Photo from here

Focussing on these ‘problems’ of the book, as outlined in full below by Jeff Jarvis:

They’re frozen in time without means of being updated or corrected.
They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources.
They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader.
They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors.
They’re too damned long cause they have to be long enough to be books.
They limit how knowledge can be found cause they have to sit on a shelf There’s only one way to get to it.
They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation.

I can’t help but think that these aren’t problems, or at least there are times when they aren’t.

Like when I don’t want to be distracted by hyperlinks and interactive discussion, when I simply want to sit quietly, at length, with the manuscript in my hands, and read it deeply, contemplate it, learn from and absorb it.

Once I’ve done this, then I can jump around looking for links and conversation with the short attention spanned.

Photo from here

We all know about Hades gving Persephone a pomegranate or at least pomegranate seeds, the eating of which bound her to the underworld every winter, but what’s with this sudden flood of pomegranate juice into our grocery stores? We’re awash in it, at least here in Canada…

Who turned on the tap? And why now?