> and that I have nothing to put on my shelf.
Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?
I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.
Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?
I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.
Because it adds to the room. I realize this is very much a question of personal taste, but I find that a room with a wall covered in books can be a beautiful design detail that adds warmth and character to a room. Plus physical books are pretty awesome in their own right.
It feels very clean to me. I don't like cluttering up space for no reason than to occupy it.
I'm a fan of e-books and definitely think they have their place (I've purchased a total of 3 Nook devices over the years), but I am not ready to wholesale walk away from dead-tree books either.
I want my son to be able to pull down an atlas and noodle through it, or Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, or {insert long list of books here}. That's harder for him to do if they're all stuck on a disc somewhere.
Give your kid a tablet, and they have instant access to more books, films, television shows, etc. than you could ever hope to fit in your home.
Why flick through an atlas when you have services like Google Maps which are more useful (route planning, satellite imagery, 3D visuals, etc.)?
Why flick through a physical copy of Brewer's, when you can scroll through a digital copy, or just browse the Internet and find all that information and more?
curation is important.
Also with an ereader travelling is fantastic. A library in less than 300 gm.
It's also easier to access that library on your phone which is with many people all the time.
Not to mention access for your kids to millions of legal free ebooks.
Search _is_ one application where electronic copies definitely can surpass physical books.
Though if I know the author and work, I can often flip to a page pretty quickly. Especially if there's an index, but even without, I have a pretty good sense of where in a book a passage occurred, even position on the page.
but the legal stuff is annoying. when I die my books are legally dubious - do they get handed down in my will or does the licence make them non-transferable. and removing drm is a criminal offence.
If these were digitised they'd most likely be stored on the same device as their personal and private matters, and one does not out of good manners, automatically fire up their PC's or tablets to go and have a rummage around.
I have hundreds of books and I'd find it hard to decide which ones should hit the recycler. To this day yet even my scrappy 1970's paperback copies of stuff like 1984, Brave New World or The Ginger Man still elicit long conversations because visiting friends can freely browse your shelves.
There are interior decorators who know about our observational biases and will specify books on shelves to match a "look" although the client will probably never crack the book open. Once I learned that, the utility of analyzing bookshelves dropped a bit.
Have to actually read to be interesting, merely owning an unread book isn't very interesting. This impacts the public library user pretty intensely, because they can read a lot without having the interior decorating to prove it.
Of course it is a heuristic and there are both false negatives and positives, so YMMV.
Agreed that probably pretty expensive if you're trying to pose as a foodie complete with "Modernist Cuisine" and all that.
On the other hand, "Vintage classic worn leather covers, organized on the shelf by color" that stuff is shoveled out by the pound. The expensive part is hiring the interior decorator, not buying the shoveled books.
Bringing it home to HN I suspect for many here, there are some copies of Knuth, and the little scheme series, and numerous others, on some peoples bookshelves that look nice but have avoided reading...
I have to say one of the main reasons for this is that they are beautiful books. The design and printing of them are awesome, I even used them as inspiration for designing my friends first novel (self published) which took me six months of researching typesetting and fonts and hacking away on InDesign. I don't think I could ever bring myself to throwing/giving them away.
But I've never really had the chance to use them for posturing, non of my meatspace friends are remotely involved in IT, so have no idea about the books. But many a person has been impressed by the aesthetic quality of them, believe it or not...
With my ebooks I am not so sure that I'll be disciplined about keeping backups on contemporary storage material, have a reader still able to read the format or a tool to convert them easily.
I must admit I don't share your confidence in modern book making methods. I've had books fall apart after a couple of months, so I don't see 50 years happening.
Its the same with CD & DVD...we are promised many years of safe storage but in practice they fail soon.
For my digital media I'm paranoid - I have a mirrored NAS, rsynced to a third drive, copies on my laptop, and two offsite backups of most of my media, and I'm still concerned about how easy it is to lose it.
Especially as most of my early writing (of little value to anyone but me, but of great sentimental value) only survives on printouts - even faded acidic printer paper from the early 80's to early 90's have long outlasted the storage media holding the files it was saved on. Not because disks can't live long, but because the density and relative fragility makes it so much easier to lose or damage the data.
Exactly. They were made 25 years ago. I'm talking about books being printed right now. Quality is not what it once was.
A sewn cloth binding, archival-grade acid-free paper, and good inks will last centuries.
Pulp paperbacks may fall apart after a single reading, though I've got a few I've had for 20+ years and multiple readings, though a few of those have a fair bit of packaging tape on them.
Several of my college textbooks fell apart distressingly fast, and I've got a number of softcover books whose pages are getting unglued (varying vintages). Different cover materials can also have different longevities: a few composite / plastic covered books have had the covers crack off or break.
CD's and DVD's are another matter unfortuntaly... I am now basically operating under the assumption that any CD or DVD will be unreadable after a few years.
If I'm not mistaken then libraries buy a higher grade of books designed to endure much more. I've seen it on Amazon. i.e. a book comes in ebook, paperback, hardback & then another category - the name of it currently eludes me though.
I agree on the re-binding though.
I also know my kids don't read nearly as much as I did, so encouraging them to peruse the media server just isn't the same as letting them chill in the home library, and procrastinate from formal assignments by checking out the old man's books. (I will admit to dog-earing the naughty bits of some of my parents racy paperbacks.)
Once expansive touchscreens are cheap, of course, we can display a virtual wall of bookshelves and instantly load a text on the device of choice, or even print on demand.
And I also know I haven't bought a hard copy book in several years and I love being able to travel with a substantial library (and music collection). All I'll ever need is a little electricity to keep a tablet charged. (Assuming an easy way to move my collection to the next gen device.)
Choice. Choice. Choice. (EDIT: Oh yeah--merci, Calibre.)
This is exactly what I had in mind when reading some of the comments. "Discoverability and serendipity", as DanBC pointed out is fixable by this technology. But you don't need huge touchscreens. A medium-sized one (55"?) with something like Cover Flow, where different books slowly move across the screen might be a pretty good solution.
The problem is that when stuff is out of sight, you don't even think that it is there. Look at the Internet: it's a massive amount of information and you just don't even know what you could ever find unless you spend time searching for it.
When something is physically tangible, it's way easier to locate it and to think about it. That's how our brains work.