Slashdot Mirror
The End Of Books As We Know Them?
coxjohnson writes: "Ray Bradbury may have been partially correct in Fahrenheit 451 when he wrote that books would not exist in the future. Technology Review recently published a story predicting the demise of today's paper books with tomorrow's electronic paper books." This story about the continuing development of "electronic paper" has a nice overview of the history of the field and a some good info about current technologies under development.
For the last 100 years or so, most books have been printed on acidic paper that doesn't last nearly so long. Here are some 19th century Dickens novels that are already too brittle to read. Apparently alkaline paper is no more expensive than acidic paper now, though. The Alkaline Paper Advocate appears to have far more information than you could ever want about this.
I've seen it, but I don't work there.. I'm too much of a slob to get my documents scanned (yeah, bledin' low-tech'ers still send me stuff on PAPER of all things), so a lot of paper just lies around. Anything that goes OUT of my office however is on disks/CD's or in a mail.
Where I work, we have all documentation in electronic format, readily available, and a LOT more searchable that a zillion books and little post-its.
Really it's just a matter of WANTING it enough. Though I still go print the contracts before I read them, simply because it's easier to read that way, but when I'm done, it's to the schredder.
But hey, don't take my word for it, just look at all the ways to take the peper out of the office. They're there someone is using them, it may not be You. But eventually more and more paper is gone from the offices. Try walking through the halls where You work, how many people still get more regular mail than email ? I'd bet not many.
Same thing will happen to the books. More and more books sold will be e-books. But it will take a while.
Take a look at Oticon (page is in english) for a company that employs the paperless office, it's kinda cool to see the schredded paper blown through a glass tube in the lobby.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
obviously, if ebooks get popular, so will warez'ing them around. 2 megs per book. tell me that won't happen. all people will need then is a good printer or a REALLY good monitor.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Statements that we won't switch to ebooks because they just aren't as comfortable or familiar is partially true. People that grew up on paper books are definitely going to resist switching, but if you grow up using both ebooks and paper books, you will probably be very annoyed by how many features the paper books lack. Of course, the ebooks will have to be extremely advanced so the reverse won't be true.
The last paper printed items to switch will be pulp fiction and fluff magazines, and they may never be completely supplanted. Fiction doesn't really benefit from the ebook format unless you are doing literary research, or you feel compelled to have several books with you at all time. One of the benefits of printing costing money is that it helps filter out crap, not that people don't support a lot of bad printed material no matter what, but if a magazine can afford to be printed, at least you know that it's not just the endeavor of one horrible writer with a website.
When paper books are dead, it won't be that they are wiped out, but they will be unimportant. People will still have paper books, just like some people nowadays bake bread, knit sweaters, and ride horses. In certain situations, these tasks are actually necessary, but for most of us, ebooks will be much better.
Ebooks will probably become extremely prolific after a few generations of upgrades creates a huge market of cheap used ebooks. It may still cost $400+ for a new computer system, but you can get an 80486 system for less than $100 with a monitor. Once you can get used ebooks for $10, the licensing issue will be less relavent, since you can actually lend your ebook to someone else, without just copying the data between two, which is the kind of reuse that really upsets publishing companies. Of course, the question is whether we'll actually store that much information in the ebooks then, or if everything will just be wirelessly networked, and all your data will be housed forever on a server, which means that licensing for reading a book may need to be completely different.
People are funny about preferring physical goods over electronic or intangible goods. You mention O'Reilly -- they a good example of the strong preference even heavy computer users have for paper. In the past year and a half I have probably spent $100 on software (a Linux distro and BeOS), but several times that much on computer books. In the time I have been dithering over spending $50 on JBuilder 4 Std Ed I have spent several times that amount on O'Reilly Java books (Servlets, XML, Examples).
So... What if publishers decide that eBooks are all they're gonna do?
:)
People may or may not prefer these books for a while. As long as ePaper isn't almost exactly like reading off of real paper -- and even if it is, as long as the book interface/experiences of literal pages and a nice weighty feel is prefered over the slick single page attached to a chip -- people will probably want printed materials.
However, keep in mind that publishers have every incentive at the moment to go digital. Why? Access controls, and a legal framework that supports them . They can control who reads their published stuff, and charge per read. Say goodbye to ownership, say hello to licensing.
Not to mention that if they play their cards right, their cost for production and distribution will actually drop through the floor.
And they can do it all in the name of saving trees. How nice.
--
Tweet, tweet.
"I can't wait until I can carry around my whole library in my pocket, transmit a book to a friend, and say 'Hey, I think you will enjoy this.'"
Only if you can pay the $10,000 annual licencing licencing fee for that library.
And forget about transmitting anything. No way the publisher's would allow that.
E-paper could be the biggest cash cow the publishing industry has ever seen. They can charge licensing fees for bits that they didn't write that are stored and read of devices thay they do not sell or support.
E-paper could be a wonderful thing, but not if it's controlled by the wrong people.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
The problem is legacy.
We can read the rozeta(sp?) stone, because it was written down by means that we can understand.
