How the invention of the book changed how people read | Hacker News Reader

How the invention of the book changed how people read

thebritishacademy.ac.uk

81 pointsdiodorus22 comments

Very interesting piece.

I also got caught in rabbit hole following the AAP report on ebooks sales declining. It was an interesting ride, showing a glimpse on how much things are changing and the industry is evolving.

The entry of the hole, a report on trade books sales, with numbers from mainstream publishers: https://newsroom.publishers.org/trade-book-publisher-revenue...

Then digging further it seems these publisher also had a series of actions to bring physical book prices down and promote them better to fight back the ebook trend, which would explain the number.

Digging much further, independant publishing has become a thing, partly due to the rise of ebook, and independant sales is said to have sharply rised. A take on this trend: https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/ebook-sales-doubled-us-...

Or more into the indie side: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/traditional-publishers-ebook-s...

Anecdotally this is true for me. I used to buy kindle books frequently, now I rarely do because costs have gone up and paperbacks are often cheaper.

Going through my email order history also confirms this to be true (in my case) except for programming ebooks. Prices listed for my purchases are kindle prices in USD. I can't lookup the paperback price on my day of purchase but it would be higher otherwise I wouldn't buy the ebook.

May 2015 I bought The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (book 1) for 4.99. Today kindle is 7.99 and paperback is 7.99 (also the ultimate edition paperback with all 5 in the series is 13.31)

May 2015 I bought The Intelligent Investor Revised for 13.99. Today kindle is 16.99 and paperback is 12.39

Jun 2015 I bought Mistborn: the Final Empire for 4.99. Today kindle is 8.99 and paperback is 8.92.

Jun 2015 I bought Soul of a New Machine for 9.99. Today kindle is 9.99 and paperback is 9.79

Aug 2015 I bought Snow Crash for $7.68. Today kindle is 13.99 and paperback is 13.15

And I can keep going but I think you all get the point.

Strange, on Amazon from the 3rd world kindle books are a lot cheaper for me.

The ease of finding and buying them has upped my reading significantly.

Thinking out loud, the utility of the book seems to come from it being composed of standardized, discrete units (pages). It's easier to progress through it by turning pages, and it has addressability (ability to mark pages, such as to indicate the current place you're at).

And the downsides of the bookroll -- awkwardness to progress through it, having to 'rewind' them after finishing them, and lack of addressability -- comes from them being continuous.

It's interesting to note that modern reading on the web is usually continuous (scrolling). It doesn't have the awkwardness of moving through the text that bookrolls did, as the computer handles that. But it does have the problem of lack of addressability.

There is addressability on the web, yet creators are hell bent on removing it. the id tag lets you navigate directly to content on a web page. However, in an effort to try and find some good examples, every long form news site and magazine I checked forgoes them in favour of random class identifiers.

One major difference between reading on the web though is the mutability of the support. Content can change without notice, or simply disappear (though this has parallels with physical books).

I find the point of durability interesting, on how codices protected the paper better than scrolls, and had the side-effect of surviving longer and in harsher conditions. I believe the same cannot be said for digital supports: what are the chances that an EPUB file be readable (assuming file integrity and language liveliness) in the next couple of centuries ? Even if "digital monks" copy the contents of those books from one format to the next to ensure readability, at one point practicality of a paper printed version for long-term storage will prevail.

This is an interesting argument as we are in completely unknown territory.

As is it now we have some of the oldest scripts still readable because of pure luck (they were trapped in specific materials that preserved them, stayed in unopened cave etc.), extremely high effort (actively kept in pristine condition, backed up, repaired as needed) or wide appeal (e.g. religious books, reference books)

Basically we don't have much of the random papers circulating in markets and left lying around when their appeal was pretty small.

I think the same process will still happen with digital data, there will be a very low chance to find back the integrality of random users facebook posts, or the verge's amazon echo reviews in 4 centuries. But the work of the 'digital monks' will still be a lot easier, and I'd expect the bar to preserve any specific content to be a lot lower than what we had in the past.

Say, people's cooking recipes might survive a few centuries more, and possibly at a massive scale if a few dozens of people take the time to make that happen, where in the past this would just be unrealistic.

