If there’s such a thing as a friendly adversary, Walt Crawford is mine. I’ve told him privately and now I’ll say in public that even when I don’t agree with him, he makes me think hard about why I don’t, and I find that extremely valuable.
(He publishes the only ’zine-serial-webloggy thing in PDF that I actually read regularly. He’s that good. It’s not that I’m an anti-PDF zealot, though as we all know, I am; it’s that reading PDFs onscreen makes me growl and gives me headaches if I do it for too long, and I can’t afford to buy or store all the extra paper to print them. So I don’t read PDF ’zines. Except Cites and Insights.)
The latest issue of Cites and Insights (’ware 275K PDF) contains a brief mention of me, surprisingly unconnected to a quite long and impressive slagging of ebooks (with, it must be said, some grudging admissions of their use in certain areas; Walt Crawford’s no blind dogmatist).
It’s probably easier to point everyone to CavLec’s ebooks category archives than to explain again how I stand betwixt-and-between the worlds of print and electronic text. Suffice to say that anyone with the gall to imply (as Crawford never has, be it said) that I don’t understand or respect the print book is cruising for a knuckle sandwich.
(One of my SLIS professors Who Will Remain Nameless actually marked a paper of mine down for employing the ordinary print-typographic convention of not indenting the paragraph immediately following a heading. I think it fair to say I understand print better than that professor does!)
Suffice to say that despite my experience with and love for print, I have cast my own lot with electronic text; I will gladly and eagerly spend my life making them, and making them better than they are now.
So I read Walt Crawford’s roundup with mixed feelings, and I expect I’ll be running off at the keyboard about it a considerable part of the upcoming week.
Starting off with the fish in barrels, then… I confess I don’t understand why Crawford recommends this little squib. I don’t quarrel with the point that e-texts are not print; I’ve been known to say myself that e-texters have a less-than-comprehensive notion of the fantastic complexity of print.
I do, however, have a bone to pick with the bizarre notion that we must cling desperately to print, practically in exclusion of e-text, because print has capabilities e-text doesn’t. Especially when the canonical example given is pop-up books.
Pop-up books?
I will admit to a certain jaundice; I didn’t like pop-up books as a kid, because there wasn’t enough text in ’em. Even so—the best this man can do to defend print is this edgiest of all conceivable edge cases? Extend that notion the tiniest bit, for heaven’s sake, and we are forced to turn up our noses at print books because they’re useless as gravestones! Those stonecarvers, they were really on to something…
Everything in its place, say I.
