Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Smart and slow Books?

I’ve begun to realise that the little Guide or briefing which I’ve been working on for the past few days (called, for the moment, "Encountering Romania") is rather unique with its various distinctive features -
  • It focuses on the aspects of a country you normally find pushed to a few back pages of the conventional travel guides – literature, art and history
  • It includes blogsites – 16 of them – with the hyperlinks and some excerpts    
  • It gives a lot of hyperlinks to material about Romanian society and culture – for example 20 travelogues from the last couple of decades (that’s one a year); to lists of several hundred novels; to sites which will give data and examples of a couple of hundred Romanian painters; and to several photographic sites
The "Blue Guides" and Pallas Guides do offer cultural feasts - but don’t have the hyperlinks..  
A year or so ago I picked up in one of the second-hand bookshops in Bucharest some volumes of a 1960s "Collection Literaire" - French schoolbook texts by Lagarde and Michard. They cover most cultural forms and include excerpts and photos. Quite exquisite....but is there a modern equivalent?   

They used to be called Reference books. But in even their traditional (ie non web-based) form they were generally available only in the local language ie not for foreigners - or at least only for that minority of visitors who spoke the language fairly fluently.......

And what does one call this new format – with its “embedded hyperlinks”? 
“EBook with embedded links” is a bit of a mouthful! Also sounds a bit warlike! 

My first idea was “smart” book - but that seems to be a technical device like a tablet….
and this EC initiative doesn’t actually tell me very much.

I blogged a few months back about “slow books” – perhaps I should patent a product called “slow, smart books”????

No comments:

Post a Comment