When hard books disappear
kk.org
kk.org
High quality, "collectible" books kept for their prestige value.
"Consumable" books that you read for fun or to learn something fairly current (not timeless) drift more and more towards ebooks.
In other words, people buy Knuth's books to adorn their office shelves with, but probably won't feel the same way about putting "Twilight" (or worse) there, even if they enjoy reading them.
I agree that consumable books will disappear faster than collectible books. In fact, I believe Amazon released statistics a while back showing pulp fiction sells better (compared to paper copy sales) than pretty much any other genre on the Kindle.
But I am not so sure collectible books will be around in 30 or 50 years. By then, the concept of a bookshelf may seem hopelessly backwards. A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless (or at least significantly less appreciated), why wouldn't paper copies of Knuth's books follow?
Maybe it is just because I grew up with books, but I really prefer to actually hold a real book to read it (although I do read ebooks when it's more convenient). The tactile experience of a real book is something that I think ebooks will have a very hard time trying to surpass. So I think that there will always be a place for them.
Although perhaps I'm starting to sound like someone who will only listen to music on LPs!
I have a box of vinyl in my basement. It still doesn't get listened to in favor of the lower quality MP3s. With ebooks, you don't even lose the quality.
I am also a surfer and I found this explanation of riding a hollow wooden surfboard a beautiful description of just this type of experience.
"You obviously can’t actually feel the wood when it’s wrapped in a layer of glass & resin. But beyond the tactile, there’s definitely an emotional aspect to paddling, sitting, and standing on a piece of wood in the water.
You ever driven a Ford truck from the 50′s? Slept on the dirt in wool blankets? Cleaned a big fish? Sipped 40-year old Scotch? Chopped down a tree with an axe? Like surfing a wood board, all of those kinds of things awaken something inside of us that the plasticine era has covered up in layers of shiny dross." Benny http://www.hollowsurfboards.com/Q&A.htm
Pure pulp will, I agree, largely leave the printed medium. Items like Twilight may I suspect stay around as they're 'a collectible series' in spite of perceived literary merit, almost as posters or similar do today.
I've compared the future of the book here before to the future of the horse in the early days of cars. They will retain a luxury and a prestige with enthusiasts for certain specific applications, but their previous general usage will likely vanish.
What will remain in print? Some may want classic texts like Don Knuth's TAOCP, though personally for that sort of thing I'd always rather have an eBook. I foresee primarily luxury 'coffee table' books - lavishly illustrated, beautifully made, designed to be objects of desire in themselves, independent of their content.
Otherwise, we're talking legacy content. I have a 1980 copy of a huge, library reference quality world atlas that can be pried out of my cold dead hands thank you, and a few other similar volumes, but pretty much everything else would frankly serve me better as an ePub file on a home server that could get synched to my various devices.
As an aside - I would LOVE a historic online mapping service. The ability to view a map moving through time, communities displacing, rivers changing course, harbours silting up, whole countries appearing and disappearing, simply by selecting an area and scrolling along a time axis, would destroy my ability to achieve anything productive for a very long time ;-)
In theory something like this could be achieved by wading through the regular releases of openstreetmaps[1] data. Although there you're more likely to see the results of the collection/moderation process than anything else. Still, possibly interesting to look at.
I'm too lazy to search for the exact reference this very moment, but I remember reading about how Seneca was making fun of the wealthy, not-so-educated people of his age that were collecting papyrus books in order to show how cultivated they were. This was happening 2,000 years ago, I fail to see how such a long habit would disappear over night just because people in Sillicon Valley live in a different world.
The first real alternatives to paper books included papyrus, microfiche, reel-to-reel microfilm, card catalogs, Rolodex files, the khipu, the filmstrip, the erasable notebook of ivory leaves, the phonograph, Indecks cards...
Surely microfilm replaced paper books in many uses some time ago.
I think the last time I saw a horse being used for transportation (pulling a two-wheeled cart) was, uh, last week.
So it might be a lot messier than a simple replacement.
Can you give an example? A hundred years ago a rich man wore a handmade suit and a Rolex and drove around in a Rolls Royce. In a hundred years time, the only difference is that the car will fly...
