Matt Hayler has a very interesting article on his blog entitled It’s Just a Book – A Problematic Gestalt.
Digitisation, like any disruptive agent, forces us, and at unexpected moments, to confront the unfamiliar constituent parts of our composite forms. When a digital book “doesn’t feel right” we are reminded of how a bound book’s form functions. When an electronic text is reproduced and pirated and sent across the world in a second we are reminded of print’s legal history, its fixedness in space, its immutability, its scarcity. When you read materials which would otherwise would have been unavailable, when you see a first time author able to publicise their work to an ideal audience in 50 countries, when you can look up a word or reference that you’d never normally have made the effort to, then things start to seem different. Do we have the right gestalt? Or rather is the default always correct?