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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.
According to the author, the change of books’ words from immovability to changeability is______,
选项 A、a desirable phenomenon in the information era
B、an attractive development of publication industry
C、a regrettable loss in cultural integrity of works
D、a blameable impetus to commercialization of knowledge
答案C
解析 本文指出现象“在传统书籍走向电子书籍的过程中，文字的固定性消失”并对它的利弊进行分析，其中重点展现其弊端，即修改书籍内容的能力易被滥用，此时书籍失去了作为一个成品、一件独立的艺术作品的感觉；最后对书籍文字的“可变化”趋势表示遗憾：传统书籍的固定性赋予作品以“形状”和“完整性”，使书籍坚不可摧，经得起潮流变幻、时代变迁。但这一切注定随着书籍数字化(可变化)趋势而丧失。因此书籍文字从“固定性”变为“易变性”过程中会损失其文化完整性，作者对此深表遗憾，[C]为正确选项。
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