Note that what you're describing are items that are symbols of pride due to their limited accessibility. I don't think social symbols based on indicating wealth will ever go away. Collectible books like TAOCP are a different type of symbol and usually not indicative of great wealth. These non-wealth based symbols often disappear (over very long periods of time), especially when you can access the same product in a more convenient method.
Even if you had the TeX PDF output to read, it's not quite the same. Now maybe younger folks today are so used to reading things digitally that they won't care or notice the difference; I'm not sure.
E.g., I constantly refer back to previously read material. I never know 100% where it is or know in advance that I'm going, but I have a rough idea of where it was by the thickness of the book. If I'm reading a novel, I like to refer to some previous dialog. If I'm reading a math book, I like to go back to the motivating example. When the depth component is removed it's surprisingly difficult to find my place. Likewise, I can navigate through a book by thumbing through it much faster than I can press the "prev" or "next" button or try to perform a binary search by entering in random page numbers.
Having said all that, I have a Sony Reader and I keep it in my bag when I commute. If I end up getting stuck someplace longer than anticipated, it's really handy to have a whole library at my hands. It's just not my preferred way of reading.
That, and the only time I've ever had my Kindle go dead on me was when I accidentally left the WiFi on and used it constantly for like three weeks.
Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?
"Dongly Things" by Douglas Adams
It should definitely last for 4 paperbacks. Maybe your Nook is the color version?
For my digicam I have two batteries. One is always in the device, one is either in the charger or packed with the camera fully loaded. I find that works very well.
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help... [2]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4059 (under 'iBooks features')
In other words, someone needs to develop what Vim/Emacs is to text editors, for e-book readers.
In fact, writing is an interesting example because many people say that they can think perfectly while writing by hand, but not while typing. But the ones I know who have been typing since they were extremely young, or have just been typing for a long time, often say they can think perfectly while typing. I have actually noticed the transition in myself-5 years ago it was very hard to think deeply while typing, today it's completely natural.
An e-book searching system doesn't need to be nearly as complex as typing. For example, you could theoretically have a little scrollbar that you drag your finger across and can easily anywhere from the beginning to the end of the book. In just a couple weeks I imagine this would be totally natural behavior.
1. I have to cross-reference page numbers for every citation. When you're talking about hundreds of citations from dozens of sources, you come to regret not reading the originals in the first place. I don't see the day when citing Kindle locations becomes acceptable among the standardized citation guides (MLA, Chicago, etc.) since many users convert PDFs by themselves, and different settings (e.g. omitting introductory pages, dedication pages, title pages, etc.) mean different locations.
2. Annotations. Everyone tells me how easy it is to insert notes and highlight passages, but the currently available methods do not give me the same flexibility as a simple pen:
2A. Discontinuous highlighting/underlining. Sometimes I don't want to highlight every word in a particular passage, but Kindle does not allow me to do this; as soon as the highlight ends, the next highlight can only be treated as a completely new annotation.
2B. I can't draw. Arrows, lines, maps, even illustrations are an important part of my annotation process. On the bottom of one section of Plato's Meno, for example, I have about a half a dozen drawings trying to make sense of a particularly interesting geometry problem (about which several papers have been published) [1]
2C. Multiple language/character support. This is a particularly difficult issue when dealing with translations. Even if I'm not reading a Greek text, I may be on-the-fly translating between English, French, German, and Greek (often 3 or even 4 of the above within the same paper!). As such, quite a few of my notes are in Greek, and so you can imagine my disappointment with the Kindle.
3. Jumping between passages is difficult. Sure, I can search the text - but I guarantee that's actually slower than flipping through pages. And if I direct students to a particular passage? That one kid using a Kindle in the corner of the room is still looking for it by the time we have moved on.
These are not all just Kindle problems, they're obstacles that eBooks and their complimentary software have to overcome to actually obsolete the physical book. I don't mean to suggest that these issues can't be overcome [2], but I believe the paperless revolution is much further away than some like to believe.
For the small amount of for-pleasure-not-work fiction that I consume, I'm probably not going back to paper.
