mctaylor: eTexts

[reading]
A Wrinkle In Time
Upper Canard, Nova Scotia, Canada 1993
Minolta SLR, 50 mm lens, Kodak T-Max 400

Last updated: Sunday June 24, 2007

Etexts

I have mixed opinions on e-texts and e-books. I think they are a great idea, shedding the expensive, restrictive paper book for a more readily transportable electronic copy. E-texts are small, you could fit a large novel uncompressed on a floppy or download it in thirty seconds using a modem.

But the ease of reading, of enjoying that text or book is not there yet. At least I have not yet seen or experienced a replacement for reading an actual book. I love to read books in comfortable locations: in bed, lying on the couch, or uncomfortable trying pass time on the train. I hope these e-book readers improve, I suspect higher resolution will help. Something as small and light like a Palm Pilot would be usable in my opinion.

Until then as far as I am concerned, e-texts are primarily useful for technical and research material because it easily indexed, searchable, updated, and annotated.

The Right to Read by Richard Stallman

Project Gutenberg and Books Online have approximately 1GB of public domain or freely redistributable e-texts. There is also the Banned Books Online resource, which has numerous books which have been censored through the ages.

Some etexts I have read, in either paper or digital form: High Noon on the Electronic Frontier edited by Peter Ludlow, In the Beginning was the Commandline (HTML) by Neal Stephenson, The Hacker Crackdown (txt) by Bruce Sterling, and Cracking DES (one big page) by EFF (text scan from cryptome.org). Including the classic, George Orwell's 1984. To the not so well-known Underground (warning!: nearly 1MB) by Suelette Dreyfus (original source) subtitled, "Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier."

The Internet Archive have expanded to include over 900 movies, many of which are Americian from the 40's to 60's. They plan to offer over 1000 such movies. It is good to see somebody trying to preserve history of media. Now if we can convince the BBC and CBC (and other broadcasters) to undertake something similar I would be happy. We should preserve Nanook of the North which is now only available in a "remastered" version with a musical score added to it.

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