I started out not much liking this article about how print books are really hypertext. (Partly it’s the dropdown menus. Man, I hate those things. More on that in another post sometime; I think I finally know why I hate them.)
Take this, for instance:
A book as a technological artifact is highly interactive and non- linear. Grab one and you can flop it open in the middle, skip around, and thumb through its pages forwards or backwards.
Yeah, sure. It’s a matter of affordances, though. It’s dead easier to activate a See also: link than to flip through a book. It just is. E-texts have vastly better targeted skippability than print. So, like it or not, it’s fair to call print more linear than e-text.
I note in response to their point about the non-linearity of reference books that reference books have been the first genre to roar onto the e-scene and establish a major presence. Do I think easy skippability has a lot to do with that? I do indeed.
The article does get better, however:
Since printed text has not changed, users of on-line text face an annoying situation. To work with text on-line, they must either import the old conventions of print awkwardly into the new medium or they must struggle with new conventions of hypertext that are too often unpredictable and ineffective. Hypertext conventions simply do not intersect well with print conventions. The information that can lead a reader to a passage in print may not help get her to the same passage on-line, even if it exists in that form. Likewise, encountering a text on-line often leaves the reader with scant clues about how to find it in print. We need to change this situation.
Right on. I’m all about the changing of this situation, personally. Hop to that paragraph and read the rest of the paper, and you come across one of my most heartfelt howls: the total randomness of print page numbers, and the need for an electronic-citation system.
I think, in fact, I shall adopt their phrase for this: “device-independent referencing.” I don’t usually think about things this way, because I deal with texts on the production end, long before they hit reader gadgetry, but the phrase gets the idea across to people who aren’t production geeks like me.
Anyway, article worth reading. Give it a look.
