{"id":4881,"date":"2010-07-08T22:20:16","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T05:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=4881"},"modified":"2010-07-08T22:20:16","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T05:20:16","slug":"do-books-work-as-memory-theater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2010\/07\/08\/do-books-work-as-memory-theater\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Books Work as Memory Theater?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Open Letters Monthly<\/a> has an article called In Defense of the Memory Theater<\/a><\/em>, by Nathan Schneider in which he argues that books on shelves perform the function of reflecting memories back at us.\u00a0 They are a constant reminder of the various events, stages, and emotional states of our lives.\u00a0 We look at our shelves and can instantly catapult ourselves back in time to events surrounding our reading of various volumes.<\/p>\n

Schneider mentions a 16th-century memory theater that used images and symbols of the cosmos to inspire observers and enhance their intellectual powers.\u00a0 Books, for Schneider, do something similar when they are visible on our shelves.\u00a0 I agree up to a point.\u00a0 I am often taken back in time by my own books upon their shelves.\u00a0 But so am I transported by nearly every object in my home.\u00a0 Objects all have this power.\u00a0 Books are not exceptional in this regard.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Schneider also goes on to worry over the ongoing movement toward ebooks and electronic reading devices.\u00a0 Frankly, this entire subject matter is beginning to bore me slightly.\u00a0 I like reading whether it’s from a book, an e-reader or from a magazine.\u00a0 But Schneider’s concerns are that corporate entities are wielding absolute control over these devices and can take things away as easily as they give them to us.\u00a0 Amazon famously deleted copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> from Kindles recently.\u00a0 He also worries that all of this electronic cloud computing reliance sets up the perfect environment for totalitarian control of literature and publishing.\u00a0 It certainly might.\u00a0 If a book burning can be accomplished with the press of a delete button that is a very dangerous thing.<\/p>\n

I think Schneider’s arguments about the Kindle being a catastrophe would play better if he had gotten the facts right about the device.\u00a0 It is apparent to me that he has not used a Kindle yet, so it is a leap for him to write about Amazon keeping user notes and annotations in an inaccessible proprietary format when in fact the Kindle stores these things as a simple text file that can be read anywhere.\u00a0 If you are going to write about e-readers you had better get your technical facts straight.<\/p>\n

He makes the point that one’s books should last forever.\u00a0 A corporation should not be able to take them away or disappear one day leaving you with a bunch of proprietary ebook files that can no longer be read.\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 He’s right.\u00a0 But realistically if one wants to preserve one’s proprietary ebooks, there are all sorts of hacks and conversion methods for doing that.\u00a0 No one really needs to be at the mercy of a corporation where ebooks are concerned.\u00a0 Hack them and save them as text files.\u00a0 Simple.\u00a0 Stop worrying so much.\u00a0 The fact of the matter is that people don’t even want their music to last forever any more.\u00a0 The forever thing is going away.\u00a0 Perhaps it’s a loss.\u00a0 Perhaps not.\u00a0 It sure makes moving a lot easier!<\/p>\n

There’s an enormous amount of intellectual snobbery masking a lack of technical understanding.\u00a0 Mr. Schneider’s article is pretty good at making one think a little bit more about what makes books so good at what they do.\u00a0 But he trips over the new publishing technology he is afraid of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open Letters Monthly has an article called In Defense of the Memory Theater, by Nathan Schneider in which he argues that books on shelves perform the function of reflecting memories back at us.\u00a0 They are a constant reminder of the various events, stages, and emotional states of our lives.\u00a0 We look at our shelves and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,137,1042],"tags":[2500,243,323,1197,200],"class_list":["post-4881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-publishing","category-books","category-e-books","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-kindle","tag-memory","tag-publishing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4881"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4889,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881\/revisions\/4889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}