The book, the scroll, and the web

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

The book, the scroll, and the web

The scroll, whose pages are joined end-to-end in a long roll, is older  
than the codex, a writing technology – known more familiarly as the  
book – with pages bound together at one end. Websites have always  
looked more like scrolls than books, a nice retro touch for the ultra- 
modern digital word, but as e-readers grow in popularity, texts are  
once again looking more like books than scrolls. While the first  
online books, the kind digitized by the Gutenberg Project in the  
1980s, consisted of one long, scrolling file, today’s electronic book  
takes as its model the conventional printed book that it hopes one day  
to replace.

read what's in store for ebooks on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan


____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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