“David, what about “the medium is the message?” As I say, I expect we will have massive amounts of usable e-books some day, maybe even soon, but the experience of reading a paper book and that of reading an e-book won’t necessarily be equivalent.”

While I fully agree with that, I am less convinced by the discussion about “container” and “story”:
Jean-Michel Salaün, commenting (in French) about Paul Duguid’s article reminds us that documents could (should?) be considered as having three dimensions:

“* Anthropologique : Forme (Document = Support + Inscription)
* Intellectuelle : Texte (Document = Code + représentation)
* Sociale : Médium (Document = Mémoire + transaction)”

(my translation)
Anthopological : Form (Document = Format + Inscription)
Intellectual : Text (Document = Code + representation)
Social : Medium (Document = Memory + transaction)

In order to render the original (book) document, the digitization process should consider the three different aspects, which goes — most of the time — further than the mere distinction between “container” and “story”.

the fact that google can’t seem to get it right doesn’t mean it’s _hard_.

duguid (whose earlier article i admired) was very slipshod with this one.

he points to blurry scans. and they’re entirely unforgiveable, of course. but does anyone here really think it’s _difficult_ to get nonblurry scans?

likewise, duguid discovers google has lost track of the volume numbers. but does anyone believe that noting volume numbers is inherently hard?

or take the fact that google confused the list of illustrations in “shandy” as a table of contents. was this because it’s _hard_ to tell ‘em apart? no, it’s because there was no table of contents, so it found the closest thing.

***

why is google making such stupid mistakes? probably because they hire people at minimum wage for a job that requires very close concentration. and — even more importantly — because their quality control _sucks_…

but to pretend this job is _difficult_ is laughable, in the extreme.

***

dorothea’s post is quoted here:
> We have to sweat over math, art, indexes, tables, links,
> complex layouts, production workflows, metadata,
> non-Roman alphabets, digital preservation issues,
> and all that fun stuff.

math = graphics (or latex, if you’re nasty).
art = graphics.
indexes = indexes, hotlinked please.
tables = tables.
links = links.
complex layouts = oh, poor dear, yes, that layout _is_ complex. sheesh!
production workflows = gobbledygook.
metadata = shmetadata.
non-roman alphabets = unicode.
digital preservation issues = mirror stuff to new formats constantly.
all that fun stuff = make up your mind; is it hard or is it fun?

none of this is hard. i repeat, _none_ of it.

the vast majority of books can be digitized in a straightforward manner.

dorothea would have you think that i believe this because i’m “stupid or clueless” and have no experience digitizing books. but she declined to identify me, so you couldn’t check up on her little hatchet-job.

-bowerbird

And, often, we do speak loosely of a book as the content.

If we want to FRBR-ize the discussion then in my stricter definition it is nonsensical to talk about a book as any FRBR entity. A book as container would be part of the thing being described as a manifestation (well, not really, but I’ll leave this philosophical issue aside) and certainly part of the item (if it is a book) being described.

In the loose sense of speaking, we could say that a book is the item. But in this case, and actually especially (hmm?), in this case the book is only the container. The work (the story) has already been cataloged at the work/expression level.

Yes! In fact, in FRBR there isn’t a single thing about the story that is part of the item. It is only individual carrier info–bar code, provenance, condition of the item, etc. Manifestation is pretty much the same.

E.g., see the RDA-FRBR mappings:
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/docs/5rda-frbrmapping.pdf

So, David, if you were only talking about the story all along then, on one hand I apologize for butting in. But on the other, I could not tell exactly what you meant because of the collapse of a distinction that I felt important (in many cases; again, not all).

David, I fully agree with you (and Iris and others) that, except in the ways Walt suggests matter, container should not matter.

Recorded story is recorded story, and reading is reading.

Certainly there are things that can be teased apart between reading a quality print item versus reading from a screen, and reading some kinds of materials may be better than others…. I guess I just feel these differences reside at a finer grain, perhaps, and thus won’t need to be trotted out as often.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation all; in all the various places we have spread it.

Sorry to go off topic a little… I now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.

I think what I’m trying to get at is this: I see some public libraries build whole websites and huge programs around paper books, and actually get sorta mad when presented with the possibility that people at some future point in time might not equate paper and books (or texts).

I even see librarians that don’t understand that the concept of “reading” means much more than holding a paper book in one’s hands.

So I’m just trying to explain that I think there’s a huge difference between where you are reading the words (on a page, on a screen, etc) and the words themselves.

I think “denigrate” came from a comment or post Steve made, and I commented on that and used his comment on my words as a starting point… and this is probably where conversations in comment boxes start to break down. Kind of like how USENET conversations got lopsided pretty fast :-)

To wit, “I don’t denigrate books. I denigrate the container,”

I’ll avoid the issue of the definition of “book” (which, I submit, is ambiguous, but there are much better minds in this collective and I’m learning from the various perspectives) and just wonder why there’s any point in “denigrating the container.”

I mean, unless (David) you really are saying “digital is always better,” then why denigrate? If a different container works better for some people for some uses, fine–point out the virtues of that container. But unless there’s something actually defective about a bound collection of printed pages as a way to read long linear text–and the, um, overwhelming popularity of the Rocket Ebook and various others (including Sony’s device) seem to suggest that most people aren’t anxiously looking for a replacement–then denigrating physical books just seems silly.

I suppose this comment belongs on DLK’s blog…but the emphasis on those two sentences in this post broke through my poor on-screen retention. Thanks.

FRBR-ized librarians might prefer to say that David is talking about a “work” or “expression” while Mark is talking about the “manifestation” or “item.” (I’m not a FRBR expert, though. The distinction between “work” and “expression” seems very slippery to me.)

But it’s all the same story.

Does that clarify my comment any?