It's easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from
an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged
what would become the world wide web, it was with the idea of making academic
papers and other documents widely available. To this end he devised a simple way
of laying out text and images on a page, inventing what we now call Hypertext
Markup Language or HTML.
Early HTML could define pages and paragraphs, bold
and italicise text, embed images and lay out tables. A little more than 20 years
later, HTML 5 includes media playback and animation, and the web has now become
so ubiquitous that for most users it is indistinguishable from the underlying
framework of the internet itself, but at its core the technology of the web
remains little changed. Every web page, however sophisticated it may seem, is
basically a digital book that we read on our computer through our web browser.
We can make mull use of the Internet to promote our products, such as cone crusher and raw material
mill.
So when Hugh McGuire, founder of Press Books and LibriVox, stated
today that the book and the internet will merge, he was in one sense simply
reiterating what is already the case. But from the perspective of people without
the technical knowledge to see how closely entwined the book and the internet
already are, it has the whiff of yet another doom-monger proclaiming the death
of the book as we know it.
McGuire's argument hinges on the recent emergence
of ebooks as a serious contender to the print book as the dominant artefact of
the publishing industry, with some suggesting that ebooks will make up 50% of
the book market by 2015 thanks to the Kindle, iPad and smart phones. Ebooks are
deliberately packaged and marketed to appear as much like traditional print
books as possible, so many readers will be surprised to discover that ebooks are
built around much the same HTML structure that powers the web. Every ebook, no
matter how much like a print book it may seem, is a web page that we read on the
simplified browser embedded in our e-reader of choice.
For centuries the
book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and
preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably linked with our
concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the
other. But for human knowledge to reach its full potential, we may have to let
go of the book-as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different
definition of what a book is.
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