Formats: A Historical Perspective
Subtitle: A short trip through Wikipedia to investigate the many, many ways we have attempted to communicate with each other, from cave painting to ebooks.
see also: Form, content, copies, rights, & Plato
additional note: in my opinion, music predates spoken language; though sign language may predate both.
##
cave painting
voice & music
speech & language
the oral tradition
writing
musical notation
scriptoria
solfa/solfège
paper
modern musical notation
moveable type
illustration
printing press
typeface
rotary press
linotype
piano rolls
wax cylinders
offset printing
acetate
vinyl records
photo-typesetting
magnetic tape [let’s all try to forget about 8-track]
Analog to digital: word processing
Analog to digital: CDs
audio books
MP3
HTML & world wide web & web publication
ebooks
Anyone can say just about anything about the ebooks, and make it stick, and get retweets and link backs in the echo chamber because no one does their homework.
“Oooo: ebooks are new and flash and a Game Changer™! Books will never be the same again!”
[*pfsh*]. please.
I personally think of ebooks as more of an evolutionary, transitional format, as opposed to be a total game changer and its own Whole New Thing — particularly when ebooks are compared to web pages. [psst: ebooks are nothing but gimped, DRM crippled web pages]
Go back. Read a bit; Wikipedia has its own flaws and problems, but most of the articles linked above are pretty good. Let the History of Communication soak in; try to readjust your world view — Books are not [just] physical commodities to be bought and sold: books are one way, one of many ways, we transmit culture to future generations. Obviously, I both enjoy and support the free-market-supported system we currently have, where books are bought and sold and creators get compensated for their work — but this was not the earliest model and is not guaranteed — indeed, creator compensation isn’t even guaranteed in the free-market-supported model, though more folks get paid (& more reliably) today than at any time in the past. Yes, even with digital piracy:
The biggest fear should not be getting pirated, but in being unknown, or forgotten. Piracy has been with us since the beginning; in fact ‘piracy’ was once the only distribution model. [that’s one of the points I made in this post]
Before you tell me ebooks are the “answer” I insist you do some research, and be sure you’re asking the right questions.
