Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Cookbooks would be a natural for multimedia--any how-to books, for that matter.
|
Now there's something I'd like: a car repair manual that would let me see the parts I'm working on, move them around in 3D space, and figure out how they fit together
without struggling with some half-invisible, crud-coated, and of course
broken part before I actually tried to get it out of there. It would save a lot of stress and the occasional scraped knuckle.
I'm not sure that anything smaller than my netbook would work for that, though. A smartphone? Forget it. And there's the whole issue of having it around a car I'm working on -- the pbooks get replaced faster than the cars because bad things happen to them.
Oddly enough, though, I've never seen anything like this (if you know of one, let me know!). I've seen DVDs on specific repairs, and before them videotapes, and of course the Haynes manuals and their diagrams of impossibly-clean engines and unnaturally well-fitting parts, but never something that would let me grab a virtual part with my pointing device of choice and play around with the thing until I really understood how it fit in there and what I actually need to detach to get it the hell
out of there.
Multimedia "books" have been around since the dawn of the home CD-ROM ... Dorling-Kindersley used to have a nice line of them (dunno if they still do). But they're more a computer program with some text content than a text with programmatic content. While the coffee-table books are certainly a possibility -- that's pretty much what coffee-table books are: pictures with some text -- and various sorts of references (everything from dictionaries that pronounce words up to history books that summon up animated diagrams of battlefields) I can't see any kind of book one would settle down to read working well that way.
As for the guy who preferred movies because he didn't have to think ... I couldn't imagine a better example of men without chests.