But I doubt that many of the kids starting school now will build up the same kind of personal reference system around print books, any more than most children of the 1920s bothered to learn how to hitch up a team properly. To them, print books will seem ponderous and slow--what we find serene and undistracting, they will find as annoying as making your own Jello out of calve's feet and eggshells. They will have their own mental information maps that revolve around search and keywords, not physical proximity.
Alan Jacobs gets at some of what is wrong with this mentality, namely that for academic work or pedagogy there is simply no competition between paper and electronic books. And why is that? Because the search function is a labor-saving device for the least labor-intensive part of academic work. McArdle's approach only makes sense for books 1. that you're only reading for information and 2. that you're only planning to read once. Neither of these conditions obtain for academics, and the second skews our reading patterns in important ways:
First: the main book I work on, Hugo Grotius' De jure belli ac pacis, is about 800-1000 pages. I've read it through a few times. This means that I know the general outline of the entire work, including the topics covered in each chapter. If someone makes an offhand reference to something they read about Grotius, I know where the reference comes from. The ability to search quickly is useless to me because my 'mental information map' already contains the relevant information.
Second: searching is next to completely useless if you're attempting to build an argument about a text. The presence or absence of a particular word doesn't tell you anything about a text. You would need to search for a word, it's synonyms and cognates at a minimum, to say nothing of those situations in which a term is gestured towards but never specifically mentioned. At that point, one is better off just reading the text.
Third: what applies for research applies even more to teaching. Woe betide the political theory instructor who doesn't know where a word, concept, or theory plays out in the Republic, or The Prince, or the Second Treatise. One usually teaches the same courses, and reads and re-reads the same texts; neither searching nor keywords are going to be useful.
Add to these considerations the problems with OCR and scanned texts; the importance of having particular translations; works where notation is done by line number rather than page, chapter or section; and the general unavailability/extreme cost of the best editions of important works, and you have an approximate idea why the paper codex will continue to be the academic format of choice.
3 comments:
This is very interesting - I've been thinking about the paper v. ebook debate (if you can call it that) for a while, and this is probably the only cogent set of points I've heard so far about it. One thing I'm particularly interested in, though, is whether print newspapers still have value, other than the fact that they bring in money and allow newspapers to continue existing (which is no small matter, of course, but still). I know this isn't what's on your mind, per se, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that?
The value is mostly, I think, in the sort of reading it permits. The physical layout of a newspaper page, and the tendency to finish stories on a different page then they begin, leads to more casual reading. Online is a superior model if you are looking for a story about a particular topic--you will find newer, more specific information about what's going on in Missouri, or Japan, or Libya. Print is superior if you want to know about the news generally--once you've already bought the paper and read one story, you might as well scan the page or the section to see if anything else is of interest.
Not very original thoughts, but it's what I have.
That makes sense, actually - newspapers are for browsing, so you might read something you weren't looking for and expand the scope of your knowledge. I like that; it makes more sense than "paper is just better."
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