[extropy-chat] Umberto Eco: In Defense of Vegetal Memory

[Emlyn O'regan]

> "It is true that today's e-books are not very convenient to
> use compared to paper books, but this will change soon with better
> technology. Today's scissors cut much better than last 
> century's scissors. A
> book remains a book regardless of the technology used to 
> produce and use it.
> See also this post of mine at Always On."
> 
> Convenience isn't the whole reason, though.  Sure, it makes 
> sense to replace a collection of flimsy paperbacks with an 
> e-book reader, but for those of us who like to pick up a 
> nice, hefty, leatherbound tome from time to time, the book 
> isn't going away.  There's something about holding a book in 
> your hands, feeling the paper, and reading the printed word 
> that even a good e-book reader can't quite make up for.  It's 
> like the difference between having fast food and going to a 
> five-star restaurant... sure, the former is *sufficient* 
> nourishment, but if it's an experience you want, you're going 
> to choose the latter.
> 
> Not only that, e-book readers and formats are going to have 
> to advance considerably before they can reach the utility of 
> a hardbound book.  For instance, I'm a so-called "pen and 
> paper" roleplaying gamer.  While I have many game manuals in 
> PDF format, and I use a laptop to run my games and write my 
> notes, I'd much rather use a hardbound book than a PDF when 
> preparing for the game, precisely because I can flip through 
> the book to the pages I need and access the data much more 
> quickly, ironically enough, than my computer can.  I'm sure 
> that many engineers and technicians would say the same of 
> their manuals- paper is still a convenience.  It's likely 
> that this will change in time, but the first attempts at 
> creating "paperless" offices and plants have largely been failures.
> 
> -Nicq MacDonald

I don't think we'll ever go paperless, but I think paper will change. Here's
why:

We love paper. It's dumb, it's unsearchable, it's static (unless you use
pencil and eraser), it's not hyper-linkable. But it's excellent, it
absolutely kicks butt all over computer screens. Why is that?

Well, it's thin and light and easy to read. You can spit a printed document
out of a printer in short order, and go read it down at the cafe, or in your
lounge room, or in the tub. You can make notes on it, you can highlight it.
You can stick little tags on pages you want to bookmark, or you can fold the
corner over, or whatever. And you can have lots and lots of it. You can
spread a document out on the floor around you if you like, and see it all at
once.

Computer screens, on the other hand, are quite crappy as a substitute.
Mostly they are bulky, embedded in a device that is giant and cumbersome
(compared to paper!), and *there is only one of them*. Yes, for any given
device it is more than likely that there is only one screen, of limited
area, for you to read from. Compared to that, a handful of letter or A4
sized paper sheets is luxury!

Hang on a minute Emlyn, you say. Aren't you a big technophile, supporting
uploading and nanotech and all the good stuff? What's all this press for
dead trees?

Well, the problem is that the things they do well, they do very very well.
Paper is simply stupendously superiour to an electronic display, for all the
reasons I've given above.

But paper is a broad term I think. Maybe better to say lightweight, cheap,
ultrathin, self contained display, something like that?

I think we need better paper. We need to retain all the current qualities,
as I've said above, but we need more. We need it to also act at least a bit
like a computer display. Particularly, we need to fix the one real
limitation of paper, which is its lack of integration with our information
systems. So, it needs at a minimum to be reconfigurable (so you can download
a page into it from a machine). It would also be *really good* to be able to
scrawl on it, and be able to load that back into the machine. Not having
this second quality would compromise one of paper's important features.

I envisage a *successful* e-book reader as looking like a book. It'd have a
hard cover, modifiable, a wireless NIC, and a bunch of pages inside, like a
book. It'd be like an mp3 player, but for books, so you pick the book you
want from an interactive display (maybe inside the front cover) from a list
of books stored in the device, and the cover and pages would update
themselves appropriately. Also, you probably want a list of downloadable
titles, and maybe a full web browser for maximum flexibility in finding new
books. As to redrawing, there is some squirm room here; it could take 5
minutes for the pages to redraw themselves if necessary, as long as they
were fixed afterwards. Then, you'd have a book! Just read away. Hopefully
you can make notes on the pages (with some kind of special pen), and add
bookmarks (which probably end up listed on the inside cover; you'd select
one and the page edge would change colour to show you where to turn to).
What else could you put inside the front cover? A search facility! Surely.
It might just give you a list of pages to turn to for your search item, and
when you go there, the words are highlighted.

If the book didn't have enough pages, that'd be ok; it probably needs a few,
but not necessarily hundreds. It would be a big advantage if the whole
document was displayed at once, especially if redraw was slow, but it's not
strictly necessary. If there aren't enough pages, you just need to be able
to load a subset of the book at any one time, and switch subsets easily.

A device like that would have me ready to ditch paper books for good.

Single sheet smart paper would be awesome too. Instead of needing a printer,
you'd just plug it into some device that could download/upload content, and
modify it. You could distribute hardcopy documents that way if you wanted
to, and the recipient would be able to, with the right equipment, have
access to the full electronic version. Maybe the paper itself would even be
really interactive, so you could touch a special menu spot, and you'd get
all these options for interacting with the document. Cool!

If it was cheap and dynamic enough, it'd replace displays altogether. I
think coding on really dynamic sheets of paper would be awesome. You could
lay different bits of it out around you, and scribble out changes by hand.

Anyway, enough blathering. Electronic books will eventually kill of static
books, but we'll need smart paper before that happens. And then, no one will
miss the old books, because we wont be replacing them with something shitty,
we'll be replacing them with something just like they were, but better.

Personally, I'd love to get a smart display "tatoo", possibly all over,
hopefully with touch-screen type functionality.

Emlyn