eBooks vs Traditional books

The quick development of  new technologies is transforming our lives dramatically in many aspects. One of them is literature. Nowadays, traditional books are living a little crisis due to the appearance of eBooks. An eBook (or electronic book) is, in plain words, a digital version of a traditional book.

An example of eBook: the new Sony Reader (model PRS-505)

So now you may be wondering why you should start using this new type of devices, right? The answer is quite simple: because they have a never ending list of advantages over traditional books. Let me illustrate this afirmation with a few examples:

Hypermedia, what are we talking about?

The term hypermedia was used for the first time in the book No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks by Ted Nelson in the year 1965. We call hypermedia to the procedures to design contents including texts, videos, audios, maps… that are able to interact with the user. That is the main and most important characteristic of the hypermedia. 

Aspen Movie Map

The first hypermedia work that we have a record of is the Aspen Movie Map, a tool developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 and that allowed users to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. But the most modern hypermedia have been delivered, mainly, via electronic pages, using a wide range of systems including Media players, web browsers and, of course, stand-alone applications. However, when we think of hypermedia works we are not exclusively referring to computer applications, a Dvd, for instance, is a good example of hypermedia.

Orality and writing, human communication step by step

Human communication has suffered a constant evolution along the millenniums. When we study this process, the first idea that we should remark is the oral transmission of information. This ability is one of the most important characteristics of human race, allowing us to difference ourselves from animals and share knowledge in order to evolve.

"Writing is inhuman" Socrates. Bust of Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) at the Louvre Museum in Paris

According to professor Walter J. Ong we could distinguish different types of orality; the ‘primary orality’, which refers to the verbal expression among members of a society without written literature; the ‘residual orality’, which refers to the verbal expression in cultures that have had a previous contact with writing and print, but have not completely ‘interiorized’ the use of these technologies in their daily lives, because, in the opinion of  Marshall McLuhan, another important communications theorist, as a culture interiorizes the tools of literacy, the ‘residual orality’ diminishes; finally, we find in the electronic age the ‘secondary orality’, which displaces written words with audio/visual technologies.