Have you ever had the unpleasant task to have to "discard" books? Ouch, it's painful. I find it feels rather sacrilegious. Won't somebody like to read this? All that work, thrown away, just because it's old? I'm sad. Oh well, we've got to make room for the new ones. Close your eyes, toss it in. Thump! Oh no, I know it's not a dead animal or anything, even though it seems sometimes as if books are becoming an endangered species on the brink of extinction. What are they going to do with these books, burn them in a huge conflagration ritual burning of books or something?.... I don't want to be there.
Books must be kept in a cool, dry place lest they become moldy. I'm going to have to talk to my parents about this. Even if they are moldy, they are still our friends. Paper lasts for centuries, but electronic media is only good for around 10 years before it's format must be converted, at our expense. I'd like to know if during earlier times of print remediation were the cost to the consumer equal to the current expense incurred for print format translation? Something to think about in this ever changing consumer trend to get the latest and greatest best new technology for our important files. If I had a lot of electronic media, I would be way more concerned but fortunately I don't. Let's look at the changes in the last 10 years: from floppy disc to CD, to DVD. I guess the next new thing is Blue Ray or something? What an expense! It may cost $2-3000 to retrieve work and files that are only 10 years old! What a racket!
As Bolter (2001) describes in Writing Space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print, "although print remains indispensable it no longer seems indispensable." That's where we are getting into trouble folks and it's costing us a bundle!
Here's another thing that Bolter brought up, "some educators imagine a classroom in which books are replaced by virtual environments." Replace the books, well, not anytime soon, I would think, especially in these economic downturn times. I doubt we are really going to see funding allocated for educational pursuits like these. Maybe in a couple of decades or so, but certainly not in large scale in my teaching lifetime. Maybe in Japan they already have these? I'll bet they do. In the mean time, I'll take care of my books. I have to tell you something, when there is talk about replacing books, I get a little nervous. Part of my familiar professional landscape. Do I have to ask the next question? I think you know what I'm talking about.......I guess I might like working from the comfort of my home. I will say, it would certainly take away all the fuss about snowdays. I hear some schools are already setting up skyping for snowdays. Why not just snow days, why don't we just skype away at the k-3 level? All right , all right, you get my drift. I'd better stop, I'm sounding Andy Rooneyish.
Well here's where I'm at, the way Bolter described it: " In this the late age of print, writers and readers still often conceive of a text as located in the space of a printed book, and they conceive of the electronic writing space as a re-fashioning of the older space of print."
Over the past two years, I have aggressively downsized my home library, relieving myself of many books that came from my father's library (anyone want thirty-seven volumes of Thackeray?). Unfortunately, as they said of diamonds in Casablanca, "books are a drug on the market," i.e., who wants 'em. No one. I still have Thackeray not because I think I can make any money on it, but just want to see it go to a good home. It seems the last resort is the Library book sale. As I read you post, it makes me think that we focus on the book, but it's the experience--the atmosphere--of reading that we really want. Where do we find that in the digital age?
ReplyDeleteI am also slowly converting my collection of vinyl to MP3, and I swear I can tell the difference in the richness of the sound...And, no I haven't gotten rid of the records even after the conversion (teirs not mine!).