You can read Shakspere(sp?) original plays and understand them, because they were written down.
Can you say the same for punched cards?
What about 100 years from now?
Shaksphere & the rozeta stone would be just as readable, how would those new books? Would I be able (assuming I live that long) to plug my current hard drive to a computer and read the data?
Would there be tools to interupt the data (after all, the data is just a streams of bytes)?
If you want to keep something durable, keep it off computers.
Print if on paper, rock or steel, and tuck it some place safe.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Porn will always exist in every media available. In fact, mediums that have excluded pornography have died (laser-discs). Pornography has been the single-most driving force behind the advancements of technogolies from home theatre, to the internet, to the printing press.
Porn will be available in e-book, paper book, paper magazine, video games, and will sell copies wherever it is. Sex sells. People buy it. Like it or not.
(face it, your average bourgeois motherfucker has a shelf full of leather-bound, unopened "classics")
As a matter of fact, I do.
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
Would the Bible be the same had it been written on a microchip instead of parchment.
The Bible was one of the first books to be touched by the epitome of then bleeding-edge technology: the movable type printing press.
michael? hmm that must have been a jon katz article, surely by now he has a patent on the 'end of as we know it, new digital age' article.
This claim has been around forever. TV will kill radio. Radio will kill the news paper. The internet will kill everything. Of course it's all crap. And deep down, everyone who's in touch with the world at large knows it. E-books will probably make better text books, and manuals. But anything truly great, I'll want to read in paper. For Whom The Bell Tolls is one book, that needs the texture of paper (others have mentioned this already). The feel, the smell, they both lend something to the experience of reading. Maybe it's the subconsious connection to something older. I suppose I could buy it on CD and have James Earl Jones read it to me. But I don't. Maybe I'm silly and sentimental (if one can be that at 26), but I don't take the experience of reading lightly. Maybe it's because I didn't really find joy in reading until I was 12, I don't know. But what is certain, is that when I read for pleasure, it will always be paper over plastic. Besides, paper has a lot going for it. It's cheap, doesn't need batteries, it isn't shattered if you sit on it, if someone steals it was cheap, and it doesn't crash even if it's got Microsoft on the label. Media formats are only tools for the distribution of information. We'll have a new varient of an old tool, it can join the others in the tool chest and wait to be needed. Not all screw drivers are electric, and not all books will be electronic.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I also have a fondness for long novels. They have to be well-written, however. There's a bookmark permanently stuck in my copy of Cryptonomicon at about 1/3 of the way through. It just wasn't a very well written book.
I much preferred 'The Big U', which doesn't take itself seriously, and was fun to read.
Your not considering that the publishing industry would most likly nail you for copyright infringement when you zapped that book to your friend. Digital books will only cause more legal hassles.
The notion that books will disappear in their entirety is mildly ridiculous. While I could imagine technical books that rapidly become obsolete, newspapers, office memos, and other short life documentation might be disappear, there are some types of books that just aren't practical to replace, at least at this stage. By this I mean books whose content is largely graphical. These are impractical because it would take a fairly substantial leap from 'little rotating black and white spheres' to a technology capable of producing the resolution and range of colour needed to reproduce photographs well.
.pdfs, but it'd really be nice to be able to look through them somewhere other than my desk.
Also, books of this nature tend to be larger than usual (especially Atlases..), and while a smaller display area with some sort of scroll and zoom function might serve, it doesn't give anywhere near the same impression as a full colour spread.
That all aside, a nice portable device for reading technical books etc would be nice. I don't really want to waste the paper to print out big unwieldy
I'm sorry, but that was just so funny. Obviously not a business man. Deffinately not part of any media distribution business.
Are DVDs cheaper than videos? Are CDs cheaper than cassettes? Do you think for an instant that pure digitally distributed songs (using Format X) will be significantly cheaper than the same songs distributed on physical media through physical distribution channels?
The price of books is going up, while the costs of production are falling. See the trend?
The e-media of the future will not revolutionize anything, except the business models of the future and will only accomplish the further stratification of the social hierarchy.
Call me a technophobe or a luddite or whatever, but believe me when I say that I can't wait for these technological marvels to appear. I love technology for technologies sake, however, I have no illusions regarding what will happen: the battle for control over information.
IMHO, there will always be a need for paper (and all other physical media) versions: people will want to have permanent access to what they purchased.
Now, as for the technology itself: Very very nice. I remember when the JC Penny ad. was a big deal and it's nice to hear that progress is being made along these lines. I can't wait to see the v1.0 results. No more ridiculous "palm-style" style "eBooks" (rocket, etc...).
I wonder if the pages will stand up to dog-earing though? (I somehow doubt it)
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Light, flexible, creasable, non-serviceable, broken, expensive to replace.
E-books are not the perfect application of e-paper. E-books need something unbreakable, or at least tolerant to severe mechanical stresses such that the utility is not reduced. E-paper would have to be sealed in polycarbonate to survive the use cases for a book. Which defeats its purpose somewhat. Unsealed, it's better suited to static applications requiring confomant wrapping plus moving pictures. But not to rough handling.
