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Sunday, 6th December 2009

Michael Hart on "Things I Like the Best and the Least About eBooks"

Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, shares his views on the topic in an article from Project Gutenberg News.

From the Article:

One of my personal favorite things about eBooks is how easy it is to find your way around in them; even a three word phrase such as “not to be” only appears twice in Hamlet, so telling everyone how to find a certain place in an eBook is much easier than on paper, as giving the page number in a paper book only takes you within a thousand or two thousand characters of where you want to go. The idea of giving someone just a three word phrase to find the exact location is something that works incredibly better, and, as those examples in Hamlet demonstrate, if you get another identical word combination, just hit the search key again, much easier than scan and scan to find the phrase on any given page.

Quoting eBooks is also quick and easy, and of course accurate for eBooks in comparison to paper books. Gone are the stacks, stacks and stacks of 3×5 index cards or notebooks full of quotations and the labor of writing each one out longhand. Gone is is the quote you wanted to use and just can’t find, even though you remember a card you laboriously wrote it down on. And, thankfully, gone are the errors you made in the quotations, the ones marked in red and made you wonder how your instructor knew the quotes so well as to nail you for leaving out that comma

Hart goes on to list some of his least favorite things.

The thing I perhaps like least about eBooks is how many people in the world think it is my job to make eBooks come out exactly that way they think is the best in the world, and constantly harass me to change to this format or that one as the only, or primary, one of all the formats in the world.

Sorry, CONTENT is what Project Gutenberg provides but not FORMAT, FORM, FORMALITY, etc.

Sources: Project Gutenberg News
Hat Tip: TeleRead, S.C.


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