Water damage

This image is a happily coincidental acknowledgement of Footnote 21 in Thomas et.al (2007) and its further link to the theme in “Digitise or Die: a personal reflection’. I would like to add though – that I wouldn’t be too keen on my Kindle ending up in such a state either.

4 Comments , ,

4 Responses to “Water damage”

  1. Caio February 4, 2013 at 2:49 pm #

    Hi, I’m a Coursera student from Brazil, Your post made wonder: is Kindle either water or coffee proof? :D

  2. Steph Carr February 4, 2013 at 8:39 pm #

    Hey Caio, nice to see you in #ededc.

    I wish my Kindle was water or coffee proof :-)

    Apparently, some say that the sign of a good book is that you can read it in the bath (!?) but the author of the “Digitise or die – a personal reflection” blog quite rightly points out the damage that water can do to a book. She says ‘…won’t printed pages soak or at least dampen, blurring the font and wrinkling the pages? Why might bringing a book into the bath be the test for “good” reading?’.

    What really interests me, is how the author and the speaker she is critiquing use this analogy to argue for the primacy of digital and non-digital respectively. For me, the fact that both paper and digital books (e.g. Kindle) can be ruined by water may well debunk the whole analogy, or it may suggest that the divide between the digital and non-digital perhaps isn’t that wide.

    I was lucky enough to have an image of a paper I’d ruined accidentally, but I didn’t quite feel the need to soak my Kindle :-)

  3. Jen Ross February 6, 2013 at 3:42 pm #

    I like your suggestion, Steph – “the divide between the digital and non-digital perhaps isn’t that wide”. I’m often asked (for some reason) if I prefer printed books or ebooks, and I don’t think people are very satisfied when I say that I don’t mind very much either way. Our commitment to the digital or to the paper book seems to be a marker of a set of other positions.

    Also, I don’t know why this is, but sometimes flight attendants make me turn my Kindle off for takeoff/landing, and sometimes they don’t. Kindle seems to have some kind of liminal device/non device status.

  4. Phil Devine February 8, 2013 at 3:40 pm #

    Love the idea of ‘cyber’ thinking being defaced in the analog domain – then pushed back in the digital domain – think you have something special there!!!!! :)

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