Margaret Atwood-Three Reasons to Keep Physical Books

[Peasant]

It's good to get away from monitor glare and electronics now and again. I barely read any books though, I seem to have trouble concentrating now. D:

[Aemma]

Oh you're all such geeks!

Now we need to see Groenewolf's book collection...but I'm really dying to see Lodd's book collection, truth be told.

[Stygian Cellarius]

(edit: I also fixed my last post, with the close-up of my book collection, to ultra-resolution. You can see the title of every book now)

[Psychonaut]

Good Gods, you've got that Rucker book! I can't tell you how many times I've read that. I was actually just flipping through it today jotting down some notes on the four-dimensionalist theory of time that he so wonderfully discusses using the spacetime worm model.

[Groenewolf]

Oh you're all such geeks!

Now we need to see Groenewolf's book collection...

You mean up close? You could just go to my account at Libarything.

[Aemma]

You mean up close? You could just go to my account at Libarything.

There's such a thing called Librarything??

But nahh. I meant post a pic here of that book collection of yours!

[Groenewolf]

There's such a thing called Librarything??

http://www.librarything.com/

But nahh. I meant post a pic here of that book collection of yours!

All the pictures I have of them have me in front of them. And I not gonna post them in the public section.

[Yona]

Development of reading technologies

Chartier (1995) points to several historical developments pivotal for reading practices and experiences. An early and extremely important development was the implementation of the codex in the second and third centuries. Gradually replacing the scroll, which required both hands in a continuous form of reading, codices, with easy accessible pages, gave new and effective ways of organising and navigating text. However, the early reading of heavy codices and densely written parchment pages (with many abbreviations and no word spacing) required the use of the whole body, including the voice (as the text had to read aloud to be comprehensible). Then, during the Middle Ages, the introduction of smaller books and new text features, such as word spacing, punctuation and paragraphs, gradually made books more easily portable and reading physically less demanding (Saenger, 1997). According to Chartier (1995), these medieval developments in text materiality led to a very consequential shift from oral reading, indispensable for comprehension, to a process of reading that could be visual, silent and fast; the modern way of fluent reading. As a further development, the printing press gave new ways of reproducing text, making books ever more legible — and less expensive, thus accelerating the spread of literacy.

In the historical process, Chartier (1995) emphasises the so–called reading revolution that took place in Germany, Britain and North America in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a change also commented on by Robert Darnton. In his essay “First steps towards a history of reading,” Darnton (1990) refers to the book historians Rolf Engelsing and David Hall who independently describe changes in reading habits on either side of the Atlantic. From the Middle Ages until sometime after 1750 people read “intensively”, according to Engelsing. Most households kept only a few books; the Bible, an almanac and a prayer book, which members of the family read over and over again, usually aloud and often in groups. But by 1800 many people were reading individually and “extensively,” lending and buying all kinds of material, especially novels, periodicals and newspapers, reading it once and then racing on to the next item (Darnton, 1990). According to Ross, et al. (2006), Engelsing’s account created a binary conceptual opposition that has lasted to this day: between deep reading and shallow reading or between active engagement with text and passive consumption of text.

Robert Darnton (1990), in his theoretical outline of a history of reading, underscores the significance of text materiality for reading practices, and Alberto Manguel’s (1996) copious A history of reading is very much a description of codices, printed books and other technologies related to reading. In the field of material studies, Mary and Richard Rouse (1991) and Paul Saenger (1997) have exposed how the advancement of the codex to an easily navigable book was a very long process indeed, and one that only accelerated in the thirteenth century when manuscripts were provided with pagination, indices and concordances, features that were transferred into printed books. For Peter Stallybrass (2002), the art of printing was primarily a culmination of this development of the navigable book. In printed books, legibility and accessibility were further improved by standardised fonts and more systematic provision of titles, chapters, tables of contents and page numbering — material features that assisted fingers and eyes in browsing and navigation. In his analysis, Stallybrass demonstrated that printed Bibles in sixteenth century England were designed to support discontinuous reading, with indices and concordance lists supporting Protestant interpretations of the scriptures. Through studies of contemporary book annotations and diaries, Stallybrass documented that the Bible was in fact read discontinuously. That reading at a later stage, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to be dominated by silent and continuous reading, especially of novels, can, according to Stallybrass, be seen as a return to an earlier form of reading: “To imagine continuous reading as the norm in reading a book is radically reactionary: it is to read the book as if it was a scroll.” [2]

In his analysis of digitisation, Stallybrass (2002) emphasises the continuation and amplification of codex features in the computer and on the Web. In digital environments many typographical features are the same as before, access to pages is simple, bookmarking is easy, and advanced search functions make it possible for readers to follow up on themes in a discontinuous reading process, jumping from page to page and from site to site. However, while Stallybrass accentuates continuity, Chartier (1995; 1997) focuses on the break, claiming that the new “immaterial” materiality of digital text inevitably requires new ways of reading.

From: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap...view/2762/2504

[Yona]

I will never give up physical books. I even print out and bind online articles that I find useful.

Yeah... and are you ever get lost in all those electronic texts? great amount of information distracts me at times. (or may be it's personal))?

[RenaRyuguu]

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