--Blair
Well, not to discard bragging rights, about which you're definitely correct, but we're talking about having a "cozy feeling" looking at a shelf full of books. I meant to say that a "bookshelf" as a necessary part of our entourage may not need to be a physical collection of paper.
Also, non-physical one-of-a-kind things can have bragging ability, too. E.g. I own the domain name linux-g.nu, having all bragging rights to that. ;) It's non-physical and only exists as a zone file on a couple of boxes in the world, yet I brag about it any chance I have. ;)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
People still print their frickin' email, you think their going to give up books?
VHS stinks, it's slow, it's poor quality and it is here to stay b/c there's so much of it.
Books far out number VHS tapes.
Do the math.
---
This
Sadly, some people seem to be under the impression that shiny gadgets can replace age old methods of human communication
They can. More generally they simply up-the-ante rather than being a replacement, but remember that the book replaced word-of-mouth once upon-a-time. What level of resistance do you think that received?
Would the Bible be the same had it been written on a microchip instead of parchment. Would the works of such great literary minds as Shakespere or Mark Twain have had the same impact on our society if they had been strings of ones and zeros on magnetic media
Your questions imply that you believe that the form of the words, and their storage is more important that the meaning of the words themselves. I would argue that if the bible was on a microchip for the last 2000 years, that the message therein would have had no less impact, and the spread of the message may even have been more insidious without the burden of manual copying, and the inherrent errors caused by that manual copying.
Technology can do wonderful things, but it will never replace genuine human communication
So IMHO here's the flaw in your argument. It isn't trying to REPLACE human communication, it is trying to ENHANCE it. Perhaps it will fail on this attempt, perhaps in 1000 years time, when books lose all physical form, and the content is inserted straight into your memory, slashdotters the universe over will have this same discussion again???...
I'm looking forward to giving this baby a whirl.
--
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
...your book freezes up and you have to reboot.
...your book gets wet and fries the reader
...they've got a version of War and Peace that's faster and better resolution than your current one.
...your electric bill goes up when you join a book club.
...you take your life (and your appliance's life) at risk if you want to read a book in the tub.
...you get so sick of looking at computers all day (and in every aspect of your life) that you get fed up and move to Tibet to be a yak farmer.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Amen to that. I've been on a personal crusade for a couple of years now to get Rocket and Peanut and all the others to recognize that restricting content to hardware or other give/loan restriction schemes are a violation of fair use. But the DMCA doesn't recognize fair use or consumer rights as an issue, so neither do the e-book vendors. Most people take it for granted that they'll be able to swap the content like they can paper versions, but when they discover they can't, they'll drop the concept like hot stones. Or maybe not. The general population seems to be embracing the sheepish herd mentality at a breakneck pace. Maybe they just won't care. Scares me to death.
Dear God Help Me.
Clancy is a useless hack. His characters are less than one dimensional, they barely deserve names.
Crichton writes interesting books, but again couldn't write a decent character if his life depended on it. Plus his plots are formulaic.
Stephenson is the best of the three, but the man can't end a story. Cryptonomicon was great until the end. Then it just dies. Ditto everything else he's ever written.
I read all three of these people, and enjoy them, but I wouldn't call them great.
I agree. I would love a convenient e-book. the reason the one i want doesn't exist is because the kind of display that would interest me - very large (at least 8x11"), very high resolution (200dpi or better), full color (24 bit min) and absolutely stable (no flicker,no "viewing angle" issues) would still be an extreemly expensive part. I believe that when a reasonable price point is hit that something like this will quickly become ubiquitous. The palm/ce/e-book units i have seen do not meet the criteria I require for enjoyable reading. Paper does.
p.s. I have almost every book Gene Wolfe has written and I've lost track of the number of times I've reread the new sun books over the last 20 years. very highly recommended.
I spend a lot of time curled up with a book. Ok I don't have a fireplace, but that part is realy optional.
As for having commentary along side the text why do you need an e-book for that? I own many books that have commentary along side the text.
Plus I can read a paper book on Shabbos.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I'm sure publishers are leaning toward E-Books because you can license them. I'm leaning away from E-Books for the same reason. I don't want my technical library to go poof because I didn't pay my yearly technical licensing fee. Lets not go there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
--brian
e-paper is a fine idea, but I can't help but notice some flaws with it.
:)
Firstly, is it a better solution for the environment? Paper isn't especially nasty stuff. It does decompose whereas plastic based paper wouldn't do quite so well. It also needs more materials to make (coloured oil and titanium dioxide), which may well become cheap if it's not already, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Tied in with all this, there is the concept of upgrading. When you buy a book, you wouldn't "upgrade" because someone had brought out a newer version that was printed at a higher dpi than your current book. This may well happen with e-books made of e-paper. The potential waste is therefore increased. This will happen - it will be a thing that people compete over; "Well my book can hold 45 novels!".
