Electronic Books vs.the Printed Version

The Evolving Concept of a Book

The concept of a printed book should by this time be familiar to any college student. Just mention a few of a printed books features:

Books are designed to be read in a linear manner (each page to be read in sequential order).
It is easy to read because the printed text is high contrast black against a white background with crisp edges to enhance our pattern recognition sytem.
Easy is to pick up and carry around so we can read it at the beach or at our desk,etc.
It can be roughly handled.
It will with stand cold and hot temperatures.
Outside of comfortable lighting it does not need a special environment or source of power to use.
Books allow us to make notes in the margin and highlight important ideas.
Books are static documents; once it is printed the book does not change. Thus a book has a well defined author and the author's intellectual property rights are well understood.

In contrast, the electronic book or document is a new and rapidly evolving concept that is causing all aspects of our society to rethink many policies. Intellectual property rights, what constitutes pornography and does the Internet deserve first amendment protection like print media or controls like film and video, are just two recent issues that have drawn public interest, federal legislation, and judial and excutive review. Further the electronic book or document as found on the Internet is seen to have many diffent features from those of a printed book. For instance, an electronic document has:

Electronic documents (ED's) are hypertext documents written using languages such as SGML and HTML and are displayed via a Browsers that could yield a different layout on a Macintosh, a Windows PC, or a UNIX workstation. (Are these differences inportant? Note here that we do not mean to consider simple text or word proceesor files)
ED's require hardware (computers), special software (Browsers, Viewers, etc.), special devices (printers, sound), and network access.
ED's are not easily taken with us to the beach, bed, or places that we have taken books to read or study.
ED's are designed to linked together in such a fashion as to encourage non-linear thinking i.e. to jump from one page to another from one person's document to another's as our interest dictates.
Ed's can have images, videos, sounds, and interactions with other computers (CGI's. JAVA) and other users.
ED's are dynamic. Hence, the user may find different material in the document at different times.
ED's can have many author's and the material may be copied and incorporated from other ED's. As yet, ownership of the intellectual property is still open to debate; but legislation and practice are becoming standardized. Because the author of the page is linking to the work of others, it could happen that the material that the author linked to could be deleted, changed to become irrellivent, or even to something totally embarrassing.
ED's can be used in multiple window environments that allow inter-window linkages(These products are now coming to the market). For instance, we could link an author's poem in one window and use the poem's words as links to a dictionary or other reference in another. With the words in the poem window high-lighted as the text was read by the author and played through the computers audio channel.

Assignment

The above brief discussion gives some example diffences between the printed book and the ED's. Use the Internet and the library to research the following topic:

Discuss and contrast the book versus the ED as a learning tool as specifically applied to one of your major or minor fields of study. Make a table of advantages and disavantages not covered in the above discussion. Give at least two examples of ED that you found on the Internet that illustrate a novel teaching paradigm or one that showed a specific advantage over the book in terms of your learning the material.

1) The assigned paper to be at least five typed pages and a separate Bibilography (include journal articles, books, and WWW pages).

2) Attach printouts from the WWW to support your two novel learning paradigms arguement.

3) Briefly sketch how you would create an ED to respond to the assigned topic using a diagram(s) to illustrate your ideas.

4) For extra credit, discuss which gave you the greatest assistance with this paper the library or the Internet? Why?

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