When Is a Book Not a Book?

Question: When is a book not a book? Answer: When it is on a computer.

I draw a strong distinction between the things we call books, and the things we call books when they are saved on a computer. The former are codices, and the later are digital files. For the most part codicies are akin to collections of pages bound between a pair of covers, and the later are manifested in formats such as but not limited to: Portable Document Format (PDF), HTML, epub, etexts, and various word process or files.

Why do I draw strong distinction between these things? Because, since they are manifested differently, they lend themselves to different functions. These differences offer various advantages, distadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses. Consequenlty, one set of these things (books) can be read one way, and the other set of things (digital files) can be read another way.

I have enjoyed using the traditional reading process to read the book by Mortimer Aldler called How To Read A Book. The book outlines four over-arching reading processes: 1) elementary, 2) inspectional, 3) analytic, and 4) syntopical. The processes make sense to me.

I have also enjoyed the combined processes of text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to read books. Moreover, I have created a tool allowing the student, researcher, or scholar to read digital files of narrative text. The tool echoes the processes outlined by Adler, but does them in a digital environment.

Increasingly, academics do not read real books (codices). Instead academics increasingly read digital files, and since the formats are inheriently different, so must be the processes of reading them. The balance of this essay outlines how...

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