Page 42 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

cember 2010 Blog2Print! offered a service by which a blog could be turned into a professionally printed 20-page soft cover “Blog Book” for $14.95. Be- cause we tend to view the past through modern metaphors, Patricia Cohen, writing in the New York Times in December 2010, characterized the sixteenth century creator of the essay form, Michel de Montaigne, as the “the father of all bloggers.”19
A book also needs basic means of identification including author, title, date, and publisher, though not all of these details are always provided. If it is being marketed today in either printed or digital form a book needs a unique product identification code called an ISBN (International Standard Book Number). If the eBook is being marketed in different electronic for- mats each different version is supposed to have a different ISBN. Still, even without these basic means of identification, a scholar or detective might be able to identify a book from its text whether the book is physical or digital.
But what if a book does not have any text or images? Should we call a “blank book” a book? With respect to physical books, blank notebooks are sold as books every day in a wide variety of formats and bindings. A blank codex is still a functioning codex, and a blank papyrus roll remains a papyrus roll. Both of those are books partly, I believe, because they have the potential to carry text and illustrations even though they are blank. Does that mean that an eBook reader without a digital file is essentially a “blank book”? Perhaps.
Summarizing the elements of a definition, the concept of book has moved far beyond its traditional physical attributes and may be thought of as a container for text and related information designed for distribution and communication, chiefly by means of reading, but also perhaps by listening and viewing. At present a book may exist in two main forms, physical and digital, but may also exist in a third form in a human memory.20 If a text exists in a physical form like a codex it contains an integral display mecha-
19 Cohen, “Conversation Across Centuries With the Father of All Bloggers,” NYTimes.com, Dec. 17, 2010.
20 As in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
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