The Last Book?
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT. (麻省理工大学), researchers are working on a project they call "the last book."
This may sound bad to book lovers. After all, MIT devotes itself mainly to computers. Looking at a computer means reading a screen, which is decidedly not the way most people want to read a book, particularly the last one.
Reading text on a computer screen is limiting and tiresome. You can't see where you are or how far you have to go. You can't turn the pages quickly without reading much to compare parts of the text or to see what your eye finds freely. You can't comfortably carry a computer screen around with you, to bed, to the beach, or to the bathroom.
You can't collect computer screens, or cover them beautifully, or place them on bookshelves in the way the English writer Anthony Powell described in his book.
But hold everything! The news is far from bad. The book of the future described to me on a visit to MIT is really a book, just like any other. It has a cover that could be made of anything you want, and hundreds of pages you can turn one at a time or turn over quickly.
The key to this book is something called electronic (电子的) ink, or e-ink, which can be added to the page from within instead of by a press. It was developed by Joseph Jacobson, an assistant professor at MIT.
As the capacity of the book's memory grows, whole libraries may be added. Jacobson predicts that this book is able to store the entire U.S. Library of Congress (国会), whose holdings number more than 17 million books.
Yet the book would still have the familiar advantages of a book, Jacobson says. You could turn off its power and carry it anywhere.
Jacobson greatly admires the usual book. "After all," he added, "if books had been invented after the computer, they would have been considered a big breakthrough. They run on very low power at a very low cost."
Every book ever published in a single copy? Will this really happen? How soon could the last book be available? "A first model of it with just a few pages could be put together in two to three years, with one of 400 pages taking a year or two longer," Jacobson said.
How much will it cost? Jacobson says the final book will probably sell for $2 to $4 for each reusable page or $500 to $1,000 for a book, although he is working on ways to reduce costs further.
Will books no longer equip a room? It looks as if they won't, though people will continue to collect old-fashioned books.
1.In the third sentence of Paragraph 2 the word "decidedly" means _.
A.certainly
B.importantly
C.necessarily
D.easily
2.One can imagine that in his book, the English writer Anthony Powell described a book as _.
A.a thing of beauty
B.a piece of bread
C.a valuable thing
D.a waste
3. The sentence "But hold everything!" in Paragraph 4 means "_".
A.Please try to get everything
B.Please don't not jump to conclusions
C.Please have a look at everything
D.Please control yourself
4. In what sense is the last book different from regular books?
A. It has no pages.
B. It has no ink.
C. It can't be carried to whatever place you like.
D. It has memory.
5. Which of the following is True according to the passage?
A. The last book is much more expensive than a regular book.
B. Regular books will be thrown away as garbage.
C. The last book is no match for the regular book.
D. Relatively, it takes a longer time to publish a last book.
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