The Reading Experience: Are Ebook Readers the Next Big Thing?
You may have seen this video that's been making the rounds the last couple of years. The joke is that, back in the middle ages, the " codex " (a flat book, with separate pages bound between two covers) was a revolutionary new technology that took the Western world by storm, pretty much putting the scroll-book industry out of business. This happened, by the way, largely because of the Christian Bible, which people wanted to be able to peruse quickly and easily, and, probably, keep it all together instead of on umpty-jillion separate scrolls. (LOTS has been written on how the spread of Christianity helped popularize the codex -- here's one example from Catholic apologist, Jimmy Akin.) Very soon, the obvious advantages of this new form of book spread, making multi-volume rolled books a thing of the past. (Jews, however, to this day scorn the "new-fangled" technology of the codex in liturgical use, requiring each synagogue to have a scroll of the Tor...