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Considering that all that information could be accessible in an easier way online (and with better resolution), a book doesn't make much sense. They are heavy, you can't copy/paste, you can't zoom on the images, you can't share it easily... however, they are beautiful. I hope people keep making books for years - not only this kind of books (that are beautiful), but also paperbacks, etc. Books are a beauty on themselves, even if they are not the best format for some purposes.

I guess, however, we are going into a future that resonates with a quote from HBO's The Newsroom, that says that books are the new form of art. They will soon be like paintings.

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You bring up good points against the physical medium (especially when it comes to note-taking), but I'd respectfully disagree.

Books I've read multiple times, the great ones, nothing beats a well-made physical edition.

The way light pushes off the pages, that smell...the book changes over time as you read it more. It almost takes on a life of its own with yours. And, if you need to be completely offline or Amazon decides to one day Google-drop your entire online library, that book will still be open to you.

Great work deserves to be supported. Buying a physical copy is my small way to show my support.

You can smell another book while reading an ebook, and those are readable offline

Are there scratch n sniff book smell stickers for ebook readers?

You can smell another person while caressing your significant other, but it probably won't be a satisfying experience in the round.

Not only that, a much read book is like an old friend when you pick it up again. The wrinkled edges, the spine giving away with ease when turning, the small tea spill stain you made on accident.

A book makes sense because lots of people want a book. Sounds like they are planning an ebook version as well, so that solves some of your problems with the format.

>you can't zoom on the images

I enjoy picture books, which went through a golden age of illustration that ended when 32 bit computer graphics became available. Often I look at scans of picture books, and the experience is disappointing compared to printed paper. It would help if I had a giant A3 size tablet, so that I could see the whole illustration at once at the intended size and hold it like a book, but even if the scan has good resolution there's still the matter of gamma or contrast or color balance. I don't want to adjust these to some theoretical perfection, I want to adjust the actual lighting under which I look at an actual picture. So maybe a gigantic e-ink tablet could be ... as good.

Searchability, it's true, is an advantage. Physical books offer an advantage in discoverability, though, because of the way flicking through the pages works: not only is it very fast, but you can see multiple pages at once while keeping the places with your fingers, utilizing basic monkey hardware to great advantage in ways which swiping hasn't yet replicated.

What would be really cool is if all of this information was readily formatted and readable on something like Wikipedia, with all of the sourced images, and then people could "print" their own personal book copies through a great printer. I can already order custom books for my toddler with his name woven into the books illustrations from places like Uncommon Goods.

It sucks there is no inbetween from <send webpage to desktop printers> and <buy a niche book that needed $750k in crowd funding to even exist>.

I'd love to be able to ship myself beautifully printed and bound books on all sorts of free information.

The original kickstarter was for $150k, not $750k. They went way past what their minimum target was.

The issue with doing print on demand is that it basically limits you to doing industrial inkjet printing.

“Real” offset printing will produce a sharper, higher quality result, and is more amenable to using nicer paper stock too.

You can absolutely zoom in on the images: You hold the book closer to your face.

Also, fundamentally printed images just look different than displayed ones.

a PDF on my tablet is going to disappear from view within days. A coffee table book that takes up space on a table or looks good on a bookshelf provides an evergreen visual reminder, but not in an annoying way like a phone notification or home screen shortcut.

The problem is epubs and the like didn't evolve shit since invention.

It's more that small e-ink devices are completely unsuitable for reading content that demands a fixed layout designed for large pages, often with multi-column text and lots of photos/artwork/diagrams.

Those are the best kinds of books. Epubs haven't evolved since 2010 because it's done it's job. It's provided a scaffolding for selling .epub files for $9.99.

I prefer physical books for this reason. If I'm paying $10, I'll buy a used copy over a DRM file.

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