The Medium and the Message Written by Sam Vaknin
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There is no doubting that finally e-books will surpass print books as a medium and offer numerous options: hyperlinks within e-book and without it - to web content, reference works, etc., embedded instant shopping and ordering links, divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines, interaction with other e-books (using Bluetooth or another wireless standard), collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities, automatically or periodically updated content, ,multimedia capabilities, database, Favourites and History Maintenance (records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, plot related decisions and much more), automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities, full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities and more. The same textual content will be available in future in various media. Ostensibly, consumers should gravitate to feature-rich and much cheaper e-book. But they won't - because medium is as important as text message. It is not enough to own same content, or to gain access to same message. Ownership of right medium does count. Print books offer connectivity within an historical context (tradition). E-books are cold and impersonal, alienated and detached. The printed word offers permanence. Digital text is ephemeral (as anyone whose writings perished in recent dot.com bloodbath or Deja takeover by Google can attest). Printed volumes are a whole sensorium, a sensual experience - olfactory and tactile and visual. E-books are one dimensional in comparison. These are differences that cannot be overcome, not even with advent of digital "ink" on digital "paper". They will keep print book alive and publishers' revenues flowing. People buy printed matter not merely because of its content. If this were true e-books will have won day. Print books are a packaged experience, substance of life. People buy medium as often and as much as they buy message it encapsulates. It is impossible to compete with this mistique. Safe in this knowledge, publishers should let go and impose on e-books "encryption" and "protection" levels as rigorous as they do on their print books. The latter are here to stay alongside former. With proper pricing and a modicum of trust, e-books may even end up promoting old and trusted print versions.
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
| | An Ambarrassment of RichesWritten by Sam Vaknin
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Now imagine you are an online retailer, a syndicator or a reporter for an online news service and you are reading a review in "Publishers Weekly" about Communities of Commerce and you run across a link to related resources. And imagine you are in Buenos Aires, and in an online publication you encounter a link to "D-Lib Magazine", an electronic journal produced in Washington, D.C. which offers you locale-specific choices for downloading an article. The above examples demonstrate how multiple resolution can present you with a list of links from within an electronic document or page. The links beneath labels - URLs and email addresses - would all be stored in DOI System, and multiple resolution means any or all of those links can be displayed for you to select from in one menu. Any combination of links to related resources can be included in these menus. Capable of providing much richer experiences then single resolution to a URL, Multiple Resolution operates on premise that content, not its location, is identified. In other words, where content and related resources reside is secondary information. Multiple Resolution enables content owners and distributors to identify their intellectual property with bound collections of related resources at a hyperlink's point of departure, instead of requiring a user to leave page to go to a new location for further information. A content owner controls and manages all related resources in each of these menus and can determine which information is accessible to each business partner within supply chain. When an administrator changes any facet of this information, change is simultaneous on all internal networks and Internet. A DOI is a permanent identifier, analogous to a telephone number for life, so tomorrow and years from now a user can locate product and related resources wherever they may have been moved or archived to." The IDF provides a limited, text-only, online demonstration. When sweeping with cursor over a linked item, a pop-down menu of options is presented. These options are pre-defined and customized by content creators and owners. In first example above (book purchase options) DOI resolves to retail outlets (categorized by book formats), information about title and author, digital rights management information (permissions), and more. The DOI server generates this information in "real time", "on fly". But it is author, or (more often) publisher that choose information, its modes of presentation, selections, and marketing and sales data. The ingenuity is in fact that DOI server's files and records can be updated, replaced, or deleted. It does not affect resolution path - only content resolved to. Which brings us to e-publishing. Second part of Embarrassment of Riches - here: http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb17.html
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
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