eBooks

The whole concept of ebooks is good and yet must have drawbacks. I’m sure endless reading on computer screens is more damaging to the eye than print on page but yet maybe that may also be overcome.

Vinton Cerf’s surprising being of the ‘book’ era and yet at the forefront in his passionate work for integrated web based reading of a truly global nature ; "Because the Internet is a computing environment, a software environment, it's possible to create a much richer kind of information than what we are typically accustomed to in books,” … “digitized books, he said can be searched and updated easily, linked to related material & enhanced with audio & video.” I like to think that those books I came to love will still look & read the same when I next pick them up ; but that is not the way google books see our reading future – “ .. they can also be changed, which means that the book you read a year ago may look different the next time you consult it”. It’s just a different way of looking at books I guess; you should feel attached to the story, not the book.
“Before physical books were invented, thoughts were constrained by both space and time”; but we are rather an unconstrained society aren’t we – instantaneous production ; The Espresso Book Machine – but here we have something that appeals to the senses as well as to our brain – it 'feels & smells' – so we are not willing to give all this up just yet.
I searched for title ‘Wife of Bath’ in Project Gutenberg - this came up with no entries (maybe it could have suggested something else? Other titles that were similar or a suggestion of possible author’s that linked to books they did have perhaps). Searched again for Chaucer and found 5 entries plus a wikipedia link (which is rather nice). I clicked on Chaucer’s Works Vol 4 (of 7) – The Canterbury Tales & from the list of formats, opened the html (non compressed) main site (1.96mb) & was delighted – the text was clear, very readable (included Wife of Bath’s Prologue); perhaps a paging format could have been useful, instead of having to scroll through the work but was easy to read & seemed complete – no missing pages and the formatting made it good to copy from.

Did the same exercise in Google Books ; searched for ‘Wife of Bath‘ – which immediately came up a whole list of entries, at the top was The Canterbury Tales directing me to the page number in each particular book entry but also other books that contained ‘wife of bath’ – something Pope had written about Chaucer, criticism & commentary books on medieval texts & Middle English – most impressive; however books that may have been of greater interest had ‘limited preview’ or only snippets available plus on the whole, the text was not as ‘reader friendly’. Is a keyword based search tool superior to an author / title search – not necessarily, but sometimes yes. I found Google Books was an exceptional resource for titles - which could perhaps lead to the researcher visiting their “local library”.

(pic c/o Barnes & Noble)