Friday, April 24, 2009

Fast books: would you like a glass of wine with that?

I just found this exciting article about a new machine that prints books while you wait. Ok, look there should be a law that they can only ever use recycled paper. But - how cool it that? I just imagined a whole new world for the bookshop. Maybe the big chains will keep a front section display with all the lastest chick-lit, Ian Rankin, South American magic realism pastiche and Irish poverty porn novels. But in the back will be a couple of these beasties, with nice LED-touch screen displays, where you can surf through millions of books and - voila! your own copy. It would be an awesome way to get hold of journal articles, proper peer-reviewed research, and academic work, too. Gawd, a potential antidote to the endless circular arguments on the internet which relay he said/ she said nonsense without any real research or fact finding. Oh frabjous day. Imagine if you were studying in the outback and you had one of these babies and an internet connection in town? Imagine if you can get them into kids community centres in remote areas, for printing picture books or exercise books? What about in Kabul, Bagdhad, Nairobi? I guess the database must come from laborious digitisation of old issues.. this has been going on for some time now, I think the NSW state library is fairly heavily involved. A truly wonderful thing.

4 comments:

alison said...

Or if you have a Kindle, you can just down load the book and it'll never touch paper

BSharp said...

yeh true - put you need power to charge your kindle up, but once you have your own print out you can read by candle light... ? Oh I suppose if they have low voltage some solar panels would be ok for charging your kindle. Mind you the big printed in the centre of the village would need a fair bit of juice!

Just in terms of research work though, I struggle to do it all with electronic sources - something about papers that you can read, compare, and write on seem to work better. But maybe my brain is just hard wired to hard copy and a young 'un wouldn't have that problem.

alison said...

Oh me too - I can't edit on screen and I absorb things much better from paper. I've read somewhere that when reading on screen our eyes tend to move top to bottom rather than left-right. Hence there are so many websites where the text is laid out in a slim column in the centre.

BSharp said...

Apparently your eyes trace a kind of "F" pattern on a website - they scoot in from the Left hand margin, depending on how interesting the first couple of words are. So if you want to keep people on your page, rearrange sentences so the best word is at the front. Get rid of "thus" "therefore" "we can see that" lead ins... (free tip from shortcommunications for you there) : )