Structure of Information
Here are some (intended) characteristics of a book:
1. Has a single point of entry.
2. Progresses linearly from start to finish.
3. Information is organized into a hierarchy.
Most books, you're meant to read from the beginning to the end, and the information is structured into a natural hierarchy; books have chapters, chapters have sections, and so on. Inherently, there aren't any good reasons for these characteristics. They exist merely because of the constraints of printing information in the physical world, and because human beings insist on categorizing and organizing everything.
In a digital world, this isn't true. In a single person's blog, for example, every post is a potential point of entry. The author can never assume that a person has read everything that came before or will read anything that came after. This makes it difficult to construct a larger point, and it gives the readers in the audience a license to be fickle.
A single book is one thing, but it gets more complicated when you start dealing with large numbers of books. This is why bookstores and libraries play the genre game and use alphabetical order. Dewey thought he was being clever when he devised his decimal system, but there's no inherently good reason for that either. They're merely different methods of organizing chaos in the world before the Internet and Amazon.com came along.
1. Has a single point of entry.
2. Progresses linearly from start to finish.
3. Information is organized into a hierarchy.
Most books, you're meant to read from the beginning to the end, and the information is structured into a natural hierarchy; books have chapters, chapters have sections, and so on. Inherently, there aren't any good reasons for these characteristics. They exist merely because of the constraints of printing information in the physical world, and because human beings insist on categorizing and organizing everything.
In a digital world, this isn't true. In a single person's blog, for example, every post is a potential point of entry. The author can never assume that a person has read everything that came before or will read anything that came after. This makes it difficult to construct a larger point, and it gives the readers in the audience a license to be fickle.
A single book is one thing, but it gets more complicated when you start dealing with large numbers of books. This is why bookstores and libraries play the genre game and use alphabetical order. Dewey thought he was being clever when he devised his decimal system, but there's no inherently good reason for that either. They're merely different methods of organizing chaos in the world before the Internet and Amazon.com came along.