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Are Book-Length Publications Necessary?
Posted on Wednesday, April 04, 2007 at 1:17 PM by Jason Barker
Ben Vershbow has another interesting post on if:book on the fine art of "fileting a monograph" - finding and reading only the sections of a book relevant to your immediate needs or research - and the fact that many of us purchase entire books simply so that we have access to a single section of the text. He writes:
Not all thoughts are book-sized and not all reading goes in a straight line. Selective reading is probably as old as reading itself.
Unbundling the book has the potential to allow various forms of knowledge to find the shapes and sizes that fit them best. And when all the pieces are interconnected in the network, and subject to social discovery tools like tagging, RSS and APIs, readers could begin to assume a role traditionally played by publishers, editors and librarians -- the role of piecing things together.
Vershbow is correct that not all thoughts are "book-size," although I would point out - and his statement indicates he would agree - that some thoughts certainly are "book-size," and require a full monograph to explicate and examine all elements and ramifications of the thought. At the same time, however, his central point has a great deal of validity: digital publications enable readers to easily find the sections that are of interest and relevance to them.
I try to facilitate this reading style in my Bible studies by putting on every screen of the application - and featuring up-front on the home screen - links to indices of the different types of articles within the application. Thus, in the upcoming Luke application, screens will have at the top a menu (designed to look like an airplane ticket) to indices for Bible chapters, commentaries, life application articles, articles on Orthodoxy, and group-study handouts. This makes it easy for users to find articles without being forced to go through a strict linear progression of chapters.
The HTML versions of articles for the various applications allows for a similar reading style. While the primary reason for creating these HTML versions is to enable users to read and print the majority of articles without using the Shockwave application, having these articles in an up-front HTML index also allows even easier access to the material than going into the Shockwave application.
Thus, to answer the question asked in this post, are book-length publications necessary? When it comes to Bible studies, the answer is an emphatic yes! As I wrote in an earlier post:
The focus of our Orthodox Christian Bible Studies is on longer commentaries, articles about the background of the text, and articles about life application and Orthodox faith and practice. The Bible is a substantial collection of texts: it is long, it can be difficult, but it is also vital and transformative. It is the written word of God to His people. The biblical text not only cannot be understood with a cursory reading or video-viewing, and thus the Christian cannot be transformed through such an approach, but such an approach is an affront to the God Who gave us the Bible, and His people who through the centuries faithfully wrote, translated, taught, and learned these vital books.
Concessions must be made to the learning levels and styles of youth who are not currently adept at extensive reading, and we make these concessions by providing the "Fast" overviews. We must not, however, leave Bible study at this rudimentary level. We must fully delve into the Bible with our commentaries and other articles, both for those Christian youth who are currently able and willing to immerse themselves in the Bible, and to provide resources for youth who will do so in the future. While it is conceivable that in the future there will be a more effective medium than text to engage in such extensive and transformative study, at this time text (supplemented, when possible, with other media) remains the primary vehicle for communication, and thus extended articles remain the best way for us to communicate the transformative truth of the Bible to youth.
At the same time, the medium of digital publications allows us to create extended publications that are highly accessible and usable, while retaining all the depth of a book-length document.
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