Page 46 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Besides the problem of making a valid comparison, if there was genuinely one to make, I suspected that in order to make a convincing comparison I would need to fill in the gaps between the fifteenth century and the present, and, in view of the sporadic way that I had to work on the project because of business obligations, the only way that I thought I might be able to accom- plish that would be by expanding my timeline of significant events. Prior to thinking about these issues, I had studied the development of computing technologies from roughly the seventeenth century to the present, and I realized that my understanding was more deficient in the period prior to printing than in later periods. But once I began studying the Middle Ages, I was gradually taken back 900 years to Late Antiquity, a period of great fascination to me, and so, little by little, the project expanded back to the beginning of records. Over the ten years between 2005 and 2015 in which I created most of the database, I found that, considering my particular inter- ests, studying the history of media was the most appealing way to under- stand history in general. For several years the title of the project was From Cave Paintings to the Internet.
With the wider availability of eBooks or digital books, beginning after the availability of the first Amazon Kindle in 2007, the problem of comparison of our time with the fifteenth century was greatly simplified, since if we ex- clude other forms of electronic media from the comparison, eBooks provide a means by which we may draw reasonable analogies between the fifteenth century and our time. There is a clear analogy between the fifteenth-century transition from manuscript copying of codices to printed books, and the transition in our time from printed books to eBooks or digital books. Much like the transition from manuscript to print, in our time digital books co-ex- ist with printed books, and some printed books still sell millions of copies in print, even though most of the growth overall of information production occurs in digital form. We may view computing and the Internet—the over- all technologies on which digital books or eBooks are based—as analogous to printing by movable type. Images in digital books such as photographs, or even videos, reproduced on the computers controlling the electronic dis-
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