הפיהוק המתמשך

מחר אני צריך להרצות במשך שעה באנגלית.

אני

שעה

אנגלית.

אני חושב שלפחות חצי שעה תתמלא ב-אממ... אבל מה לעזזאל אני אמור לעשות בחצי השעה שבה אני כן מדבר?

שיהיה.

בכל מקרה החלטתי ליתר ביטחון לגבות את הסמינריון ולהעלות את מה שכתבתי עד עכשיו לפה. כן אני יודע, זה באנגלית. אף אחד לא יטרח באמת לקרוא את זה. (אלא אם כן יש לכם הנאה אנאלית לשבת ולתקן לי שגיאות דידוקיות שהוורד לא תיקן לי בעצמו)

Intrudaction

“The elimination or suppression of the book (often as a shorthand for ideas or history) has been a staple of science fiction for decades [....], leading to a sense that technology inevitably will supersede the printed work” (Lynch, 2001, 1). As can be seen from the grate book “The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Galaxy” that was written in 1979

He also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. (Adams, 1979 .pp. 10)

The dream of appliance that will hold an electronic book has indeed entered the mind of the millions who have read this book. However, the vision of appliance that will be the library of the end user was not just a science fiction. “The dream of electronic books has been with us at least since Vannevar Bush published his famous article “As we may think” (Press, 2000, pp. 17).     

However, one of the things that I first noticed about this seminar is the irony. The answer to the seminar subject lies in the body of the seminar, and I mean it literally. This seminar is dealing with the subject of bookless society. The evolution of the electronic books (e.g. eBooks) - and the appliance that allow you to use and read them - is giving us the feeling that this is the last we are seeing from the printed book (e.g. pBook), and yet, I’m submitting this seminar in a printed form and not in its digital original form.

So, are we going to live in a bookless society?  

Literature review

Let us start with the problem that bothered Vannevar Bush

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. (Bush, 1945, pp. 2)

If the amount of information was a problem in the 1940’s, this days we are talking about a whole new problem.  According to “how much information 2003” executive summary in the year 2002 the stored new information was about five exabytes (10¹⁸ bytes). They refer to information that was stored in physical media: print, film, magnetic and optical. To assert the amount of information they state

How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections (Lyman &Varian, 2003, p. 1)

So if we look again at the problem that Bush (1945) has raised, we can see that not only we didn’t solved it we are now facing a much bigger amount of information and still have no real means to master it. “The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Galaxy” appliance might be a good solution, which lead us to the issue of “eBook”.  What is the definition of an eBook?

According to Connaway (Connaway, 2003)  “eBook is based both on emulating the basic characteristics of traditional books in an electronic format, as well as leveraging internet technology to make an eBook easy and efficient to use” (Connaway, 2003, p. 14) . Lynch (2001) define the eBook as “a large structured collection of bits that can be transported on CD-ROM or other storage media or delivered over a network connection, and which is designed to be viewed on some combination of hardware and software ranging from dumb terminals to web browsers on personal computers to the new book reading appliances” (Lynch, 2001, p. 5).

Pro and Cons of eBooks

Connaway (2003) present the opportunities and advantages that will come to the library by using eBook.

·        Easy access to content

·        On-demand availability

·        Prevention from being lost, stolen or damaged

·        Ability to link to other resources including dictionaries and thesauri

·        Access from anywhere (Connaway, 2003, p. 14)

Is it really that simple? If we ignore for a moment from the displaying problem, which will be discussed later, the eBook solution give us the access to all the knowledge that we couldn’t access, (as you may have noticed, access is the operative word here). By using the eBook a student can click on a reference and read the original source of the citation, is it really what’s going to happen? We will see. But why are we talking only on one book? Lynch (2001) aspiration for the eBooks are larger than this. Not just one or even twenty books, one entire library will resides on or in the eBook. “Think of portable personal digital libraries, not portable electronic books, as the future of these appliances” (Lynch, 20001, p.7 ).  What Lynch (2001) suggesting is in a whole new level. Instead of buying one or even fifty books you buy a subscription service to the best supplier of reference library in the field you are interested in. This service will update your subscription with the news of your field and the new important publications.

So if the eBook is such a great thing why we don’t see more of it?

The eBook that we have now is a “literal translation” of printed book. The only difference between a printed book and an electronic book is the method of display. And this is the problem. “Current computer display technologies do not offer a pleasant environment for reading very long texts”. (Lych, 2001, p. 8) . Lin and Hubbard (2000) raised another problem, “without the hardware, Internet connection, or battery power required by an eBook reader, electronic documents are useless” (Lin & Hubbard, 2000, p. 5).

There are a lot of legal issues that arise with the development of the electronic book, which for me, may be the real problems of the evolution form the print to the screen. Projects like the Gutenberg project (www.gutenberg.org) or the Ben-Yehuda projects (www.benyehuda.org) are uploading old books that the copyrights on them have expired.  What about new books or books that were printed after 1920?  Let’s look on a serial of questions that concern the legal rights of the readers of these books (Lynch, 2000, p. 37):

·        Can you loan or give an e-book (or access to a digital book) to someone else as you can a physical book? […]What other constraints on usage (for example, printing) exist?

·        Do you own objects or access? If your library of eBooks is destroyed or stolen, can you replace it without purchasing the content again simply by providing a proof of license or purchase?

·         From whom are you really obtaining content?[…] Who has to stay in business in order to ensure your continued ability to use that content? What happens if the source of your content goes out of business?

·        Can you copy an eBook for private, personal use? If you own tow readers can you move a digital book from one to the other without having to purchase it again?

·        Do you have the right and the ability to reformat an eBook or a digital book in response to changes in standards or technologies or do you need to repurchase it? What happens when you upgrade or replace your eBook reader with another one? What happens when you replace the PC that might house your “library”? What happens if you replace one brand of eBook reader with another?

·        What are the policies of the content provider with regard to your privacy and the usage monitoring? What limitations does your book reader technology place on the ability of a content supplier to collect usage data?

All these questions are extremely important in light of what happened to the music and movie industry because of the file sharing systems like the original Napster, Emule, Kaza, Bittorrent.

According to Bar-Ilan (1998) there are two kinds of books, the “live” book and the “dead” book. The dead book is a book that its content will not be changed in the future.  The live book is a book that its content is changing dynamically, like reference books. Bar Ilan see the eBook as the solution to the problem of updating the criteria and reprint it. However, Lynch (2001) thinks that once the reference books will be updated online the researchers will lose a great tool. They will lose the ability to look at an encyclopedia form a specific time and learn about the human knowledge of this time, because the encyclopedia will always be updated. So once again where one see a solution the other see problem. 

There are other questions that should be addressed, like in what field will the eBook rule and in what field there will still be a place for the printed book.  In her research, Badihi (2004) has found that “the e-book has a future, especially within an academic framework.” (Badihi, 2004, p. B) but it will be along side with the printed book. Gall (2005) think that the discussion about the future of the printed book should revolved around the question of the materials that should be left in the printed format and the materials that would be useful in e-book format. 

Discussion

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