Digital Man and the desire for physical objects

<p>Extract:</p> <p>In 1999 I attended a conference about digitizing manuscript corpora at which the participants were convinced of the imminent demise of print culture: all access to document images would be online, all ‘facsimiles’ would be on CD-ROM. That didn’t happen. On the co...

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Tác giả chính: Craig-McFeely, J
Định dạng: Journal article
Ngôn ngữ:English
Được phát hành: Oxford University Press 2013
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author Craig-McFeely, J
author_facet Craig-McFeely, J
author_sort Craig-McFeely, J
collection OXFORD
description <p>Extract:</p> <p>In 1999 I attended a conference about digitizing manuscript corpora at which the participants were convinced of the imminent demise of print culture: all access to document images would be online, all ‘facsimiles’ would be on CD-ROM. That didn’t happen. On the contrary: the British Library found that putting manuscript images online stimulated the sales of paper facsimiles of those books. Despite Amazon’s success with Kindle (sales of eBooks finally outstripped sales of hardbacks in 2012), there is still no substitute for a paper copy for performing; for handling a physical object to understand the relationship of pages (and pieces) to one another; for getting simple pleasure from ownership of something beautiful. The demand for facsimiles, particularly of objects that simply cannot be handled in the everyday way for which they were intended, is still high, and will probably never be lost.</p> <p>This is far from the whole story however: Google Books was launched in 2004, and despite the almost continuous lawsuits that have accompanied its progress, by March 2012 it had digitized more than 20 million books. Online delivery and access is unstoppable, and the demand for more online materials escalates with it.</p>
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spelling oxford-uuid:012fcf5a-4e6f-4f59-9564-4161b4f67fcf2024-01-12T10:30:47ZDigital Man and the desire for physical objectsJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:012fcf5a-4e6f-4f59-9564-4161b4f67fcfEnglishSymplectic ElementsOxford University Press2013Craig-McFeely, J<p>Extract:</p> <p>In 1999 I attended a conference about digitizing manuscript corpora at which the participants were convinced of the imminent demise of print culture: all access to document images would be online, all ‘facsimiles’ would be on CD-ROM. That didn’t happen. On the contrary: the British Library found that putting manuscript images online stimulated the sales of paper facsimiles of those books. Despite Amazon’s success with Kindle (sales of eBooks finally outstripped sales of hardbacks in 2012), there is still no substitute for a paper copy for performing; for handling a physical object to understand the relationship of pages (and pieces) to one another; for getting simple pleasure from ownership of something beautiful. The demand for facsimiles, particularly of objects that simply cannot be handled in the everyday way for which they were intended, is still high, and will probably never be lost.</p> <p>This is far from the whole story however: Google Books was launched in 2004, and despite the almost continuous lawsuits that have accompanied its progress, by March 2012 it had digitized more than 20 million books. Online delivery and access is unstoppable, and the demand for more online materials escalates with it.</p>
spellingShingle Craig-McFeely, J
Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title_full Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title_fullStr Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title_full_unstemmed Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title_short Digital Man and the desire for physical objects
title_sort digital man and the desire for physical objects
work_keys_str_mv AT craigmcfeelyj digitalmanandthedesireforphysicalobjects