Page 40 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

cellaneous pieces loosely joined.” He seemed to suggest that an essential element of “the book” was its separateness from the loose conglomeration of material on the Internet rather than its connection through the many cross-references to the conglomeration that websites typically provide by links:
. . . bookish material tends to dissolve into an undifferentiated tangle of words. Without containment, a reader’s attention tends to flow outward, wandering from the central narrative or argu- ment. The velocity of shifting focus creates a centrifugal force which spins readers away from the pages of the book.
To counter the distractions of the web, Kelly stated that “a separate reading device seems to help,” such as an eReader or even a cell phone. Taking advan- tage of future reading devices and interactivity with readers, some of which he outlines, Kelly suggests that as the eBook evolves it will take a form very different from websites, reflective of the rapidly evolving definition of “the book” and “the eBook”—definitions that seem to be growing more com- plex along with the increasing complexity of the associated technologies.
Perhaps the most complex publication on the Internet, and the ultimate intellectual expression of its social networking aspect, is the Wikipedia, with its many million articles in English and even more millions in around 250 other languages. It is presumably the longest, or among the longest In- ternet publications, and it might be the longest book, or figurative set of books, ever created, with the most different currently published versions and the largest number of authors.17 The speed at which it has been written would have been unimaginable before the Internet; the Wikipedia began on January 15, 2001! But should we call it a book? The enormous length of the Wikipedia does not prevent it from being called a book by the present
17 I raise the question of the size of the Wikipedia relative to other websites since one of the dramatic features of the Internet has been the amount of information that some sites contain, and their remarkable accessibility. For example, collections of government documents, such as all the U.S. patent records, accumulated since 1790, may be enormous, and as I write this I am unaware of how one could make size comparisons between websites, though one would assume that quantification of any amount of digital information should be possible.
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