Quote:
Originally Posted by mbovenka
Maybe so, but ebooks are superior to pbooks in all ways that matter to me. And your arguments don't convince me that I have 'given up' anything...
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The science on this is all very new. I'm sure when movies came out, nobody saw the end of Vaudeville. When television came out, it was hailed as the greatest educational tool in history. When the Internet came out, nobody predicted that one day privacy would be difficult to maintain on it - after all, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.
What we don't know is if reading on an ereader is understood and remembered as well as on paper. We don't know if reading speeds are the same. We don't know if there is long-term impacts on vision. And we don't know if ereaders, by making it easy for everyone to publish, will destroy the traditional publishing model or make it stronger as people decide that the gatekeepers were actually doing a good job.
There's no going back, though. The genie is out of the bottle and now we have to wait and see what the impacts are. It could turn out to be well worth the price. Gutenberg's invention was a pretty good one on the whole. But we still gave up the ability for people to remember word-for-word what they heard (why remember when it can be written down.) And the proliferation of books and reading led to a new era in eyeglass manufacturing as people spent far more time focusing closely, leading to widespread myopia. Technology gives on the one hand, but it takes away on the other, and it is far too soon to say whether the net effect of the ebook revolution will be a positive one.