2010-08-03
post/898579529
Mark Oppenheimer, in Slate Magazine, in a piece titled “Judging a Girl by Her Cover”, subtitled “Why I’ll miss a world where books make the first move.”
Sure, technology hides the name of a book, but it could also bring it back. In one of his books Cory Doctorow talks about a system where cars swap tracks wirelessly; similarly (and with less worrying for old-fashioned copyright) there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a system where iPhones advertised what book a person was reading.
Of course, it’d be possible to lie, but it’s possible to do that already: if you really get ashamed of reading Dan Brown, you can wrap it in a Stephen Hawking dustjacket.
He goes on: “Worse, they will no longer be that perfect lending object.” Well, with luck, they’ll be even better: an object you can give away, maybe even using something like Phil Gyford’s proposal for pay-per-point or Lee Maguire’s threshold pledge system.
Remember: for everything we lose when we move from physical to digital, there’s something we can gain, if we just think it through.
