Quote:
Originally Posted by Cthulhu
@ Zelda: As you can see, I have a thing for tentacles.
;-
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yes i noticed that... ;-
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospect
The issue is to distinguish between the device, the text and its particular format.
This is a challenge because the traditional terminology is based on the paper book which is both the physical device and the text in one.
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i didn't spend much time thinking about it first, but when i talk about the whole e-book experience, i tell my friends "i have a
liseuse" and then they look at me funny so i explain "it's an electronic book / e-book (livre électronique)" (and then they're still confused so i say "like an ipod for books"...), and i call what i read on it e-texts or digital texts.
this seems logical to me ; traditional terminology does make an amalgam of the content and the container, which poses problem when trying to establish a new terminology, however to me the word "book" refers more to the container than the content because the same content could be presented in the form of a scroll, or a clay tablet, or graffitti on a wall.
for an example, take the dead sea scrolls : as their name suggests, they were originally presented in the form of scrolls. if we copy the exact glyphs onto individual sheets of paper and bind them together along one side, is it still a scroll ? no, it's a book (codex) ; but it's the same text (content) of the dead sea scrolls.
before there were different names for different formats of books : in folio, in quarto, etc. these are no longer really used but we refer to our own different formats such as "hardcover" or "paperback" or "magazine" or "newspaper". but the content of all these could be the same.
a device, i would say, belongs to the set "clay tablet, scroll, codex, folio, book, magazine etc." with the most common generic word today being "book", whereas the content, regardless of the form it is presented in, is always text (well, or images / hieroglyphics / whathaveyou, but let's not complicate the matter further !).
so a device seems logically to be an electronic book (e-book), because it is the generic container, and the content (text) is an e-text because it is in an immaterial form, it is not printed / immutable.