“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
We’ve found a new device which we think will transform the way information is delivered.
- It never crashes.
- It has the simplest cross cultural interface that works.
- It doesn’t need a help manual or instructions.
- It requires no power supply.
- It’s cheap to make.
- It’s highly portable.
- You can use it pretty much anywhere without any sort of connection.
- If treated well it will last for generations; no matter what other technology arises it will always be usable.
We love virtual content as you know but we also love books. We encourage people in the team to contribute to our office library – if you want to borrow a book, then you have to add a book. Share and share alike.
Blogs, wikis and websites are all very well but a book gives a subject time and space to breathe. I will rapaciously tear through a 400 page book but would balk at the idea of having to read the same 400 pages online or on a mobile device. For now.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx (1890 – 1977)
3 comments
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April 13, 2008 at 11:26 am
heinemannvideo
Good post. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the whole e-book phenomenon (Amazon’s Kindle seems to have finally cracked the screen resolution issue). Maybe one day we’ll all be reading lightweight digital screens like those on Star Trek.
But somehow, I doubt it.
For me, the difference with a ‘real’ book is that it lights up far more senses than you realise. First of all there’s the smell (the chemical-inky smell of new books, the arcane mildew of old books). Then there’s the weight – Amazon proudly claims their Kindle is lighter than an average paperback. Well, you know what, I quite like the heft of a decent paperback or the solidity of a hardback tome. You’ve also got the sounds – a riffle of pages when you’re looking for something quickly, or the tense sussurance as you turn the final page.
There’s also something slightly imperfect (or better yet – personal) about a book. The odd dog-ear, a creased spine, edgeworn, sunned, thumbed, annotated… No matter how many times you read an e-book it will look exactly the same. And you’ll never get one second-hand with someone else’s fading imprint on it.
A book is like a great meal – a feast for the senses. Different every time, but the better for it. An e-book is like a cookery programme – you can watch it as many times as you like, but you can’t taste the food.
Anyway, I’m off now to read my foxed, limp-sewn chapbook with the deckle edges.
April 24, 2008 at 8:45 am
David Hicks
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, of general tech-blogging fame, have just started a new website called StackOverflow (see blog.stackoverflow.com). It aims to be a programmer’s technical resource. The comment that particularly caught my attention in their first podcast was that the bottom has pretty much dropped out of the programming textbook market. No programmers buy textbooks these days, they start what they want to do and “page fault on knowledge” as they go along – when they get stuck they type a query in to Google and wind up at (hopefully) some well-written documentation, or (more likely) at some discussion board where someone’s come across this problem before.
Is this a good way to teach children to go about things? Sure, novels or other books with narrative structure are always going to be in demand (following on from the comment above, even in Star Trek people still read good old-fashioned books), but is the textbook’s time limited?
April 24, 2008 at 11:34 am
Mr B
Well, I am not a programmer so I’ll nudge one of ours to read your comment! Certainly all our coders have got at least half a dozen technical books on their desks at all times. I do wonder if they read them or keep them there as “comfort blankets” as the Internet is right there at their fingertips.
Outside those very domain specific tomes the books we tend to favour are
mostly “layman science” books, or pop psychology and commercial stuff such as “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. Anything that inspires or encourages us to think different.
We also have a guilty pleasure for graphic novels (but hey what do you expect?).
Whether the Spolsky method above is a good way to learn may not be our choice; it’s now out of our control I think. People may continue to read and horde books simply for pleasure (see Heinemannvideos post above) but perhaps textbooks themselves are now being proved obsolete when children need to learn core skills.
Textbooks aren’t discursive or extendable or even part of a conversation that leads the reader into enquiry. The web can do all this.
The internet can deliver you a million percent more information than a text book.
But here’s the thing: the skills that need to be taught are how to properly filter, sort and trust what’s being said. To be fair, a textbook has a kind of built in trust factor. It’s Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica again.
Those skills are vital in the 21st century. And the question should be asked: are those skills specifically being taught as part of the curriculum? I doubt it.
“Elizabeth Haylett, secretary of the society’s educational writers group, said: “The textbooks that are being used are being reduced to answer books for the exams. There’s no opportunity for children to read beyond the test. They are learning parrot-fashion.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/dec/01/schools.education