‘Photosynth and the feebleness of books’
Imagine—every chapter of Bleak House presented as a column, and you can zoom in on the text in detail. This is among the goodies seen in a YouTube demonstration of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. You might not want to read a book the Seadragon way—I wouldn’t—but the novelty intrigues me as an alternative to pop-ups. Books are actually just a part of the demonstration, incidentally.
In fact, a much-bigger question arises. Despite the Bleak House example, does technology like Photosynth mean that books will seem increasingly feeble compared to alternatives, including photos linked via tags on a universal, global scale?
Peter Kerry Powers, through whose excellent Read, Write, Now blog I ran across the video, nicely sums up where books shine as a medium and where they’re losing ground. He writes that “we need to think clearly about just what it is that books give us access to in terms of form or content that can’t be accessed in the same way via these kinds of technology. Among other things, of course, we might say that books are a good source for exploring the possibilities of language. And one traditional distinction between novels and movies seems to me to still hold for the visuality of the internet. Books, texts in language, are better media for exploring the intricacies of the human psyche, better access to the interior world than the visual world of technology typically allows for. Perhaps we need both novels and autobiographies by mountain climbers, and photosynth representations of mountain climbing, to get our strongest human approximation of what it must be like to climb in the Himalayas.
“Secondly, of course, I’m intrigued by the degree in this video that books and newspapers are a passing mention. Indeed, the brief nod to Dickens’ Bleak House seems to be mostly about the fact that we could put the whole of Bleak House into a simultaneous view, something the presenter agrees is not necessarily a great way to read a book…”
Where the column idea might work out, better than with books: Newspapers.
January 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Interesting comment that books are not a visual medium.
To me, books have always been a better way visualize something. Movies and pictures are limited by either what a camera can see or the technology for creating images. What you see in a book is only limited by your imagination.
Therein lies the problem I believe. To me, when I see a movie based on a book that I have read, the movie is always a visual letdown compared to what my mind has seen reading the book. For much of this generation, this is not the case. They’ve grown up watching TV and movies, and haven’t had the means or inclination to foster their imaginations.
A lot of bibliophiles want to do something about the lack of reading as a means to get information and for entertainment, but they seem to focus on the problem instead of the solution. I’m excited about things like e-readers that appeal to gadget lovers, but we also need to focus on imparting the joy of reading to children.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
[...] Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates Microsft Photosynth and Seadragon. I can’t describe it, you have to watch the video. Awesome stuff. [via David Rothman, TeleRead] [...]