My second concern is one that will probably cause a witch hunt on slashdot at some point in the future if it does happen. It's the issue of licensing. It may well happen that if we lose paper books, God forbid, it will become very difficult certain items permanently. We may have to rent books as opposed to buying them. It could also destroy libraries as we know them. Imagine, for example, being able to access every book stored at the British Library. Everybody could access the same book at once and not have to worry about overdue fines
I'm not completely against e-books, but I just don't think that they will be as superb as some people like to make out.
oojah
Do you have any better hostages?
Tolkien will always be better with real paper pages...people will never really give up "Real books" it is to much of our history...
Perhaps Cryptonomicon wasn't your cup of tea, but I must (respectfully) disagree about it being well-written. I enjoyed the characters, the way they were presented (current day versus WWII) with the current day characters being the children/grandchildren of the WWII characters. I think the story about Crypto is great and I am eagerly awaiting the next installment...
Beware of Sleestak
They can have my huge collection of dead tree books when they pry them from my cold, dead hands.
I often read more than one book at a time. I've got books next to the couch, on the coffee table, under the coffee table, on the computer desk, on the floor next to the computer desk, in bed, beside my bed - not to mention at least 6 bookshelves throughout the house.
I think of my books as a collection...they are something I enjoy, and I am constantly adding to the lot.
When I go to someone's house, I look at their bookshelves. You can learn a lot about a person by looking at their collection.
As for the future generation - I honestly do not see how any child of mine (if and when that ever happens) could not have a natural affinity for old fashioned, paper books. They will grow up in a house busting at the seams with dead tree literature, plus they'd have a mom passionate about her book collection. Some of that would have to rub off.
As for the e-book thing, would I like one? Sure - for the k3wl factor. New cutting edge toys are great! Would the e-book phase out and replace my current penchant for spending entirely too much money on tangible, bound books that are a complete pain in the ass to box up and move in a change of residence? Absolutely not.
I'm sure it is very different for everyone, but I figured I'd throw my personal experience with that. When I got my Visor, I figured I'd check out a few Gutenberg books but would not ever be able to read an entire book on such a small screen. After all, when I read off of my monitor it hurts my eyes. I started reading a book on the Visor, and kept reading, and kept reading, and finished it. In fact, I believe I read it *faster* than I usually do. The PDA screen is MUCH easier on the eyes than a monitor. Monitors bother my eyes, yet my PDA did not bother my eyes at all. Secondly, the screen is it such a width that I can basically run my eyes down the streen, instead of left and right, which I believe makes me read faster as well as reduces eye strain. I did not find the small screen a limit at all. I mean, sure, you have to hit page down pretty often, but that did not bother me. I would never let my PDA replace books--I read paper books much more often than I read on the Visor. What I do like to do is load up
books that I would like to read sometime, and then if I'm stuck somewhere without the book I'm currently reading, I'll start reading books off the PDA instead. It is in no way a replacement for paper books, it is more of a supplement.
-- kapheine
I think that there are enough people out there who absolutely hate reading for long periods of time from a computer screen. Its hard on the eyes for one thing.
It doesn't have to be. The biggest problem with reading for long periods of time on a monitor is that most people can't come to terms with the idea that the electron-beaming, glaring, radiating monitor is NOT paper. The vast majority of interfaces (from Operating Systems, websites, email programs, games, etc.) assume that dark text on a bright background is the way people were meant to read (just like paper).
Well human eyes are good at focusing ON light rather than the absence of it. When the monitor is radiating, if your whole screen is a deep color (ie. nearly black) && all your text is even half of standard maximum intensity, it will be completely visible, legible, && far more comfortable to read for extended (nearly indefinite?) periods. I used to constantly moan about this glaring problem, pun intended, but then I lerned Perl && routed around it. Check here for a prime example.
If some people prefer dark on white, I can live with that, but don't enforce (assume) dark text. Configurability is the name of the game. TTFN.
-*BBC*PipTigger
I was refering to existing books when I was talking about books needing to be typed in, if books did ever become a dead medium. The 3rd world country thing was them having jobs typing the books in. (Grammar's bad, but I does not care.)
The future is epaper, with resolution and reflectiveness that is as good as or better than today's printed pages
The far future, maybe. Back in the 70's, the standard resolution for draft printing was 1200dpi. Hold a stamp or dollar bill up to a computer screen and try to imagine displaying the incredible detail that paper can hold on a device with less than 10,000dpi resolution. The article states that 100dpi e-paper is still 3-5 years away. Until they come up with something with at least 1000dpi (and with a viewable area around 20-30 square inches), I don't think it's a serious contender.
Just junk food for thought...
And God help us if it does. If e-books made from this e-paper replace regular books, how long do you think it will be before books are sold by subscription? That is, when you go the bookstore / e-book Web site, you're going to be licensing the "author's intellectual property" rather than buying the book. And I can't wait until they start building time limits into these books. "Sorry, your book license has expired. Press here to license it for another 60 days for the low, low price of $2.00"
Everyone can argue technical advantages/disadvantages all we want, and wax poetic about our favorite old books, and the wonderful smell of paper, but the deeper issue has not been addressed.