[1] http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/writings/dialogues/meno/meno9...
[2] No doubt the failure to adopt these features stems from low demand -- most of the demand in the industry is for popular literature, not the sort of people who are writing all sorts of things in the margins of their books. There are also some curious UI/UX problems that need solutions, e.g. scanning pages.
<quote source="Dune (Herbert, Frank)">A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.</quote>
This perfectly identifies a location in the work, regardless of page numbers and other nonsense. A smart viewer will have no problem linking it to the correct place.
Later in the year the professor showed up with an iPad as well. :)
(There are apps to organize and cite papers with, like Mendeley, that help somewhat, but I haven't found a great one yet.)
It's a pity they seem to gloss over that, since the duplication of that effort does need some justification - perhaps the national libraries don't cover enough foreign books? Or they don't trust the government? Also it's a bit misleading, acting as if it doesn't already happen.
I do not mean this as a modern-day political snark at any particular government, I mean this as a historical comment.
Of course there's no guarantee your archive will survive indefinitely either, but if we treasure them and have several of them the odds go up substantially.
It is true that things might be more efficient if everyone pooled resources and, say, kept track of the fact that we have ten distributed copies of Book X in the world but only three of Y, so we should be looking out for more copies of Y. Which brings us to a second reason to start a new public archive: as a pilot project to explore different ways of running public archives. Modern infotech is evolving fast; presumably there is lots of room to experiment with different strategies, and the national libraries have only so much budget for research.
Edit: To expound on my last point, It not just redundancy in the collections, but redundancy in the effort which is important. If the LoC stores two copies of the same book in two geographically dispersed locations but makes the same brain-dead mistake in preservation process at both, then it doesn't matter that there were two copies. Entirely separate organizations using entirely separate methodologies are much safer than one organization. The general process for storing these books seems to be very different than that of the Library so it is good that he is duplicating the effort.
I read once that the only things the Library is legally required to keep copies of are original author holographs; I don't know if that is true.
Physical books all in one place have a bad habit of being more vulnerable to destruction.
But hey why not, it's just one copy of the books. I think it's a great idea to at least attempt to keep an archive for this reason:
"When they were making microfilm of books, they thought they would never have to rescan them. When they were being scanned at 300 dpi, they thought they would never have to scan them again. We know someday these books will be rescanned. They will be waiting here in boxes."
If you have a scanned/OCRed copy of a novel (or a book that is an ebook from the get-go) -- then why would you need to rescan it?
Light bulbs didn't cause candles to disappear completely.
Printed books will get a feel of classic/high end/fancy. Parents will be reading to their kids from printed books (as well as electronic ones) for a while.
If you take an example as puerile as my son's latest acquisition 'Where is little duck?', I struggle to see how an electronic replacement can supersede the physical interaction he has with the different textures and the constant struggle he has learning how to turn one page at a time (he's only 13 months old btw!).
I love ebook technology and whilst I can't justify the cost of a kindle currently, I could definitely see myself reading more if I had one but I think to say that technology will render physical books defunct is sensationalism.
Children's books have a very short shelf life. New ones get published all the time. A very tiny percentage become Curious George and get reprinted for decades, but the rest go out of print. The printed copies get used by children and therefore become ragged and nasty. In ten years you will have thrown them away. Hopefully you will have thrown them away: Clutter is no good either. If we want to preserve them it should not be your house's job.
This is why archiving is hard. It is why backups are hard. It all seems so redundant when the objects are shiny and new and sitting right there, they're in the stores, they're on all your iDevices, they're all over YouTube. And then one day you wake up and the original film of your 1970s-era Oscar-winning movie has fallen apart. This actually happens! You've got to think ahead.
The danger of the digital era is that we get tempted to rely on a number of physical copies that is so small that we get blindsided by black-swan accidents. That's what this is really about. The movie Metropolis was ultimately saved because it was distributed in physical copies and a film archive in Argentina didn't throw theirs away like everybody else. That sort of thing is in danger of stopping. Make copies!
This needn't actually be that hard if we do it systematically.
Aficionados may still use the legacy format, preferring it due to some special advantage, but for the normal man-in-the-street, the more convenient format will definitely replace the old.
