Focus on vocabulary

1. Transcribe and read out the following words.

fibre, papyrus, pharaoh, scroll, thesaurus, replicate, descend, digital, dispenser,

aesthetic, Flaubert, Faulkner, Macintosh, Gutenberg, venerable

2. Define the meaning of these words.

1. portable 4. media

2. interactive 5. aesthetics

3. digitized 6. stylus

3. Give synonyms.

1. predict 5. data

2. essentially 6. displace

3. electronic (book) 7. issue (v)

4. ultimately 8. replicate

4. Study the definitions and work out what the word is.

1. (of an old person or thing) deserving great respect or honour because of character, religious or historical importance

2. transmit or send quickly

3. give out to a number of people

4. look quickly through sth by turning the pages

5. begin or help in the early development of

5. What do you know about these people?

Johanes Gutenberg, Fielding, Flaubert, Faulkner, Melville

6. In each set find the odd-one-out; explain your choice.

1. a. laptop b. word-processor c. hardware

2. a. IBM b. Macintosh c. Apple Computer

3. a. thesaurus b. encyclopedia c. dictionary

4. a. Faulkner b. Melville c. Flaubert

5. a. cash machine b. vendor c. dispenser

7. The jumbled words below can all be used as adjectives. Put them with an appropriate noun. Sometimes there is more than one possibility.

computer, literary, electronic, software, digital, paperless, digitized, portable

a. revolution g. book

b. publishing h. company

c. computer i. disk

d. user j. library

e. information k. program

f. enthusiast l. media

8. Fill in the gaps with the correct prepositions.

1. The letters … the page are descended … movable type pioneered … Johanes Gutenberg … the 1400s.

2. Books today may be written … word processors, but they are still printed … ink, bound … thread and delivered essentially … hand.

3. When it comes … literature, the electronic publishing movement has run … resistance … both readers and publishers.

4. Among the first to be issued … disk are Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Melville’s Moby Dick.

5. Reading the book … a screen is amazingly close … reading it … paper.

6. Other firms are working … similar products.

7. The reading device could be loaded … digitized books … a cash-machine-type dispenser that would serve as an electronic library.

9. Explain the meaning of the following.

1. The hard-cover book is a pretty venerable piece of technology.

2. Computer enthusiasts have long predicted that the digital revolution would soon liberate the word from the printed page and put it directly on the screen.

3. Driving the new venture is a bit of magic performed by programmers at Voyager, a Santa Monica, California, software company.

4. Ultimately, it may be the economics of publishing, not the aesthetics, that determine what shape literature will take.

Reading

Read the article “Death of the Book or a Novel Way to Read?”

1. In the article, find the words that mean approximately the same as the following definition.

1. one of several problems you must solve before you can do sth successfully

2. to move information to your computer from a computer system or the Internet

3. to add the most recent information to sth such as a book, document, or list

4. to give sth to sb in exchange for sth else

5. a computer screen and a keyboard connected to a computer system

6. easy to carry or move, so you can use it in different places

7. smaller than most things of the same kind

8. the part inside a computer that stores information it needs to work

2. Supply the missing information.

The Rocket eBook is light (… oz) and easy to hold.

There are … buttons for scrolling up and down the pages.

It can store up to … pages, roughly the equivalent of … novels.

The battery lasts for … hours.

It takes … minutes to download an electronic book into the Rocket eBook for immediate reading.

The Rocket eBook costs …

3. Answer the following questions.

1. What features does the Rocket e Book offer?

2. Could you point out any points of difference between the Rocket eBook and PowerBook?

3. What is the appeal of electronic books, according to the author?

4. What readers are willing to give up the paper book for the screen?

5. What are obstacles to eBook’s success?