Will books survive? A scorecard.

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/11/21/will-books-survive-a-scorecard/

by bensummers • 17 years ago

13 21 17 years ago

Raphael• 17 years ago

A teenage perspective, where computer-based reading loses nothing and gains everything. I assume an open or hackable system, which any sensible user will take advantage of.

Readability: Change font, size, aliasing, and spacing to your liking.

Convenience: access millions of books using search

Annotation: Text editor or some kind of application.

Cost: free

Social flags: You can still tell people what you're reading. Bookshelves are nice decoration. But I bet OLED wallpaper or paint isn't too far off.

Aesthetic: A book is a brick of paper. At least CDs are shiny.

Sentimental value: Any object can have sentimental value: clothing, sports equipment, obsolete hardware.

Rarity: If text is not online, it doesn't exist.

Single Mindedness: Distraction is always a problem; learn discipline or face the consequences.

Religion: Torah didn't switch to the printing press.

d0mine• 17 years ago

Readability: I've yet to see a computer device that allows to read in a bright sun/poor lighting and has comparable DPI to dead-tree books.

rotw• 17 years ago

Another teenage perspective.

Readability: Read real round figures, not aliased fonts.

Convenience: Ebooks win, hands down. But going to a good bookstore is a nice experience.

Annotation: Nothing beats proper writing for notes (quick diagrams, drawings, underlining, switching position etc.) A pencil does just fine.

Cost: More than ebooks, which aren't all free.

Social flags: Bookshelves are something very physical, touchable, smellable. Also, printed book covers are great to look at.

Aesthetic: Books are beautiful. Dunno about what you read, but novels often have great packaging design.

Sentimental value: Compare a device, like Kindle, that had lots of books on (sort of like old hardware) vs. books, that each seperately hold a tale (sort of like old games). Old games definitely evoke more sentimentality, imho.

Rarity: Some texts do exist only offline. I assume it won't stay like this though. But rare physical copies make things valuable.

Single Mindedness: Books are for reading. This keeps things easy. Or would you read a book on teletext?

Religion: Not a factor for me.

I may live in the digital age and enjoy, but I just really couldn't let books go.

mattlanger• 17 years ago

> Rarity: If text is not online, it doesn't exist.

Be careful with that line of thinking. Time and again throughout the history of the digital age, data has ceased to exist precisely because it was in a digital form. Consider this remark from the US National Archives: "By the mid 1970s, when computer tapes for the 1960 census came to the attention of archivists, there remained only two machines capable of reading them. One was already in the Smithsonian. The other was in Japan!" An entire task force now exists at the National Archives (http://www.archives.gov/era/papers/preservation.html) to address the problem of expiring data formats (old cassettes, magnetic tape, etc).

Take the following hypothetical: if Google goes under sometime in the next decade, and takes all of its data with it, the thousands of volumes that have been archived by the Google Books project will persevere only because university libraries around the world have copies of them on their shelves. Data continue to exist even when they're not immediately available to us at our terminals.

[And this is most certainly not the forum for this, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly you seem to be speciously implicating that Judaism was surpassed by Christianity as the predominant western religion because of its failure to embrace the printing press, but I would point out to you that a.) I own a lovely bound copy of the Tanakh, published by the JPS and available from Amazon for the low low price of $23.10, b.) the total number of adherents of Christianity had leapfrogged Judaism by at the latest the 4th century--a full millennium before Gutenberg--and would only continue to skyrocket seeing as it was the de facto faith of a sprawling political empire, and c.) Judaism is an inherently non-evangelical faith, so talk of such competitive tallying is really irrelevant anyway.]

carbon8• 17 years ago

Actually, the libraries in the google books project get digital copies, too.

It's also important to remember that university libraries very adamantly do not view themselves as archives at all and are constantly weeding out books that they view as no longer relevant to them. The only items that can be assumed to be retained by the library are those very few items that are in each library's special collections.

Mz3• 17 years ago

Something I don't see mentioned: Health issues. I used to have thousands of books. I eventually got rid of them all for health reasons. I currently keep as little paper and cardboard as possible in my home. So I do the majority of my reading online now, which is part of why I belong to HN.

Closely linked (at least in my mind): Environmental issues. If a single ereader can replace thousands of books, this is more sustainable for a planet with a human population in the billions.

utku_karatas2• 17 years ago

> I used to have thousands of books. I eventually got rid of them all for health reasons

Interesting. Would you expand on this?

Mz3• 17 years ago

I lived for 4 1/2 years in an apartment that had to be gutted and inspected by some environmental office or other prior to me moving in. Anytime I took a hot shower or boiled water on the stove, brown goo ran down the walls that smelled like cigarette tar. While living there, I ended up bedridden for about 3 1/2 months and spent about a year at death's door. I had a long history of respiratory and other health issues which had been largely blown off by doctors for most of my life. This crisis led to a cutting edge diagnosis of "atypical cystic fibrosis" (relatively mild compared to the traditional diagnosis, but still potentially deadly).

While living there, I was frequently in the ER. I went through a couple of periods where I ended up in the ER very routinely, within about 48 hours of coming off of antibiotics. Doctors told me point blank that "people like you don't get well". I had managed my condition without a diagnosis for many years (I was nearly 36 when I was diagnosed) so, in frustration with getting no real support from doctors, I began doing my own research and trying to improve on what I was already doing.

