| Alan Sondheim on 27 Sep 2000 04:59:09 -0000 |
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| Re: <nettime> books and cdroms |
There are a couple of other issues in my case. First, there are about 5000 pages of text, among other media, on the cdrom. That's about 20 books. Here, compactness, of course, has the edge. Second, what's vastly overlooked - search capabilities. You can search for anything within or across texts with a minimum amount of software. The grep tool in unix/linux allows multiple-files access, and any reader at all allows single-file access. I wanted at one point to find the refer- ences to Philoctetes in the Iliad or the Odysses - I located the texts at Guttenberg, and had the relevant passages in seconds. And, given the cross-referencing in my own work, search capability is valuable. Third, there is cross-media referencing as well. If the cdrom were just texts, that would be one thing - but it's texts, graphics, animations, videos, etc. - all related (at least in my own mind). A cdrom allows a reader/viewer/listener to jump from one mode to another, fairly seamless- ly. If this were a question of, say, a book of poetry, I'd agree. But the cdrom or dvd or whatever has real advantages - one can create, so to speak, worlds in depth, and allow searching and inhabiting fairly quickly. There's something exciting about this ability to skitter back and forth across directories (in my case) or hyperlinks (in other cases), stopping momentarily when something seems interesting, remaining for a while... Beyond that, an admittedly minor advantage - one can copy any of the material off the cdrom, rework it, mail it to someone else, vilify it, turn it into a screen-saver, etc. In other words, the cdrom is a fixed node within an information flux - whereas a book can at best be xeroxed. I personally love reading online at this point - I also use a Phenom pocket PC which currently has a number of Sutras on it, as well as John Gay's Beggar's Opera - all free on the Net. I can read this stuff on the subway, I don't have to waste any paper, and when I'm done, if I want, I can just delete, delete... Alan Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm CDROM of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write [email protected] # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]