As we have seen recently in the battle over Napster, DeCSS, etc. the real issue is not content display or transportation but content control, specifically copy protection and licencing. Sure these new e-books can display any information you want, and switch between different books instantly, but what good is that if you don't have control over the content in the book? Unlsee something changes drastically, these books are going to come out with a proprietary interface that guarantees that only approved content from approved providers can be uploaded. And that's not the worst part. they would most likely be pay-per-use items that would only be displayable for a fixed amount of time, unless you wanted to buy a permanent licence which would cost x20, x50,x100 of the temporary licence. I'm in full support of new technology, expecially something that's easier to read than my monitor, but I'm very wary of anything that can put a cap on what I can read and how often I can read it.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
--
Future license:
This book is not owned by you: you own the medium on which it is stored and/or the reader on which it resides. You may not transmit this book in its entirety or any portion therof to another reader or medium w/o express permission by Harcourt-Brace publishers....
(that transfering medium clause covers old fasioned paper, folks. And 'express permission' is licenses at $10 a pop... after all, w/o getting properly paid, who would produce books anyway?)
--
Tweet, tweet.
When I go to someone's house, I look at their bookshelves. You can learn a lot about a person by looking at their collection.
:) (Pure ego!)
Absolutely! (I am often disturbed by people who lack literature in their homes!) It's funny that you mention that in the way you do. I keep all my computer books (an entire shelf of them) on top of my computer desk. I do this for 3 reasons:
1) The books are really easy to get to.
2) I have quite a few monitors on my desk, if I remove the shelf, the desk falls over from the weight!
3) I can show off the spines of my 30 O'Reilly books.
As for future generations having an appreciation for books? They will, but it will diminish. No one seems to have an affinity for stone tablets or papyrus scrolls anymore apart from archaeologists. As soon as calculators appeared en masse the frequency of slide rules and abacuses (abaci?) in the general population began to decrease. We may not like it, but I doubt that there is much we can do. (Or as the trees might say SHOULD do to prevent it.)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The idea of an electronic book is really great, especially when their storage capacity gets to where you can keep a carful of books in something the size of a thin looseleaf binder.
Unfortunately, the people who are building the books are:
1) Book publishers, who really _hate_ the idea of secondhand bookstores, libraries, yard sales, etc. They're as evil as the record companies and the movie industry and they want you to pay for each and every time you read their intellectual property. Nevermind selling it to another after you're through with it, either, that's gonna be a no-no.
2) (Commercial) software developers who don't see anything wrong with anything in part 1).
Now, if RMS were designing the software in the softbooks & the eBooks, I would be wholeheartedly in support of them, but he's not.
And I won't even go near the possibilities for revisionism. Another poster was dead on when he said that the scariest thing about 1984 was _NOT_ the monitor cameras everywhere, but rather Winslow Smith's job responsibilities!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
This is a great idea, one that I see as incredibly useful (not that I ant to give up on paper, I love tracking down old sci-fi books), but the publishing industry will fuck it all up with access restrictions and the like, just like the MPAA and the RIAA. So in the end, in 20 years we'll all be bitching about it on whatever Slashdot exists as.
This was the main theme of the article, the introduction of e-PAPER is an extention of e-BOOKS and only a small portion of the arguement. The theme of the article is trying to find a replacement for paper, which I argued would never overcome the issues of an electronic replacement for paper.
Maybe you should open your mind before replying to a post.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
"The book of the future, e-paper researchers like to say, will look just like a regular book. It will have a hard cover and a spine and several hundred thin, white, flexible pages. "
So everything you just said in support of the lowly print book will be just as true as the ebook with epaper. Only it will also have all the vast advantages of electronics.
Quit thinking that the future of ebooks = today's laptops and palms. The future is epaper, with resolution and reflectiveness that is as good as or better than today's printed pages. You will be able to fold epaper, scribble on them, underline words, flip back and forth as you wish, and do everything else that paper does now. When you add the electronic advantages, it becomes unbeatable, unstoppable, and ultimately desirable.
________________
________________
Private Essayist
"The end of books" is a topic raised every few months in one forum or another, and it's been coming up for twenty years. Asimov wrote a nice essay on the topic back in the 1980s. In the end, there is little or no danger of paper books going away.
E-books have their purposes; I publish both paper and electronic texts, depending on my audience and thier abilities. For example, if I'm writing about genetic algorithms, I can assume my readers have access to a computer and can read an e-text.
But I'll bet that most e-books and online docs get printed on paper...
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
I think you're missing the point of e-paper.
The analogy the article suggests is that e-paper is to paper what paper was to vellum.
It should have all the same properties of read when and where you like (why would e-paperbacks restrict you?), read in any order you like, quote from it like a real book, sell it to someone else, or lend to someone else.
Most of those things are *implementation* specific, and not technological specific. E-paper should look and behave just like regular paper. The content restriction properties is a very different issue entirely, and is as such a very valid concern.