Eventually, I found that when I could feel a crisis coming on and was clearly deteriorating, washing all the curtains and throw rugs and so forth sometimes was effective in keeping me out of the ER. Eventually I concluded that if I did more washing proactively instead of waiting for a crisis, maybe I could avoid those crises altogether. This led to a period of some months where I spent all day Saturday, every Saturday in a laundromat washing about 20 loads of laundry. Yes, my health improved. But I felt like I had no life and was simply a slave to my possessions. I also began to be outraged at the idea that I had spent more money in just a few weeks on washing a throw rug than it would cost to replace it. I began cavalierly throwing out throw rugs and replacing them fairly frequently. Then I decided throw rugs were non-essential items and one could live without them. So were curtains. I began tossing out such belongings rather then spend all my time, energy and money trying to keep them clean enough to keep me out of the ER.

This led to me concluding that if all this washing could help keep me out of the ER, maybe it wasn't just my genes making me sick. Maybe it was also my possessions. I can't change my genes but I can change my relationship to my material possessions. I soon became determined to toss out anything in the apartment that was making me sick. Ultimately, I concluded that everything that had ever been in that apartment needed to go. I methodically threw it all out over the course of several years.

I initially had fantasies that I would get rid of the contaminated items and then get new things which were more spartan and low maintenance. I figured my lifestyle would look fairly conventional but with a clean, modern decor. That was not to be. To this day, I own very little. We (my sons and I -- the oldest of whom has the same diagnosis) have had repeated experiences proving to us how negatively papers impact our welfare. So we just don't go there.

I think this principle generalizes more than most people would like to believe. At one point, I snuck into an empty cubicle at work and removed 3 linear feet of papers left there (covered in dust and essentially rotting in place). I trashed some and redistributed others back to the supply room. Within 2 days of that, I stopped needing to keep Dayquil in my desk at work. But also within 2 days of that, two individuals who shared a wall with the cubicle I cleaned out stopped being ill with a chronic cough and respiratory infections, in spite of the fact that they had been steadily deteriorating and their doctors didn't know why.

billswift• 17 years ago

Ebooks are easier to modify and censor post publication.

Ebooks require recharging and some forms require net access.

Ebooks are more vulnerable to some forms of damage than paper books - and fire and wet damage ebooks as well as paper books.

Ebooks are searchable - this is the biggest advantage they have for scholarship.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Crippleware, drm'ed publications are a small subset of "ebooks".

trimski2• 17 years ago

Keep in mind that this is about the future of ebooks, that is, those without the limitations of today's ebook readers.

Nevertheless I won't give up my physical books soon. I borrow friends' books, mark my own with all sorts of scribbles not easily reproducible on a computer, focus clearly and read much longer on paper, marvel at the wonderful construction of books, and singularly enjoy the sensation of turning page after page when reading. Yes, I'm ascribing a healthy dose of romanticism to reading physical books, but maybe it is for that reason I will be still reading dead tree editions of books when ebooks are ubiquitous, like those who view "Henry V" in the theater even though Kenneth Branaugh is available in the cinema.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

This is not true! I can imagine Apple adding something to FrontRow that acts as a "Virtual Bookshelf." Heck, it doesn't even have to be Apple. Microsoft with that "Project Natal" tech would be able to make an awesome version of this! Just have that up all the time as a sort of screen-saver. Don't limit yourself to just a simulated screenshot of the backs of books. I can imagine something with "cover-flow" and a sidebar of related works. Also, one would have the ability to "magically" re-arrange the books according to whatever indexing/ordering scheme they wanted.

A coffee table sized "Surface" would be ideal for this sort of thing. A "slate" form-factor computer to sit on top of a conventional coffee table would be dandy as well. (Just have it display a different "cover" every 3 seconds in "screen saver" mode.)

trimski2• 17 years ago

You may be interested in the app Delicious Library: http://delicious-monster.com/

Edit: Also, Readernaut and Shelfari both offer the sorting features you describe.

keefe2• 17 years ago

To me it is totally clear that ebook readers will dominate. The key technology is e-ink, which is not luminescent. I believe that luminescent displays are more difficult to read and that products like sony reader and amazon kindle will get smaller, more efficient (remember, only need power to change the page, you can power this with a handleheld generator or solar cell) and eventually replace paper altogether. Also, paper requires killing all those tree things which are so convenient for breathing...

xtho2• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, the energy needed to build & power ebook readers & to generate & distribute ebooks (incl. maintaining the necessary server farms and other ICT infrastructure) doesn't grow on trees.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

To be fair, it also takes a lot of energy to cut down a tree, ship it to a paper mill, boil and smash it to pulp, mold that into paper, ship the paper to a printer, ship the printed book to you...

I don't really know which will win in energy-efficiency terms. Probably depends on the lifetime of an ebook reader before it breaks or -- far more likely -- becomes obsolete and needs to be either thrown away or kept in the back of my closet until I can bring myself to throw it away. I really wish I knew how long that was.

keefe2• 17 years ago

once the technology is mature, it will be 1 ebook reader as a client for thousands of books. They don't use that much energy during operation.

xtho2• 17 years ago

For several decades a sufficiently large number of books will be sold to make enough money out of production, distribution, storage, and sale. Then BOD will take over but books will be still there.

jfarmer• 17 years ago

I think books will just become art objects. Illustrators rejoice!

Will books survive? A scorecard.

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