Miha Kovac
Slovenia
miha.kovac@mkz.si
MC Member – WG4
Position Paper
Reading practices and ergonomic of reading are heavily affected by technologies of reading. Even more so, ebooks and printed books could be seen as two different types of communication devices that invoke a variety of different reading practices: As shown by a variety of book historians and contemporary publishing researchers, both reader’s understanding of the text and reader’s choices are influenced by organisation of the text on the page, by visual and physical appearance of a printed book, including the design of the front and back covers, by blurbs, the name of the author, dedications and inscriptions, prefaces, the title of the book, and so on; and by the retail, social, and personal contexts in which the book is sold, marketed, and read. Just the opposite as in the print culture, the layout of a screen page of an ebook is fluid, e-books don’t have covers as visually attractive as p-books, and e-bookstores represent different “browsing environment” than their brick and mortar counterparts in a way that in the former, metadata of e-books, accompanied by automated suggestions of ebook retailer, and in the latter, random browsing and impulsive buying are the most common purchasing mechanism.