By Deane Barker | April 25, 2009 | No Comments How the E-Book
Will Change the Way We Read and Write: this entire article is an
interesting look into how e-books and Google’s digitization
efforts will change how we read. But this section stuck out at
me — in the digital world, the concept of “pages” breaks down.
One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new
world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing
digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early
1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of
describing the location of a page: the URL. But what’s the
equivalent for books? For centuries, we’ve had an explicit
system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers
and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new
digital world. The Kindle doesn’t even have page numbers — it
has an entirely new system called “locations” because the
pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose
to read. If you want to write a comment ab