City Desk: Books, Books, Books

THE paper tells me that NBC will be offering its programs on demand via Amazon, after a deal with Apple fell through. This is the inevitable, even too-late, step after TiVo. The TV series, the weekly ritual of my black-and-white youth, recurring like little seasons, has broken up into on-demand bits. So television joins the stream of Internet content, into which no man steps twice.

But the first interactive on-demand information system, before computers, before even electricity, was rolled out in Scribes 3.0-the page. Scribes 1.0 was cuneiform written on tablets; Scribes 2.0 was the scroll. But, while tablets could be shuffled, they were essentially rocks, and while scrolls were made of parchment, they could not be shuffled, only unrolled. With the hand-lettered page, both lightweight and flappable, we entered a new universe. Ucbald in his monastery could skip to the end of an Apocalypse, to find out if God saved the day at last; or he could read it backwards; or he could read the same page 20 times (necessary perhaps if he was newly literate). Gutenberg 1.0 mechanized the process. Gnomes in a hundred laboratories have been trying to invent the e-book that will be as useful and pleasant as the printed page, but they haven’t done it yet.

THE paper tells me that NBC will be offering its programs on demand via Amazon, after a deal with Apple fell through. This is the inevitable, even too-late, step after TiVo. The TV series, the weekly ritual of my black-and-white youth, recurring like little seasons, has broken up into on-demand bits. So television joins the stream of Internet content, into which no man steps twice.

But the first interactive on-demand information system, before computers, before even electricity, was rolled out in Scribes 3.0-the page. Scribes 1.0 was cuneiform written on tablets; Scribes 2.0 was the scroll. But, while tablets could be shuffled, they were essentially rocks, and while scrolls were made of parchment, they could not be shuffled, only unrolled. With the hand-lettered page, both lightweight and flappable, we entered a new universe. Ucbald in his monastery could skip to the end of an Apocalypse, to find out if God saved the day at last; or he could read it backwards; or he could read the same page 20 times (necessary perhaps if he was newly literate). Gutenberg 1.0 mechanized the process. Gnomes in a hundred laboratories have been trying to invent the e-book that will be as useful and pleasant as the printed page, but they haven’t done it yet.