> I'd expect the bar to preserve any specific content to be a lot lower than what we had in the past.

At the moment, I agree.

However, as older civilizations rose and fell, their knowledge lived on in physical support, directly accessible by anyone who was taught how to read the language, therefore the assumption was that "as long as the language lives on, books are a good archiving support".

When our modern digital civilization falls [1], I'm not sure most of it would be transmittable through long-term electronic archiving supports that may be easily readable (as easily as a written book at least) by future civilizations, because not only the language has to live on, but the technology needed to access the content also has to function.

I also agree that some contents will always be more relevant to "backup". As for everything that happened on Facebook (same can be said for most social platforms), it is likely to entirely disappear with the company. One could even see it as a parallel civilization, that has no means of self-preservation other than that of their ruling entity's business interest.

[1] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the collapse of civilization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Personally, I much prefer continuous scroll on my Kindle. It lets me keep the part that I'm focused on in the middle of the viewing area so I always have context above and below. Addressability has been superseded by the ability to search.

> Addressability has been superseded by the ability to search.

In some respects. In long-form reading on the web it can be pain to keep track of where you were up to.

And searches can be awkward--but not impossible, of course--because of multiple search results for search terms.

I can page through a web page like a book (Page Down/Up keys or spacebar) and I also can search it and jump immediately to arbitrary keywords. Being accustomed to that, I now find reading textbooks or similar to be incredibly inconvenient and non-natural despite remembering well a time when digital texts were relatively uncommon.

If I know what I'm looking for, a half-assed index and skimming doesn't cut it. I want to jump right to the relevant information.

The typical website fits on a small number of pages.

Why weren't column numbers a form of addressing?

The article discusses the pros and cons of bookrolls and codexes (books), which is interesting, but it doesn't really discuss how books changed how people read.

Joshua Foer goes into this in 'Moonwalking with Einstein', approaching from the view of a would-be mnemonist and how scrolls were far less efficient than books. OA touches on headings, indexes and tables of content, but Foer goes into more detail and discusses how these innovations made books a far more powerful way to store, index and retrieve knowledge. It's not exactly a deep dive but it might provide some roads into the subject.

FYI: I've put together a free book format called Manuscripts. See http://manuscripts.github.io and find an example bookshelf @ http://yukimotopress.github.io Happy book writing. Happy book reading.

This looks rather like an ebook written with pandoc[1]; if you don't mind, what prompted you to write your own rather than using an existing format?

[1]: https://pandoc.org/epub.html

The new format is (way) easier / simpler and yes, you can use pandoc for markdown processing. If you create an online book than you can just use HTML & CSS e.g. a "standard" website or a webpage is a book. You should ask why the book industry created a new format, that is, EPUB :-).

PS: That's also the direction the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tries to go (but failed). See the upcoming https://www.w3.org/TR/wpub/ recommendation / standard / spec trying to replace EPUB. Compare the book manifest of manuscripts with the book manifest of wpub to see what format keeps it simple.

PPS: And to keep apple and oranges apart - FYI: pandoc is NOT a book format (it's a text processor), thus, you should compare Manuscripts to EPUB or the new WPUB.

It is a nice format.

But until my Kindles and Kobos can read it, I would never use it to consume content.

In theory (and practice) you can also (easily) create "classic" epubs or mobis from the Manuscript book source (it's just a meta datafile and structured text). One dream would be to have all Gutenberg books in Manuscripts - it's only a small step from "plain" text to structured text. I'd say way easier than to convert everything to HTML source as Standard Ebooks project is doing - https://standardebooks.org - for example. Anyways, books in (structured) text (formats) will outlive all formats and will still work even without special ebook readers. It's a format like the alphabet (that is, it's forever). If you read it on paper or on a screen or as a codex (paged) or as scroll - it's all possible by design. Anyways, thanks for your kind words.

No main TOC nav?

I think the author could have drawn more attention to how reading has changed recently, outside of just ebooks. Blogs, word processors, and articles are also massively changing how we consume information. Certainly still an interesting article, even if the title is a bit innacurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com