Hi again Ellen,

I agree with most of your points on the excesses and short lives of gadgets.
All that notwithstanding, and as an example to the comments on your last
paragraph, I have heard from several people who collected shells on Sanibel
this season and used the Shell Museum online guide
http://shellmuseum.org/shells.cfm via iPhone or similar smartphones right
there, on the beach, to find more about their shells. 

Happy Shelling,

José
________________________________________________________
José H. Leal, Ph.D., Director and Curator          
The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor, The Nautilus            
www.shellmuseum.org <http://www.shellmuseum.org/>

                                                
3075 Sanibel-Captiva Road
Sanibel, FL 33957 USA
(239)395-2233
fax (239)395-6706
P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail
 
 


From: Conchologists List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ellen Bulger
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 9:33 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CONCH-L] Electronic Field Guides, Catalogs and Keys?

In some areas, I am decidedly a luddite. I love my laptop, but covet neither
iPhone nor iBook. Indoors, at home, I'm online so much that I may be as well
be hardwired into the net with a wire at the base of my skull, but when I
step out that door I want to leave it behind and be present in the moment,
thank you very much. I'm not even very good about my cell phone. 

And I really do NOT like the idea of electronic books such as Kindle. I like
the feel of a paper book. I like that I can loan them or borrow them. I hate
the way the corporations are ramrodding through all manner of grotesque
copyright laws and how the greedy short sighted politicians enable it and
the general public just naps through everything from the sleazy behavior of
the legal side of the RIAA, to allowing big agribiz to copyright the food
supply. Yeah, we snooze and our grandchildren lose while Monsanto and
company pull a sneaky genetic land grab for all manner of botanical taxa
around the world. It is like martians coming down and planting little flags
on our homes and saying WE OWN THIS NOW AND YOU HAVE TO PAY US RENT EVERY
DAY.

Some days I wake up and feel like I am living in one of those dystopian
science fiction novels I devoured in my youth, something by John Brunner or
Philip K. Dick!

I do not like these trends and I do not like mountains of electronics with
hamster-short lifespans cluttering up our landfills and I do not like the
idea of electronic books. Seems to me to be very much a way of losing more
privacy, more rights and paying over more money to the insatiable
corporations.

Except, except, except, it occurs to me that for field guides and articles
and taxonomic keys and such like, with an electronic book, you could throw
your entire malacological library into a small carry-on bag and still have
room for a change of clothes and your camera. That would be BRILLIANT. That
would be worth the money. Because, as it stands, you go on a collecting trip
and you have all this gear anyway and books weigh a ton. You might pick a
few choice ones, but even then, your arms just stretch out until you might
as well be a gibbon, what with humping around all that heavy paper.

Just something for publishers to think about.

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