When hard books disappear

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/when_hard_books.php

by jonknee • 15 years ago

142 102 15 years ago

flipbrad• 15 years ago

it could be interesting to monitor the gradual disappearance of physical copies of books by (for example) monitoring the frequency of listings of that book on ebay, or the amazon marketplace (based on the assumption that books that perish are not re-listed, although I'll admit that books are 'sticky' and could bounce around owners until settling with owners who are keenest to hold on to them long term, so you'd perhaps expect decreasing market volume/listing frequency even without any perishing)

singular3• 15 years ago

I think this is a noble aim, however isn't this partly the duty of national libraries such as the British Library[1] and the Library of Congress[2]? Having said that, perhaps the point is to take such archives out of the hands of government organisations?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_library

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_congress

jonknee5• 15 years ago

Part of it seems to be that for copyright they want to own the physical books that they have scans of. Instead of destroying the books in the process like is common, they are taking care to preserve the books.

singular3• 15 years ago

Agreed, that's clearly part of it, but the overall thrust of the article seems to be 'if we don't do this physical books will disappear', which seems to be duplicating the work of national libraries.

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.

astine• 15 years ago

I do work for the Library of Congress and no, it is not part of the mission of the Library to maintain a physical copy of every book ever written, though it does have extensive collections. Regardless, having redundancy in efforts will only make the efforts more effective.

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.

gwern• 15 years ago

> it is not part of the mission of the Library to maintain a physical copy of every book ever written

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.

Peroni2• 15 years ago

Interesting article however I don't think I'll ever grasp the concept that physical books could one day disappear entirely from the household.

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.

mechanical_fish3• 15 years ago

And yet your example is squarely in the center of the problem. How many children's books from 1850 are in your house? How many children's books from 1950 are in your house? What percentage of your own children's books are still in your possession?

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!

Peroni2• 15 years ago

I am 100% in favour of archiving and I agree with your point entirely. My frustration is directed towards those who believe that within the next few decades, printed books will be obsolete.

jonknee5• 15 years ago

The next time I move I doubt I'll take any more than a couple books with me. Same for DVDs too. Physical media is a dinosaur.

frobozz2• 15 years ago

I don't see that there is a significant difference between ebooks replacing paper books, and books replacing scrolls, or mp3s replacing CDs replacing vinyl.

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).

Apocryphon6• 15 years ago

I think an issue is the leap involved. Vinyl required record players to be used- thus the leap to CDs is replacing mechanical players with more sophisticated mechanical ones. Books, however, require no analogous external player. eBooks, on the other hand, require readers, which are digital and subject to mechanical failures. eBook readers also have other external requirements such as a need to be charged, Wi-Fi access to download books, and so on. A paper book is self-contained.

dgabriel• 15 years ago

The other thing, in terms of elementary schooling, is that it is far more cost effective to distribute paper books than eBook readers to hundreds of children. It's possible that a nigh-indestructible e-paper could work, but only if it's incredibly cheap, and the electronic formats of the books are much less expensive than traditional hard copies.

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.

davidw3• 15 years ago

I don't think books will disappear. I could see a divergence, though:

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.

SatvikBeri6• 15 years ago

I think there will be a major shift with the next generation. A lot of the reasons for keeping hardcover books are due to tradition/"I grew up with this therefore I like it"-similarly to music.

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?

stephen_g• 15 years ago

I don't know if there is such a big similarity to music... We interact directly with a book, so using an ebook is a very different experience. But listening to music sounds pretty much the same whether the source is a computer, my phone, or a CD.

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!

eftpotrm2• 15 years ago

I still think the notion of a 'collectible' book is a good one, but probably not quite as phrased there.

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 ;-)

paganel• 15 years ago

> A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless

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.

gaius2• 15 years ago

A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless (or at least significantly less appreciated)

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...

gaius2• 15 years ago

There is one definite use for this: technical books. I had a clear-out recently and got rid of books on obsolete products. They were literally worthless - you can't even buy e.g. Oracle 7 now, even if you wanted to, or download it, so I couldn't donate them to a school or something. But all in all, what I threw out probably cost well north of a grand, new.

davidw3• 15 years ago

Those are the 'current' books I wrote about. I think keeping the knowledge in them is likely a good idea, somehow or another, but see no compelling reason to keep physical copies of them.

tjr• 15 years ago

Knuth's books aren't only timeless, but they are beautifully typeset, printed, and bound. I don't feel like I'm missing anything special along these lines when reading an ebook novel, but I have yet to see the experience of reading a really nicely produced book on a digital reader.

