kidattypewriter

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Sign I May Be Reading Blogs a Little Bit Too Much (#2)

I'm reading Chesterton's autobiography at the moment. Half an hour ago I decided to read a few more chapters.

"Hmm", I thought to myself. "I wonder how long it will take the book to boot up?"

(Also, sometimes, when I'm reading books, I get the urge to cut and paste sections of the text like I'm using a computer program)

5 comments:

Maria said...

This reminds me of the e-book idea - a fan or not? I don't know that I'd want to get one t replace my paper books. I'm rather fond of having my books in paper and cardboard. I admit that having them - if they were reasonably priced - could be good for some things - say; for the academic or student who might have to lug around huge texts otherwise (I'm thinking my old law texts) that would have been discarded the next year because of the release of more recent editions.

But for fun fiction, I think it'll be hard to convince me to tuck an ebook into my beach bag or backpack and browse it in a lazy hour or two ...

TimT said...

Hummm, I often prefer my books to come in old editions, and preserve the flaws and idiosyncracies of those old editions. (I have no real experience in law or maths or other subjects where it would be of some importance for texts to stay up to date like this.) I suspect publishers of e-books would usually yield to the temptation to instant-edit the publications of books they have on the web, so the text available online might change from day to day.

The e-books available at the moment on Gutenberg and other sites are pretty dud. You get eye-strain after a while, and they often take too long to download. But blogs are basically e-books or, at least, e-magazines, so they have their place.

Maria said...

I think my blog would be put in the category of:

The book that:

a) No commercial publisher is willing to publish
b) The author is too cheap/lazy to self-publish in paper form, or has an author who has an abonormal phobia of photocopiers and papercuts. (You choose)

Gnae-O-Mi said...

I know exactly what you mean...it's a symptom of over-use of computers. It got really bad for me when I began to play tetris in my dreams and absent-mindedly remind myself to restore saved game versions of my own life, so I could re-do anything that didn't turn out right the first time.

No, really, I actually caught myself thinking that in a moment of extreme tiredness.

Caz said...

I understand the cut & paste syndrome. I get very snarky if every little thing in a newspaper or magazine isn't online and I actually have to type something up.

How dare everything in the entire universe not be available to me in softcopy, hey?

Mind you, these days I often consider the absence of the backspace and delete keys in everyday life to be a design flaw in humans.

Gnae-O-Mi - yeah, it's kind of pathetic, but I understand, and have experienced similar dreams and idiocies. (Just not related to game playing.)

Email: timhtrain - at - yahoo.com.au

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