Book People Archive

Re: MP3's vs eBooks

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Kay Douglas wrote:

> 
> It will change (and has changed) not just the amount I read and what I read,
> but *how* I read.  Since coming belatedly online some four year ago, I've
> noticed that my curiosity has mushroomed, perhaps at the expense of my
> attention span.  I look things up online that are readily available to me on
> my bookshelves.  Case in point:  I'm sitting four or five feet from three
> world atlases, but when I wanted to find the location of a town in Turkey, I
> typed "Bodrum + map" into the Google search engine and had what I wanted
> quicker than it would have taken me to locate the information in an atlas.

I find myself in the same situation with a whole houseful of books,
and a library less than 1,000 feet down my street.

> 
> Now here comes the "how" part.  From the map, I skipped to about four other
> websites that contained information about not only Bodrum, but other things:
> Turkish art, Turkish resorts, the Aegean Sea...it was like being pulled in
> several directions at once.

That's what learning should be like, it should NOT be "straight and narrow."
[Think about Red Grange inventing "broken field running". . .hee hee!!!]

> 
> When I take a book off the shelf and read, it tends to be a much less
> fragmented process.  Perhaps this comes at the expense of my idle curiosity;
> I give one work or author my attention, and there is no siren singing
> tantalizingly a mere mouse click away.

Actually, I am one of those people who used to get down on the floor
with up to a dozen books doing just this same exact thing, only it was
SO difficult to keep the cars in my "train of thought" on the track,
that I was frequently derailed before I could absorb the whole perspective.

So _I_ find your DIemma to be MY lemma. . . .

[snip]


Thanks!

So nice to hear from you!


Michael S. Hart
<hart@[redacted]>
Project Gutenberg
"Ask Dr. Internet"
Executive Director
Internet User ~#100