If an e-book is designed with e-paper, if power goes out, it should act just like a regular book. Given the right tool, you should be able to mark it up just like a regular book. A little more complex than a pen or pencil, yes, but pens and pencils are themselves special tools specifically for paper. If content management is done correctly, the e-book is no different than a regular book.
The advantages of e-paperbacks is regular updates, being able to transmit notes and annotations between other e-paperbacks, being able to back up and translate your notes, being able to browse and search and query, being able to 'change' the content without changing the physical book itself.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Do we read books because we like the feel of the paper? Because we like the endless monotony of flipping pages?
As far as most people are concerned, those are irrelevant. They read to extract the information encoded within the pages of the book.
So does it really matter whether we read from dead trees or in some digital format? Granted, current digital technology isn't really comparable to reading off paper, but once the technology is in place, what we read from will be practically irrelevant.
There's little that sells better when bundled with a computer than a printer.
Airlines don't compete with email and the web, they uses them to provide efficiencies in customer interfacing. Then they send you an electronic ticket. Which you print out.
And nobody here needs to be reminded that bricks and mortar have all but defeated online mercantilism in the past year.
--Blair
While it's true that we're advancing the technologies required for really good e-text, I predict that it won't catch on for many years. You can give someone an electronic text in a format that preserves layout perfectly, and you can render it for them at 1600x1200 resolution with antialiased text and all the bells and whistles you could ever wish--but you'll still be displaying it on a monitor or (in the very best case) a plasma display.
Books are versatile. You can read printed text almost anywhere, under any lighting conditions (other than complete darkness.) The sharpness and contrast of the text is limited only by your printing process. At 72dpi, even the cheapest pulp romance is on par, resolution wise, with the most sophisticated computer display available. The paper is absorbing light rather than emitting it; looking at a pattern of emitted light, no matter how small the individual pixels, is something our brains were not evolved to do.
There are also psychological factors unique to "real" texts. People like the smell of ink and paper; they like to turn pages. They love the way the paper feels against their fingers and they enjoy "breaking in" a new book's binding by rifling through the pages.
So, until someone comes up with a display technology that can provide the tactile, audiovisual and even olfactory benefits of paper, it's here to stay.
yeah that's great as long as you have free access to the info and don't have to pay for it everytime you use it.
But the key invention will not be the electronic book--at least not the gray boxes on exhibit at e-Book World. Instead, it will be a development that not a single speaker at the conference addressed--a product that not one of the companies in the exhibit displayed. Although the collective imagination of the publishing industry has been captured by the current generation of electronic books, the technology that is most likely to transform reading and writing will be electronic paper.
THAT was the main theme of the article. The first 4 paragraphs discussed the conference and intro'd the above point. The next 23 disucussed the past and present of e-paper.
I stated before I have books lying in my bed almost always. I am currently 'sleeping with' the Dalai Lama, the Complete FreeBSD, Firewalls, and Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls. That's ONLY the books in and on my bed - not the ones on the floor around it. I have a large philisophical bent, so a large portion of my collection reflects that - although I have my fair share of computer books as well. (The whole collection is too diverse to pin down into one category.) Factor in with that the huge piles of compact discs I have lying about - well... you've gotta watch your step at my house! :)
I'd have an extreme interest in stone tablets/papyrus - provided they were real old. I'll still take my 'modern' literature in standard bound paper text. I DO agree with you and the trees though - and there is a simple answer to that. Hemp.
As for the rest of the world...they can have their steenkin' e-paper e-books - as long as I have MY collection, I'm happy.
E-paper will take away none of this functionality.
In fact, in a properly designed e-book, you should be able to 'email' a book to someone.
'Hey, I think you'll enjoy this. Let me upload it to you!'
Of course, this also depends on the content restriction technologies some people are so keen on.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Despite all of the failed attempts to produce the "ultimate" electronic book, I still think that the replacement of books by an electronic equivalent is absolutely inevitable. The convenience of traditional books has probably been greatly underestimated by more than a few futurists, but all this does is raise the bar.
Probably important factors in ubiquitious acceptance of electronic media:
readability
battery lifetime
weight
heat
connectivity
content rights
It could take more than five years, who knows, but technology has always worked wonders to solve problems.
Hehe...that was one way of reading the sentence, yes :)
I agree with much of what has been said, but I still feel that e-books potentially can offer greater overall utility - I believe they could achieve "killer-app" status.
But first they need to overcome their disadvantages.
Portability: Until e-books are literally paper-thin (which it definately looks like they'll eventually achieve) there will be discontent.. I should be able to curl up in my bed or relaxing chair and read with zero additional stress over a paper-back. As for power, it seems to me that future devices will be passive - only requireing juice to change the displayed contents. Thus as with an uploading of a book, you should be able to recharge the book so as to at least be able to read 110% of the book (including back-flips). As for weather resistance, I have a wrist watch that's advertised as 300m water resistance (for whatever it's worth).. The technology is there. Soaking a book leaves you with a sence of loss.
