首页
登录
职称英语
Farewell, Libraries? Amazon.com’s recent announc
Farewell, Libraries? Amazon.com’s recent announc
游客
2023-07-08
77
管理
问题
Farewell, Libraries?
Amazon.com’s recent announcement that sales of e-books at the online megastore had overtaken sales of hardcover books came as no surprise. It had to happen sometime. But the news did conjure quite an interesting mental image.-libraries that from now on will look smaller and less crowded.
For the moment, let’s not argue with the proposition that people will read as much as they ever have, no matter whether they read an actual book or a book on a screen. The habits of readers may not change(if anything, people may read ore, or at least buy more—several stories have quoted e-book owners who say they buy more titles for their e-readers than they did when they were buying hardcover books). But if readers aren’t changing, their environments will. Rooms that once held books will well, whatever they hold from now on, it won’t be books, or not as many books. Theoretically, your space will be more spare, more serenely uncluttered. That’s the theory, at least. My experience is that stuff expands to fill the space available. But you can dream.
All of this has already happened big time in the music business, where downloads have gradually but surely replaced CDs. I don’t know how many people I’ve overheard crowing because they managed to transfer their entire music collections onto their computers. All those CDs taking up space on the wall have gone—All those CDs that travel from car to kitchen to bedroom to living room, with the CD and the case getting separated somewhere along the way a problem no more in the digital age. From now on, we’ll own what might be described as the idea of stuff, since the actual physical things- records, tapes, photographs, CDs, and now books — have been as good as vaporized, with the information contained therein stored away on a hard drive.
This, of course, is merely collateral(并行的)damage in the digital revolution, if damage it is. There’s as yet no way to tell if this transition is good, bad, both, or neither, but surely the absence of a physical library, be it musical or literary, marks a fundamental shift in the way we live and think about things. In music, for example, the rise of iTunes, Pandora, YouTube, and all the other online music players has quickly eroded our devotion to the long-playing album as the principal means of organizing music. After a half century of neglect, the lowly single is back on top. Most immediately this has consequences for artists, maybe not so much for the people who buy their music. But who knows?
With books, the absence of packaging does nothing to the contents. 1 can buy a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick or download it onto an e-reader, and Melville is still Melville. But I grew up loving Rockwell Kent’s illustrations of that novel, and later Barry Moser’s. It’s hard to think of the book without them. I can do that, certainly, but some little thing is lost.
Paperbacks and public libraries made books cheap or free but certainly available to millions who might otherwise not have been able to afford them, and all that happened long before I was born. Nevertheless, I was brought up by people who had been taught —and who taught me—that books were valuable things, things to be cared for and cherished, and I have owned some volumes for close to half a century(almost none of them, 1 should point out, qualify as "collectible" or valuable to an antiquarian book collector; owning a rare book makes me nervous. I like books I can hold, read, and even here my mother is spinning in her grave write in).
I come from a generation for whom the books and records on the shelf signaled, in some way, who you were(starting with the fact that you were a person who owned books or records or CDs). If you visited a friend, you took the first chance you had to secretly scan that friend’s shelves to get a handle on the person. I suppose I could sneak a peek at a friend’s Kindle, but is that the same? And try that kind of snooping on a bus or in a coffee shop and you’ll probably get arrested.
The stuff of our lives is a comfort. We look up at the shelves and we see old friends. Yes, there are books on my shelves that aren’t my friends, that I haven’t finished or even started, but someday I will, I promise—my home library is a physical manifestation of ambivalence. There is comfort in the continuity of seeing the same books year after year. I guess there might be some of the same pleasure in scrolling through a digital library or music playlist, but somehow I think something will be lost.
For years audiophiles(音响爱好者)have tried to persuade more casual music fans that a vinyl record played on a decent sound system sounds better than a digital recording played on the same system. Digital sound is not as warm, not as seductive to the ear. The resurgence, albeit modest, of vinyl, especially among young listeners and musicians, proves that this argument is not generational. It’s not, in other words, just old fogies versus young hipsters.
Something of the same argument might be made for books, or for the tactile(触觉的)pleasure of holding and reading a well-made book. At its simplest, a book is a tool, or an information-delivery system, if you will, and it does what it does supremely well. To conceive of a world without physical books is to conceive of a world somehow diminished. It may be more efficient—yes, you can take a "stack" of books on vacation with an e-reader. It may spare quite a few forests from the ax. But efficiency is no substitute for pleasure. The future may be less cluttered. It may also be less fun. [br] The author was taught the idea that books are______.
选项
A、more cherished by previous people
B、mostly stored in public libraries for free reading
C、luxuries for people when they were young
D、valuable for people to collect and treasure
答案
D
解析
细节归纳题。定位句阐述了作者对传统书籍的看法,即书是有价值的东西,值得喜欢和珍藏。由此可知答案为D)。
转载请注明原文地址:http://tihaiku.com/zcyy/2820171.html
相关试题推荐
RecentstudiesbytheCouncilofEuropeshowthat______.[br]Althoughwealld
RecentstudiesbytheCouncilofEuropeshowthat______.[br]InDr.Baum’sopi
You’vebeenoverworkingrecently,andyouwouldfindaholiday______.A、healthy
Judgingfromrecentsurveys,mostexpertsinsleepbehaviouragreethatther
Judgingfromrecentsurveys,mostexpertsinsleepbehaviouragreethatther
Judgingfromrecentsurveys,mostexpertsinsleepbehaviouragreethatther
Methodsoftraininganimalshavechangedgreatlyinrecentyears.Zookeepersha
Methodsoftraininganimalshavechangedgreatlyinrecentyears.Zookeepersha
Methodsoftraininganimalshavechangedgreatlyinrecentyears.Zookeepersha
Theeconomicreformsannouncedbythegovernment__________(可能会对该国上涨的物价会有直接的影响).a
随机试题
TheAsian(1)hastakenitstollonHongKong’stouristindustry,(2)offor
WatchingMoviesinEnglishI.OnegreatadvantageofEng
下列哪一项不是慢性病的一级预防措施。A.大众禁烟活动 B.高危人群的疾病筛检
组合电器本体壳体锈蚀,外壳表面锈蚀,外壳强度和绝缘降低,应定性为()缺陷。(A)
市场经济在其数百年的发展过程中,在国际上逐步形成了三种基本的企业制度,分别是()
《关于办理破坏野生动物资源刑事案件适用法律若干问题的解释》自2022年()
2012年版《商业银行资本管理办法(试行)》明确提出分层次的监管资本要求,包括(
属于操作技能的特点的有()。 A.内潜性 B.简缩性 C.展开性 D.客
副作用是在下述哪种剂量时产生的不良反应A.治疗量 B.无效量 C.极量 D
以下选项中属于梁式桥特点的有()。A、是在竖向荷载作用下无水平反力的结构 B、
最新回复
(
0
)