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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

It might be a shame for an old tradition to go away, but in a capitalist world, the usual reason something gets replaced is there is a more efficient way to do it.

In this case, it's ebooks and learning over the internet. The need for the paper book is diminished, and it is a waste of our human labour for thousands of people to be working book stalls for entire lifetimes when there is a more efficient way to disseminate knowledge.

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Even if people prefer paper books, that used book shop in the article is still doomed.

Their competition is not the internet. It's a better bookstore with lower prices in an air conditioned shopping mall.

Having been to a similar market in Mumbai, I can tell you that any air conditioned store with overhead is never going to be able to compete with these roadside bazaars in range or pricing. I fondly remember buying huge bagfuls of relatively recent releases for maybe $5 dollars a bag.

Except those "better bookstores" are also struggling. The internet might not be killing physical book sales, but online retailers are killing physical book retailers.

Stores in air conditioned shopping malls have much higher overhead and typically much lower and less diverse stocks. The result is better in only a limited sense.

> it is a waste of our human labour for thousands of people to be working book stalls for entire lifetimes when there is a more efficient way to disseminate knowledge.

Those who earn a living doing that might disagree about it being a waste of labour. A job that provides an income is useful to society even if you don't consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile. (FWIW I prefer physical books to reading on a screen).

I agree with you, but isn't the very subject we're discussing that these jobs may no longer provide income?

Does it follow that a job that does not provide income is not useful to society even if you consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile?

> Does it follow that a job that does not provide income is not useful to society even if you consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile?

No, it does not follow. The most prominent example: parenting.

Physical books have their advantages. Specially when reading technical books you find yourself going back and forth way too often to read a digital copy. Also no need to worry about batteries, less eye strain, etc.

In this case it is the online second hand stores (abebooks, amazon, etc) the ones that are killinh the physical stores.

I wish I could like reading certain technical books in dead tree format, but I recently bought both the digital and dead tree versions of the Pragmatic Programmer, 20th anniversary edition; and I really couldn’t stand the lack of colour syntax highlighting and colour diagrams in the dead tree version. Mind you, I bought from InformIT, so it was definitely not counterfeit; it was just the printing quality that the authors/publisher chose.

Plus, with a digital version like epub, I could change font size and let it reflow, change the colour theme to sepia in Apple’s Books app or Calibre, and it would still be beautifully formatted.

>and it would still be beautifully formatted.

It all depends on the book publisher. They could have printed it in color. And they could have done a crappy job on the digital version. In fact, by far the worst book quality I’ve ever seen was a very expensive Kindle version.

> but in a capitalist world, the usual reason something gets replaced is there is a more efficient way to do it.

Increasingly it seems to me that things get replaced simply because a company can make more revenue.

* Subscription software - 'more efficient'? Not really - just a guaranteed revenue stream

* planned obsolescence in products - 'more efficient'? No.

* "Books" that you don't really own, that you can't easily lend to friends or resell? Clearly all about the efficiency.

A nit: subscription software solves the perennial "necessary maintenance" problem. Nobody will pay to fix problems, only for new features.

nit: these updates often break working software if you ask me. the productivity loss here is not negligible.

eBook provides real advantages to readers, not just to companies. For example, it takes less space and you can carry more of them.

This only matters if your definition of efficient is along the axis of carring more books or minimizing space uptake. If your efficiency is based on the pleasure of holding pages, the visual aesthetic of multiple books, the maximum amount of time to go without a charge, collecting signed editions, etc. then eBooks are completely garbage.

They’re also superior in most ways as interfaces to works with more features than “main body text”, and to which you intend to refer again very often.

Pop fic and pop non-fic, then, for ebooks. Excellent for those. Paper or both for most everything else.

Aye. I've been reading on a long line of Sony Readers since 2005, and currently use a PRS-350 that I'm preserving as long as I can (I never liked Kindles). It's only a replacement for a stack of novels or other such books I intend to read cover to cover, probably once and once only. I've read over a thousand books on it, got a couple of dozen stacked up in there at any one time ready to go.

My paper book library has increased every year; novels I want to own on paper (sometimes more than one copy), books received as gifts, technical books, art books, picture books, language books, reference books, mathematical text books, graphic novels (and indeed, some things that clearly are "comics"), a significant number of books that simply aren't available in electronic form (and I probably wouldn't want in electronic form anyway - if I'm buying a book from the 1800s I want the physical artifact!), more and more.

At the moment, the only benefit I see to the Sony Reader is that it's very lightweight and compact for a stack of 12 novels. That is a very serious benefit and it's a real lifesaver for travelling, but inside the house I'm paper all the way. The only problem I have with them is that I'm genuinely running out of space to put them. Every bookshelf is two (or even three deep) with books, and I've lost one desk entirely to books piled three to four feet deep. There is a real chance that I might end up finally giving up on renting purely to buy a house in which I can turn a couple of rooms into decent book storage.

Yeah, I've been forcing myself to make Hard Choices about my largish collection of books, and novels from the last 80-100 years are the easiest ones to ditch in favor of ebooks. Even short story collections, it's kinda nice to have those in dead-tree format for convenience, but ordinary (not, like, Infinite Jest), somewhat recent novels? Hard to justify keeping them around.

Yes, but again, these rely on different definitions of efficiency. I definitely don't consider multi-method interfacing to be useful to me at all in the books I read. I would much rather physically write notes if I want to commit something to reference or memory, since my brain has O(1) lookup where I wrote where something else is, but an O(n) lookup when I get to the note-bucket of my reference pools. Much easier to scan over a single page or a sticky note on the physical book surface than however long would be my library's notes as a totality.

Plus, you know, DRM makes ebooks more profitable to the original publishers.

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