Ease of use: We're living in an age where people are accepting the difficulties of learning curves.. It's our general nature to adapt and learn.. We have to be taught to drive a car, bike, etc. And you can even argue that we first go to school so that we can learn to learn. So I don't believe it's unacceptible to require a moderate learning curve. Beyond that, highlighting, annotations, book-marking and most importantly searching are the bed and breakfast of e-media. True it expends electricity, and requires some sort of input, which adds to the complexity. But these aren't used in a continual basis. The fact that you can't always highlight a cool phrase in a web page is the fault of the browser, not the computer. Word-files, PDFs and XML allow for very nice annotation / bookmarking capabilities, so long as the browser supports it. Herein lies the Utility aspect of e-media.
Durability: It is definately true that a book should outlast a desk-top and it's hard drive. I even hear that burned CD's don't have incredible shelf life. But since digital media can be 100% reproduced, active libraries can maintain the data. And it's always possible to use a robust long-term digital storage medium (such as a digital vinal recording which isn't suseptible to E&M or cosmic disturbances). In general, however, I'll give you this one (for hard-backs at least).
There will, in no way, be a death of the printed page. But I believe that the added utility, plus the idea that we're saving a few trees will assure an eventual migration to e-media for mainstream use.
-Michael
-Michael
The majority of the comments above are of the nature, "Books and paper are much more convenient than my lousy electronic display!" However, the article referenced argues this as well. The point they are trying to make is that researchers are working on making e-paper indistinguishable from paper. The only difference is that e-paper is dynamic rather than static print.
I suppose everyone rushed to comment on the "demise of books" statement rather than take the time to read the actual article.
Naah, I'm not going to haul my entire collection up there; if the e-books go out, I've more important things to do than read Hitchhiker's. But I'm not shaving a damn thing; haven't for over a decade, and I'm not starting now. Besides, I *intended* for Mission Control to need a toothpick. Make them think twice about fscking with the guys with their furry little butts on the cold, unforgiving line of space. And I will have my manuals.
--
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
-- Robbie Honerkamp
Of course the optimist in me says "Sure, I'll pay your 'publishing' 'licensing' fee", except that since they don't have a physical medium to control, IE paper and books, I don't see that they will be able to corner the market in the same way.
All it takes is someone to create an 'unrestricted' book, much like region free dvd players.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I don't know if I'd like the "remember where you are" feature. I've dosed off more times than I can remember while reading... usually at 3 or 4 in the morning. I find when I go back to the novel, if I actually fell asleep, I need to reread the last 20 or so pages anyways. Though I do read pretty quick in a good novel, 100-120 pages an hour, so going back a few pages just prolongs my enjoyment of the book.
Again, it's for sentimental reasons. My wife loves the idea of a fireplace, and yes, it's right where you'd think of putting your TV. People house-shopping look at it and think, "We'll be able to cuddle up on the couch or the rug, sipping wine and talking about our love". They actually think that a fireplace will make them more romantic, and less inclined to watch TV. They don't think about firewood storage, the cost of fireplace equipment, the bother of cleaning out the ashes, etc. After one or two fires, they are back to sitting on the couch, watching TV, drinking beer and eating nachoes. But at an awkward angle, since the fireplace is taking up the space opposite the couch...
Material objects do not make the unromantic romantic. On an unrelated note, Happy Valentine's Day everyone!.
the plastics they are using for the paper
are supposed to make it to where you can buy
REAMS for relativly cheap.
NOW,
picture in your mind, magazine ads, that that
were animated tv commercials.you know,
"touch pen here to see more"
or somthing like that.
it'll happen.
although my FAVORITE idea 4 e-ink is the
wallpaper idea.Oh, yeah! change the atmosphere
of the room as easy as u change your desktop
background! or walk up to the wall, touch it,
and it brings up a screen, allowing you to
control whatever. screw a bigscreen tv,
i'll just watch it on my wall!
;P
}:kill.process:{
Not e-books, is the issue. If Xerox, EInk and IBM have their way, maybe publishing companies *will* go out of business, because 'paper' presses will no longer be necessary, in the traditional sense.
It's not that we'll stop using paper, with e-paper, it's that paper will be upgraded to all the advantages of electronic displays.
The article sums it up pretty clearly when describing e-paper to paper as paper was to vellum.
The whole idea of good older technology being blown away by newer technology is what happened with vellum and parchment, with stone and clay tablets. Not because the newer, more sophisticated was more expensive (they weren't) but because they were cheaper and more flexible.
E-paper *should* approach the cost of paper printing, if it uses the same print techniques (you do know, for example, we can use inkjet technologies to fabricate printed circuit boards?)
So when we can 'print' 'e-paper' from our printers using organic circuit technology, paper will be 'unnecessary' in the same way vellum, parchment, clay tablets, and stone tablets are unnecessary.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
As long as the average joe can put pencil to paper and write whatever he wants (with the odd spelling mistake) books will live.
The thought of trying to control content on a book is scary stuff - it would be a return to the church induced dark ages of forbidden books and the imprisonment of people disseminating ideas on paper.
I'm sure someone will come up one day with the brilliant idea of banning "analog" pens, pencils and paper to "protect the rights" of authors.
