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fail
on those axes. Ebooks don’t beat paper books for sophisticated
typography, they can’t match them for quality of paper or the
smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend
in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand
paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from
your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a
character’s name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy
passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
shorter one)] Artists are always disappointed by their audience’s
attention spans. Go back far enough and you’ll find cuneiform
etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its
insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not
like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot
easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for
boring them. We’d get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying
about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of
entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a
product of the information age, but check this out:
[Nietzsche quote]
> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an
art
in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
In other words, if my book is too boring, it’s because you’re not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
this quote isn’t from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
with attribution] It’s from the preface to Nietzsche’s
On the Gene-
alogy of Morality,
published in
1887
.
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