The status of the book in the age of digital media
thesmartset.com
thesmartset.com
Imagine a magical world where all the search results are relevant and neatly grouped, and, wait for it, written by professionals that don't care about SEO.
It made me realize how far the internet has slid (and also how handy it is to have a phone camera to "photocopy" the 3-4 pages I actually needed out of a few books).
Whereas if you want to learn TeX or C you can find amazing books that go into more detail then you'd ever practically want.
It's meant to be learned and used as black boxes, and it's all too big to actually study completely, everyone only learns the part that they work on.
I do kind of wish the "moving fast" didn't come with so much "breaking things" though.
This is already the case today, at least for me. So many homes and apartments without books, or just a few decorative ones on a coffee table. Anytime I end up in an apartment with a decent bookshelf I get excited and immediately run over to judge their taste and see where it intersects with my own.
> Curiosities aside, what makes the Fair so special is that it is about books. Books with covers and pages have, in a society dominated by social media and other sorts of online detritus, become functionally obsolete.
This is followed by several paragraphs about expensive, cultured books, and then about her own experience with a Kindle.
Most books are not the unique artifacts she talks about, or the works of Geoffrey Hartman. They're usually paperback, usually won't get a second edition, and really are about as disposable as e-books. You can see this in a microcosm with the books that this site is interested in: go to a library's programming section and the timeless books are dwarfed by a depressingly large section of reference manuals on old versions of Java and Visual Basic.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing! The heartless, disposable nature of the industry keeps the books I do want to read affordable. The author with her large collection of e-books actually is an outlier, with e-books only making up 20-30% of book publishing in the US. This share has been static over the past few years. Books only are a relic of a past age in her own mind.
Digital processes are not a 1:1 substitution for the physical world (a forum isn't a café, period), but industry-wise they let us enhance the latter. Tech isn't about selling just tech, it's about making all the things better and/or cheaper, faster, etc. It's an industrial step up, way beyond its inherent end-use. For instance, go to any hardware store, and compare offer and price with 20-30 years ago (inflation aside), then tell me our days aren't a child's dream by comparison (include 'features' such as precise cuts, delivery, and other services). Or in the world of audio/video (wherein DigitalAnalog conversion happens, and perfection isn't attainable, only "good enough"), the kind of sound experience you can get today for a few hundred bucks dances around multi-grand systems from the 1990's.
As I see it, years from now, you'll be able to buy books made in some fancy paper-like material for the equivalent of a few cents. Just like today IKEA manages to sell stuff for 10x less than 30-40 years ago.
Woah! I've tried that and failed badly. :-D
Might be due to the fact that I'm lifting weights but I can't stand audio books while doing that. Need some Metal/EDM/whatever to keep me going, E-Books totally ruin it for me.
See info and sample here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053340
Perhaps the biggest "negative" one for is, big picture, how utterly silly the ebook experience generally is. I say this thinking about how many of our collective sci-fi dreams are easily achievable today and we still don't do them. As in, I'm old enough to remember fantasizing about the possibility of the Library of Alexandria in your pocket -- and perhaps more importantly -- the excitement of the possibility.
That second thing doesn't much seem to exist. Replaced by utter silliness like *lending* ebooks from the library" which, sure, I get why it happened -- but if you step back it's just absurd.
The Thor Power ruling is a big part: https://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/05/how-thor-power-hammered-publ..., but I'd think that there should be a desire to make buyers of physical books feel they're getting something substantial.
I have only bought 1 physical book so far. I bought it because it was not available on Kindle. Also I thought it was worth the effort carrying that particular book around when I change apartments.