Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Not so: Readers allow you to manipulate your content to improve your reading experience, for instance, by allowing you to select type sizes or light levels. Many of the devices or software readers (I use a few) allow you to select fonts, colors and even backgrounds... you can have lots of choices. I've seen plenty of books that had the wrong typeface used, or in the wrong size, or badly-printed and almost too light (or too thick) to read. With a paper book, you can't fix that. With a reader, you can.
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So if someone hands you a hand-written poem, with bad penmanship and an unsharpened pencil, you "fix" it for him?
The only thing that's attractive on that front is being able to increase the size of text for failing eyesight. None of the other so-called features are what I would call good. Definitely not a "fix".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
I just looked at a Van Gough on my monitor. Looked pretty good! Unless they let you touch it, it doesn't matter much to me if you can make out individual hair strokes on a painting. I usually enjoy a painting by standing back from it and taking it all in, anyway!  |
You haven't seen a Van Gough in real life, have you? I wouldn't *want* to touch it -- oils never do dry, anyway, and I don't want to leave my imprint on it. Not even to "fix" it.
Not being able to examine it up close, you miss out on so much: how much paint was used, or how much work was truly put into a particular feature, or even the technique itself. Like a newspaper photo, you *could* stay away and see an image, but you don't grok it until you get cozy with it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
For literature, the content IS the experience. Everything else, especially the medium, is superfluous. The Three Musketeers isn't less of a classic because it's printed in a cheap paperback and read on a subway car. Great Expectations isn't great just because it's printed on fine stock and read in the Louvre. Content transcends delivery.
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If that were true, we could just remove all whitespace, punctuation, margins -- any sort of formatting since that is, in fact, just trappings for the words. Aside from ridding the world of e e cummings (not necessarily something I'd weep over, personally
), you'd also make the whole text unreadable.
Content cannot transcend delivery. Every art form has encountered this fact throughout history. Every musical performance, every painting, every monologue. I could stand up and recite verbatim every great piece of literature ever written, and find myself facing a rather bored if not hostile audience. If delivery were irrelevent, I should be able to get as good a reception as from someone reading Shakespeare. For that matter, I could just buy a musical score and call that as good a concert as the 5th-grade band or the Royal Philharmonic. Even as abstract a thing as source code cannot rid itself of delivery, if you expect to communicate its meaning adequately -- there's a huge amount being spent on notation and syntax when you *could* just transmit opcodes.
But we know that's not the case. After all, without delivery, how do you actually *get* the content?
