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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.
Once hooks are digitized, which of the following is the most likely to happen?
选项 A、There will be technological constraint on endless editing.
B、Travelers might suffer from error message in guidebooks.
C、Theorists can support their arguments with new evidence.
D、Data in academic reference books become obsolete.
答案C
解析 根据题干关键词定位到第四段。该段指出，书籍数字化之后，可以随时进行修改。因此，作者可轻而易举地纠正错误、更新资料。文学作者会想要使其作品保持新鲜，历史学家、传记作家将能够修正其表述，以涵盖新近事件、最新发现。故以此类推，理论家们将能够用最新的证据来支持其论点，[C]选项正确。
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