Today, we value a clean separation of information from its container so that content can easily be reused in multiple formats or renderings. This value is often applied to books, arguing that it does not matter if a book is in print or digital format. I, Robot provides a reflection on the importance of the container of information. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media came out in 1964, explaining the intrinsic effects of communication media, captured by the phrase, “the medium is the message”. John Miedema
I'm not sure I agree, exactly. I first came upon Marshall McLuhan in high school (back in the dark ages of the very early 70's) when a book was a book was a book. Books were words on paper, with pages bound together and a more or less common theme carried through the piece. Now, nearly 40 years later, a book can be pages in between covers; it can be a computer file read on a dedicated reader or on a PC, it can be an audio file, it can be a multimedia experience like a vook and that is just the beginning.
According to Wikipedia:
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book.
Books may also refer to a literature work, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature.
In novels, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, etc).
Personally, I think the wikipedia entry for book is seriously dated. The book is the information, not the container.
McLuhan may be famous for saying "The medium is the message," but he also said that media (medium, technology) is "an extension of ourselves." I was confused by McLuhan in high school and I am still confused, because he says that content isn't important. Content is the point, in my opinion. Whether it is audio, visual, electronic, or scratched on a clay tablet doesn't matter. The message is the same.
To go back to Asimov's robots, what made the robots important wasn't the hardware, it was the software. It was the positronic brain (the software) and the way the robots felt and communicated that made
I, Robot so important to me when I read it back in the dark ages.