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.

abecedarius2• 15 years ago

I was disappointed in the binding of Volume 4A. It's the cheap hard-to-hold-open kind most publishers seem to have switched to around 2000. They didn't even give the pages wider inner margins to compensate.

kragen4• 15 years ago

Knuth wrote TeX in the first place in the 1970s because he missed the experience of reading a really nicely produced book on a digital phototypesetter. History may not repeat itself, but it does seem to have an echo sometimes.

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

I'm really lamenting the demise of physical books and am happy I went through college when I did. Without a doubt having a whole volume of books at hand in a lightweight device is awesome. But reading a book is about much more than just the content to me. None of the devices on the market adequately model how I interact with a book and I think fundamentally they can't.

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.

oinksoft• 15 years ago

I think this just explains that physical books will be practical and widespread until we see some groundbreaking eBook user interface that can match those benefits (I'm not holding my breath).

hugh33• 15 years ago

My Nook is good for travel, but now the novelty is wearing off I use it less for that. Last week I went away for a week carrying only a small cabin bag, which should be the killer app for the Nook, but when it came time to pack I didn't feel like dealing with questions like "Is my Nook charged?" and "Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?" and "If I start charging now, will it have enough charge to make it for the entire flight?" so I just shoved four paperbacks into my bag. Heavier and bulkier, but less effort.

jonknee5• 15 years ago

Should have gotten a Kindle, hardly any need to wonder if it's charged.

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

The other advantage of a paperback on a flight is the FAA allows you to use it during takeoff and landing. I overlooked that the last time I packed my ebook reader.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

  Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?

If you haven't read it already, DNA wrote the definitive essay on the evils of proprietary power cables and connecters. It's a great read.

"Dongly Things" by Douglas Adams

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

GFischer• 15 years ago

Don't know about the Nook, but I have a Kindle (had it for 3 months already) and I use it everywhere.. in a bus, bathroom, waits on a queue... and the charge is good enough that I can take it for a weekend and not worry.

It should definitely last for 4 paperbacks. Maybe your Nook is the color version?

Tichy• 15 years ago

Does it have an exchangeable battery? I recently went on a four day hiking trip and switched off my phone most of the time, so that I would have power in case of an emergency. Only later did it occur to me that I could simply have packed another battery. I was thinking all complicated, solar chargers and what not.

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.

Jach2• 15 years ago

I'm quite happy with simple PDFs and a laptop or at home on my desktop. I don't know what PDF readers you're using, but at least Okular has bookmarks, notes, markings, underlinings, highlights... Dog-earings and other book mutilations are so primitive! Index searches aren't as useful anymore, I love ctrl+F. :P

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

I find PDF search for tech books almost wholly useless, whereas the index does a really good job. I guess it's because it has that human touch to give a high relevancy score shrug

modernerd• 15 years ago

It's worth learning to use the highlighting and bookmarking features in the iBooks/Kindle readers.[1][2] I felt exactly the same way as you until I started actively bookmarking and annotating as I read, which makes it much easier to cross reference and skip back. It's made a world of difference to how I feel about e-books.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help... [2]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4059 (under 'iBooks features')

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

Well the point was I don't know I want to reference back to something until I encounter something new. Good writing isn't all foreboding. So a depiction or conversation may seem innocuous but become much more relevant 70 pages down the line. I'm not good enough to predict those situations, but have strong enough recollection to want to go back and review the older passage.

rpedroso• 15 years ago

I work principally in academia, and I recently bought a Kindle to cut down on printing costs for PDF files (acquired from various sources, principally JStor). I find it increasingly unsatisfying.

