Commentary 14 Books without Pages~Pages without Books: Revisiting the Geography of Interface James Kalmbach, Department of English, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4240 kalmbach @ilstu.edu Nicholas Negroponte' s 1979 article, "Books without Pages," starts with two premises about the changing nature of computing: 1. Computers and computer.assisted communication will shift from tools used at work to an expressive medium used in the home. With this shift will come a demand for a higher quality of human-computer interaction. The book as a technological (as opposed to an intellectual/social) construct is a marvel of portable random-access multi-media information storage and retrieval. As such this technology offers a set of metaphors (books, pages, dog ears, etc.) with which we can understand the forthcoming transformation of interface. 2. From these two premises he goes on to make predictions about several types of "pages" (typographically-based screens, personalized interfaces, sound, and three-dimensional information) which will alter the metaphors of interface. Seventeen years later, some of these predictions have proven to be right on. Typography has virtually replaced monospaced, typewriter-like fonts for screen display, and personalized interfaces are widespread. In MS Word, for example, you have long been able to add, delete, or move any
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