Pop-up books and textured books for small children, like the "That's not my ..." series are a different matter, and I can't picture quite what their replacement will be; but normal story books, whether illustrated or not, will easily be replaced by ebooks, once colour e-ink is good enough and cheap enough.
I don't think it will happen to you or I in our lifetimes, we already own too many books, and the effort and expense of replacing our existing paper collections with electronic copies is too great.
It will happen to other people in our lifetimes. People who are young children today are just as unlikely to buy paper books in adulthood as today's youth are to buy CDs. I wouldn't be surprised if your son's high school studies are conducted without paper books.
I can't imagine buying paper fiction for myself any more, unless I have a very good reason for doing so (I recently had to kill several hours alone on a rainy day with nothing but my wallet, so I bought one).
If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a book a year, and each book costs between $5-$10, replacement costs are not substantial. If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a kindle a year, then we're talking serious money.
Also, if there are the equiv 'used' bookstores that sell ebooks for $1.
I'd even promise that the books go to the recyclers, not on the used market.
Insert previous book for recycling credit, which gets pulped later, new book prints on recycled paper but with ink that can also be easily extracted later.
Babylon5 had a newpaper printer I think where you inserted the previous day's paper and got a new one. People will always like hard copy for some casual mediums.
In a delete nothing world, where ideally URIs never change, new material == a new URI, it is easy enough to assume that digital material will last forever, but I am a bit pessimistic here. For example, what if a systemic software error invalidates most of S3?
I must agree with other people here that collectible books will probably always exist. I have a 50 pound tome of da Vinci's total corpus of work a customer gave me for Christmas - thumbing through that is simply a different kind of experience than accessing the same material through a web browser, even without rich media like video.
Kids these days (mine and their friends) don't own music collections. Its all on the web. They just download, listen, discard music.
I believe a generation will grow into EBooks and have utterly no use for bulky, unsearchable faded paper books. I will be left in my crowded house, filled with books, and the grandchildren will know I am an old coot. And I am happy with this.
Except that books have a far, far, longer history than records/CD/magnetic disks as a physical, portable medium for instant-access.
There's no reason a dead-tree book can't also have an e-ink inside-cover that allows for full-index searching. Books have evolved but are unlikely to just go away, and the "flip pages with your finger" UI has proved immensely durable.
Also, what are we to make of all those kids buying vinyl? :)
Lets admit it - books have no advantage whatsoever beyond our lifetime familiarity and affection for them. They will go away as surely as victrolas, snuff boxes, spats and buggy whips.
Still, I observe a generation that doesn't buy media, at all. And CD stores closing, and bookstore chains going belly-up. It has to mean something.
(I'm beginning to think we need to watch middle-aged women to get a real sense of the future.)
I still buy a lot of physical books, but not very often in a physical store. I only buy a few CDs, but those too I get online. That's just where I can find them. CD's, though, are not interesting as objects and do nothing to enhance the interaction with the content. A book, however, offers a set physical, spatial, 3D cues about the content (e.g., that interesting quote was at about the middle of the book, or five pages back).
In a way, vinyl beats digital in that regard; it's been a while, but I recall the way one would interact (so to speak) with a record. Side A; side B; getting up to flip the record. It offered a different kind of connection than a CD or MP3.
I'd like to see the printed page use e-ink or something so that I can get the best of both worlds in a morphing bundle of bound flippable pages holding everything I want to read.
I've got 26 bookcases at home. The prospect of moving is staggering (last time the sheer mass bumped the predicted cost by $2000). There are piles of books I so want to read but know I'll never get to ... and will never part with. Oh, to have electronic copies of 2/3rds so I'd at least have the content for the prospect of reading some day without the weight/volume, and to replace the remaining 1/3rd with high quality renderings for the sensory experience of "I _own_ this".
- Solar
- Books are heavier, already.
- Personal preference, but the UI will improve over time -- it probably won't be flipping a page however.
See you next year! :-)
And I want it to be unhackable. And EMP shielded.
And I'm generation Y, we'll invent clinical immortality and we're going to live forever.