So Many Books Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid

Author:Gabriel Zaid [Zaid, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Books can be skimmed. In this sense, only paintings are superior to books.

A film or television show, although it is visual, cannot be taken in at a glance, like a painting. Nor can it be skimmed. It is possible to lose concentration and be distracted, but not to move ahead to see what comes next, flip backward to understand something better, or pause for a moment to think.

Programs recorded on videocassettes or DVDs do allow the viewer to scroll back and forth, but exploring them isn’t easy. Not even the fastest computer is able to give the sense of the whole that a quick scan of a book gives, and with the same ease. One becomes impatient exploring the files of a computer; it isn’t easy to get a quick idea of the content.

It is very difficult to get a rapid sense of a temporal sequence (even if it is visual) that must pass through a machine. In order to follow what comes out of a player piano, record player, tape player, film projector, radio, television, videocassette player, computer, telephone, or fax, you must pay close attention to the sequence of images or sounds. To search for something, it is necessary to proceed blindly, stubbornly, clumsily, without being able to see any distance ahead.

It is easier to find things in books—which is ironic, after Marshall McLuhan’s declaration of the obsolescence of “linear writing.” Nothing requires more “linear reading” than television, tapes, and records. Unlike books (or paintings), they can’t be taken in all at once. They hearken back to the texts of antiquity, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had to be rolled from one rod to the other in order to be read.

This new-media disadvantage is evident even in direct-mail advertising. A reader may give a printed pamphlet two seconds of attention before he discards it, but there is less chance that the recipient of an unsolicited CD will load and consider it: that would take more than two seconds. Similarly, even at the height of the paperless era, many people performing office tasks prefer to work with printouts rather than onscreen files. But most ironic of all is the printed instruction booklet that comes with so-called cutting-edge electronic equipment. No book requires electronic instructions explaining how to read it.

The great advantage of an electronic text is the speed at which words (or subjects, if they are previously catalogued—like those listed in the indexes of books—and are requested correctly and specifically) may be searched for. This is especially true of CDs and DVDs, which allow readers to view lists of words and subjects on the screen before searching for the corresponding texts. When there are no lists available, whether because they weren’t created or because consulting them is difficult (downloading a thesaurus from the Internet can take hours) the advantage is greatly lessened: in a blind search, the reader has to guess which words will generate useful responses. But even with the help of lists, it is impossible to skim electronic texts.

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