. 5: Personal Computers and Personal Meanings

In the fifth chapter of The Second Self, author Sherry Turkle explores the role of the computer, in both professional and personal environments, and the effects that computers have on their users. An interesting point that was established from the beginning of the chapter was the difference in the use of the computer, especially in more technical users, in the workplace or professional setting and at home or as a personal computer. The example that she gave for this was programmers and how their programming in a work environment was much different than the programming that they could do with their personal computers at home. At the time many programmer’s jobs were to write small parts of individual code for a greater program, but the freedom to start and finish a complete program was not a reality. That is why personal computing became much more enjoyable for these programmers because they could actually write programs the way they wanted to. One of the people interviewed for this chapter, named Cark, said this about professional versus personal programming,

“If you never or rarely get to finish things at work, if your job is basically to make little pieces and its somebody else’s to make them fit into a whole, then working with a computer at home can give you an experience of getting it all together.”

With the highly technical population, especially with programmers, the personal computer became their “creative outlet” and after a day of programming at work all day, it was still desirable to be able to have a computer at home to use however they wanted.

Another point that Turkle makes is the role of the computer in influencing the development of the person as well as society as a whole. Turkle states, “ A relationship with a computer can influence people’s conceptions of themselves, their jobs, their relationships with other people, and with their ways of thinking about social processes.” For a computer just being a “machine” it sure has huge influence on people and their lives. An example of this is the idea presented in the chapter saying that personal computers possess the ability to one day be the sole source of education. I cannot imagine a time where children no longer go to school anymore and their access to education would be through a computer.

Turkle also mentions that, at the time, many computer users “demanded a sense of understanding the machine.” This statement is so clearly contrasted by most people who use computers solely for personal use today. The majority of people who use computers these days have no idea how a computer works, whether its the parts that comprise it, the programs used to run it or the code behind those programs. For many users, the solution to any type of computer malfunction is: reboot! While I don’t consider myself completely illiterate in terms of computers and how they work, and I am curious as to how all of the inner-workings of the computer come together, I don’t find myself “demanding” this knowledge to feel fine with using a personal computer.

While this chapter makes solid arguments about how computing, and especially personal computing has changed the individual and society as a whole, some of the future outcomes were not as predicted. Education is not based around computers and schools are still the most prominent forms of education for children, and a lot of the paranoia about having a personal computer has dissolved but along with this loss of the magnitude of computers some of the appreciation and large desire to learn about them has been lost by most of the population. Most users would prefer to have as little technical logic or understanding behind a computer and prefer to use it for its convenience.