Quote:
Originally Posted by BenBanned
A better question is if an e-book is really considered a book.
Story?
File?
Book?
Certainly no one would confuse a scroll for a book
eventhough they serve the same puropse.
"Electronic Book" is quite a boring term.
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I was in a hotel, and there was a paper copy of the complete works of Jane Austen. It was a beautiful binding, the author of the article would have certainly approved. The visual and tactile sensations were quite nice. The only thing is, to fit it all into one binding, the font was made tiny. It put it down. It wasn't a book made for reading, it was a book made for display, to look good on a shelf. I read Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle. I read it every bit as much as someone who read it on paper, by any reasonable measure.
But back to what you were discussing: that paper book was a book that contained books. The same thing would have been true of an e-book that contained all of Jane Austen's works. In one sense, the book is the container for the story, and can be in a number of forms, stone or clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, a paper codex or a digital file on an e-reader.
In another sense, the book refers to the story itself, independent of the medium. When we talk about Pride and Prejudice, for example, we aren't all that interested in the medium it came on, one person can read it in paperback, another in hardcover, and still another in an e-book format, and we've all read the same book.