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.

coliveira• 15 years ago

I think the general answer in that the current generation of Kindle and similar readers were created to read paperback novels, not for technical documents. The same way it takes a lot of hard work to create a word processor for technical documents (compare TeX to MS Word), it will take a lot of work to create a good reader for such documents.

icebraining• 15 years ago

1) is pretty easy to implement. Ebooks are searchable; page numbers are hacks around the limitations of paper books. Example:

<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.

daniel022162• 15 years ago

I've found my iPad to be pretty good at dealing with academic PDFs, but there are still some difficulties that make it annoying. I started taking it to my discussion classes instead of printing the day's paper out, and it worked great. The PDF is reproduced exactly as it prints, and you can quickly scroll from one page to another, search, and zoom in on interesting bits. The ACM two-column format works well with the iPad's PDF reader and iBooks.

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.)

lettergram• 15 years ago

I don't really feel books will disappear. I know personally I read most of my books on ebook, but on occasions I will go buy a book of an author I like and I know many people do the same as I do. Also the library of congress made it its goal to archive all the knowledge both to a giant database as well as in the paper form. So I feel the article is slightly off in that regard.

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Won't disappear completely, just as mechanical watches haven't ... but they'll become luxury items, focused more on "I want this and I want it as well-made as possible" than the functional content.

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".

EGreg• 15 years ago

This reminds me a bit of the library of alexandria.

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."

whatusername• 15 years ago

I think you'll find that only applies to picture books.

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?

jim_h• 15 years ago

I hope physical books don't disappear for a long time. Maybe once ALL books are available as ebooks in open format and without restriction on what I can do with them. I'd like the ability to trade, borrow, or resell my books.

Also, if there are the equiv 'used' bookstores that sell ebooks for $1.

BasDirks• 15 years ago

somewhat related: individual titles do disappear, without a trace. I have an 1876 French poem collection on my shelves about which _nothing_ is written on the internet.

JoeAltmaier5• 15 years ago

So write about it!

JoeAltmaier5• 15 years ago

Lots of talk about "books won't really go away". I'm reminded of the victrola my Grandmother kept until the day she died.

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.

jamesbritt4• 15 years ago

Lots of talk about "books won't really go away". I'm reminded of the victrola my Grandmother kept until the day she died.

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? :)

JoeAltmaier5• 15 years ago

Portable? Instant-access? Are you sure you don't have that backward? EBooks outstrip paper books in this way, by at least an order of magnitude.

stan_rogers• 15 years ago

I'm on the "dead trees or their equivalent forever" side myself (search doesn't work well with paraphrases, and the physical book has more physical cues for random retrieval of imperfectly remembered passages), but "the 'flip pages with your finger' UI has proved immensely durable" requires a link to this classic clip from Øystein og jeg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

Apocryphon6• 15 years ago

Wake me up when digital displays can match the graphical resolution of the printed page. And when the display is attached to a reader device that will never, ever need to be recharged. And is incredibly lightweight. And gives off the satisfaction of physically flipping through pages.

ezy• 15 years ago

- http://global.epson.com/newsroom/2011/news_20110517.html

- 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! :-)

Apocryphon6• 15 years ago

I ain't touching this unless it has haptic features that simulate the sensation of page-flipping, full ability in annotations and scribblings on the e-pages (I want to be able to use a ruler with my markings, I want digital pens, I want to be able to use digital crayons for all I care), and it is medically confirmed that reading e-ink produces no more eyestrain than reading paper.

And I want it to be unhackable. And EMP shielded.

drud• 15 years ago

It is without doubt a very good effort. More long term projects like this should be undertaken. A good example.

ck2• 15 years ago

Or there might be a revolution in "print-on-demand" making it possible to do for $1 per book someday.

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.

martincmartin• 15 years ago

Movies didn't cause theatre to disappear completely.

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.

WalterBright• 15 years ago

I'd love it if Amazon offered me a discount on kindle versions of hard books I've already bought from Amazon. I'd like to clear out the thousands of pounds of books I have and just keep the digital versions.

I'd even promise that the books go to the recyclers, not on the used market.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

Brewster Kahle is great: here is someone who has a track record of achieving material success but has turned his energies to filling a public need.

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.

When hard books disappear

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