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  3. When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

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问题     When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes weren’t machines; they made mistakes. With the arrival of the letterpress, thousands of identical copies could enter the marketplace simultaneously. The publication of a book became an event.
    A new set of literary workers assembled in publishing houses, collaborating with writers to perfect texts before they went on press. The verb "to finalize" became common in literary circles, expressing the permanence of printed words. Different editions still had textual variations, but books still came to be viewed as immutable objects. They were written for posterity.
    Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls "typographical fixity" served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.
    Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. A book page turns into something like a Web page, able to be revised endlessly after its initial uploading. That’s an attractive development in many ways. It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed. Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents.
    But as is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, they’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book. The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals. What will be lost is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.
    Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s "edges," the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the variations of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.
We may learn from Paragraph 5 that e-readers______.
选项 A、give authors erroneous signals of people’s reading progress
B、deprive readers of the pleasure of undisturbed reading
C、arouse radical changes in people’s book reading habits
D、facilitate commercial manipulation of book content
答案D
解析 第五段指出，书籍电子化有一大弊端：人们可能迫于商业压力随意改动书籍。其具体过程如下：电子阅读器收集读者阅读书籍过程中的信息一出版商或作家了解读者对书籍各部分内容的喜好一在利益驱动下任意改动书籍。由此可见，电子阅读器会促进出版商或作家出于商业目的操纵书籍内容。[D]选项正确。
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考研英语一

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