Page 36 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

For all intents and purposes a book should be identifiable or labeled; however, an incomplete book or fragment, which may have lost its title page or other bibliographical identifiers, may still be characterized as a book. Pri- or to the Internet and the electronic book, we might have assumed that the book was defined by its most common form, which for about 1500 years has been the codex. Or, if we took a wider historical approach, we would prob- ably have acknowledged that throughout their history books have existed in a variety of physical forms, and we would have described the book in terms of its physical attributes.
We could have said that it took the form of a clay or wax tablet, a clay cylinder, perhaps a stone inscription, a papyrus or parchment roll, or a co- dex. If a codex, it had a certain number of leaves, usually made of papyrus, parchment or paper, containing information in the form of words or images or diagrams or a combination of those, either written or printed or both, and that it might or might not have a binding. Depending upon the physical format of our book, we could attribute certain characteristics to the form. A codex might have a title page, pagination or an index.
However, if we wish our definition to include non-physical forms of the book, such as audio books, and digital books, whether issued for an eBook reader, as a downloadable PDF, on CD-ROM, on a DVD, or what-have- you, different kinds of physical attributes apply. After writing many drafts of these essays in HTML I decided to issue them finally as a finished prod- uct as a PDF with fixed pagination. However, in their prior form as HTML they took different forms on different sizes and types of reading devices.
Does an electronic text exist as book without a storage and display medi- um such as a computer or an eBook reader? If I had written out my text in longhand or on a typewriter it would have to be stored, communicated, and read in a traditional physical medium of some form, such as a collection of unbound sheets of paper or a physical codex. If written on some physical medium, however, it could be presented as a physical book. Unlike a phys- ical book, the text which you are currently reading is a digital file which I could not write or read without hardware such as a computer and soft-
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