💾 Archived View for nytpu.com › gemlog › 2024-05-10 captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:00:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

re: Books vs Internet

May 10, 2024

In response to: “Books vs Internet” by Sandra at Idiomdrottning

Even if you're looking at “the good parts” of the internet, I feel like there's one key difference between a book and a website: books go into much more detail and depth. Like, you *can* make a website with a book's level of detail and depth, but even in the historical style of personal sites on personal interests it'd be rather rare to see that; while with books it's the norm.

I've never written a book but when doing longer-form writing it is pretty refreshing to be able to go into depth and explain literally every single detail and nuance of what you're discussing. Or even just getting to elaborate on related topics rather than having to stay perfectly directly focused for the sake of brevity. Versus even in a blog post, you often feel somewhat pressured to stay concise to what you're writing about; or at the very least it's more “throwaway” so you're not necessarily putting all of your efforts into exploring every detail of it. Not that all books are thoroughly in depth or all online blog posts are lacking in depth lol, many many many counterexamples both ways.

For fiction it's obviously different, you should preferably write to whatever length fits the story properly and allows it to work how you want. Still, I think my last point about books incentivizing more writing and editing effort is tangible. There's often a big difference between a fiction book—or, say, a longer-form fanfiction online—and a one-page short story. Again, there are many counterexamples (many authors' sharpest writing is brought out in short stories, for example).

And of course, when you get out of “the best parts” of the internet and into social media and real-time chats and such, then you get to very one-sided comparisons. “Why have nuance and middle ground when I can demand everyone be a member of one of two extreme groups?” Sandra covered that in pretty good detail in their post.

P.S. I've noticed with in-depth online resources, even if they're firmly in the digital domain and aren't just a print book transcribed digitally, it seems very typical to structure them and refer to them as “books” rather than just “web pages”. Perhaps that's just a reflection of the word book having the cultural meaning of a somewhat necessarily in-depth resource.

⁂

↩ go back to index

also available on the web

contact via email: alex [at] nytpu.com

or through anywhere else I'm at

backlinks