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On a
Table or Desk
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- or -
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On a
Table or Desk
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- or -
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Some
Other Nice Things You Could Buy For About the Same Price As a BookGem:
half of a hardback book a cheap pair of reading glasses 1/5 of a visit to the chiropractor a big bottle of ibuprofen 13 common bricks a 3/8" thick piece of plate glass
a paperback book - might we suggest:
Little Things Can Make
All the Difference by Vishnu P. I. Dahliwan
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
and Its Prevention
by Sharon M. Geronthan
Avoiding Stress
by Dr. Daniel Werenstein
Simple Solutions To
Age Old Problems
by Robert L. McMuffry Ph.D.
Why Didn't They Think of This Before?
by Louise V. Trobeck
BookGem®
The World's Best Little Book HolderTM |
Later, about the eighth century A.D., paper and the wood block printing press were developed in China. A few hundred years after that a clever guy named Gutenberg invented moveable metal type, and things really started to take off. Books could be printed by the oxcart load. Of course this was still the Middle Ages, and reading was not yet a widespread phenomenon. So, at this point, there was still very little demand for a good pocket book holder. In fact, pockets were not yet a widespread phenomenon either. But soon a couple of more centuries had whizzed by, and before you knew it literacy was starting to catch up with milking cows and beating plowshares into swords on the list of desirable skills. More widespread books helped to bring about neat things like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and democracy and personal hygiene. Considering that pockets finally appeared only in the late 1500's (no kidding), it shouldn't be surprising that mass-produced injection-molded plastics hadn't even been imagined yet, much less invented. Moreover, books in the old days tended to stay open all by themselves! Up until the last hundred and fifty years or so, books remained luxury items of the upper classes, well made, bound in fine leather, even embossed in gold leaf. One advantage of these nicely bound volumes was that they had nice flexible spines which allowed the pages to remain open. Scholarly people who pored over their books for hours sometimes propped their open books up on other books or inclined boards to make them a little easier to read. Thomas Jefferson was one such
intellectual
and wealthy lover of books. This voracious reader and admitted sufferer
of "Bibliomanie" went so far as to invent a sort of "lazy susan"
spinning book stand, so he could refer to four books at a time, each
one
inclined to the ideal viewing angle. You can still find related
"inclined
board" devices for sale today if you keep your eyes open, primitive
though
they are. (Sorry, Tom.) But
then something revolutionary happened Yes, the paperback - easy to manufacture, cheap, and portable, this development made books affordable to many more people. Unfortunately, the paperback
also happened
to be a kind of book that simply would not stay open by itself. The
stiff
glued spine forced the reader to constantly hold the book open,
generally
using both hands. One possible reason TV hasImagine for a moment that you had to hold your television up the whole time you were watching it. (The average American might actually read a little more if that were the case - at least books are lighter than tv's.) One might wonder also if the laptop computer would have become quite so popular if the screen snapped shut unless you held it up constantly with both hands. And yet, ever since the advent of the little paperback book, millions of people have had little choice but to read for hours and hours at a stretch, the whole time having to hold the book up with both hands. 
Law
enforcement agents employ devices that are very similar in many
respects
to a paperback book.
To this day, only the finest large hardback books, like dictionaries and textbooks, will stay open to the page desired. In sum, after five or ten thousand years of reading, and about fifteen hundred years of books, the market for a good inexpensive folding pocket book holder has finally matured. Let's Do A Little
Math - The average student who completes 12 years of schooling and another four years of college, reading an average of three hours a day for eight months of the year, will have spent a total of just over 11,500 hours reading. - If someone reads for only half an hour a day throughout an average adult life span, this would be another 10,000 hours or so. - A lifelong avid reader (two hours a day) could spend upwards of fifty thousand hours reading. - If a BookGem were used for this period of time, it would make reading more comfortable at the cost of about 5/100 of a cent per hour. |
n
the beginning was the scroll, but then someone had a bright idea and
lo,
there was brought forth the book, and people read books, and saw that
they
were a lot easier to read than scrolls.