Exactally! What do you think Man pages are? OR online encycolpedias. They're great for reference, just maybe not for novels. Yet. And if you think about it, books didn't come into being because soembody wanted to have a story to read late night by the fire on thier fur blankets, they come for shareing of actual information
Mod point free since 2001
Hmm, ooh, lets see what E-Books have going for them:
Batteries: How nice, the book that keeps on taking, buy it once, then pay energizer, yeech, even if they are rechargable, I don't want to have to worry about battery length!
Priporiatary standards: Remember why we still have ASCII? Its so that people will be able to read documents written in the past, and continue reading documents written now in the future. E-Books, just what we need to leave behind no trace that our civilization ever had the written word.
Duribility: Books are durible, period. I can drop a book, I can drop a book from ten stories. I can sit on a book, I can put 1000lbs of pressure on a book, books rock, its to the that papery thang they have down so darn well!
Resolution: Want a high quality book, you just have to pay a bit more for it. Oversized? No problem, a few more cents here and there, but not much. Easy to read? You betcha! Books rock, you can keep reading books for hours on end and actualy get engrossed in the story, instead of ingrossed in a headache like you do with a moniter, yes, even LCD moniters aren't as good as books!
Vaporware technology: Hey look, e-paper, oh wow, by 2010 you say? Sheesh, its 2001 and we don't all have flying cars yet, and BlackLight Power (yah, theres a reliable source, LOL) said we'd have flying saucers! Zippy, where are they? There have been so many different developments in E-Paper (4 or 5 at last count) that it's getting rediculas, I'm begining to see why the IEEE and ANSI commitee's where formed, will somebody just make up their mind and start production already!
Flexability: No, I'm not talking about the paper (again) but rather all the different formats regular plain ol' fashion books come in. Full color illistrations, no prob, but don't look for those on a cheap B/W LCD moniter. Inlay's? No prob, maps? Once again, easy as pie. Just get the proper printing house to manage your book. What about a nice decrative cover? Oh wait, E-Books don't have cover art (or if they do, they are only on the web page you buy the e-book from).
I don't know about you, but getting done with a book and then looking at the cover and now reconizing the scene therein, is a great experance.
Software: Ickies, need I say more? I don't want to have to reboot my book, or wait for my book to boot up. Not to mention the entire scrolling around thing. Being one of those people blessed with the ability to open a book to almost exactly where I left off, (and feeling horribly dishonerable by saying such, heh:) I kinda like the current interface, you know, turning the page?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
They're durable. Books can be burned or soaked, but short of that they're remarkably hard to destroy
:)
Let me introduce you to my two year old daughter. She will give you a new perspective on "hard to destroy"
Though I agree about the longevity of properly preserved paper.
I think you are confused as to what is considered technology. At one time, all books were writen by hand and a technological wonder called a printing press made the task easier. It didn't cause us to stop writing, it just made it possible for more books to be produced for more people. Electronic devices are all great and good, but don't be too surprised if many people still prefer paper and ink to electronics. It happens every day. Many people still buy the morning paper rather than relying only on the internet in whatever form. Many people still write notes to each other eventhough they could send email. As a side note, I can think of many cases and situations where an electronic device is not prefered over paper printings. For example, if you were hiking or camping for a week at a time where there is no power outlets, a paper book can always be read. If your batteries run out with an electronic device, you're through. Of course, this doesn't matter if you never travel where there is no power, but there are many people that do.
He laid out this neat vision of an interactive television that would feed you content (books, magazines, etc.). I guess he was looking forward to the net as we know it, but he said that things would get more intricate, with the ability to do more with the info, etc., and more and more buttons to push on the TV. He then said that after a while things would level out, and there would be less controls on the box, then finally only one knob, and then even that one would be taken away, and the technology of the TV would be so fantasic that all you ever wanted to know would be magically transferred to your conciousness without having to touch a button.
He then claimed that that technology was available in his day. Books, he said, with no buttons to push, no sound effects, no laser shows, etc. --- books talk to the mind and the imagination, and that's all we need to enjoy a good story.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Question- how feasible will it be to "print" on both sides of e-paper? I doubt there is a real known answer yet, but I'm wondering how easily it can be made two-sided without increasing weight and cost. You'd rather have 150 2-sided sheets than 300 1-sided ones.... Of course, if the circuitry/ink cannot be reduced by making it 2-sided, you're stuck.
The Complete FreeBSD I have this, but to be honest have not read much of it, been reading Bruce Schneier's Secrets & Lies (An easy read actually, quite entertaining). I have heard that The Complete FreeBSD is the definitive reference however. I am just having trouble pulling myself away from my System V roots (Solaris) and moving to BSD.
:)
Firewalls, and Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls How is this as a book? I have heard good and bad things about it. I have OpenBSD 2.7 and plan to make a firewall out of it, but then again I can build a firewall out of Red Hat 6.2 and ipchains in about 30 Min, so I am lazy and I stick with what I know. (And that BSD initd thing gets in the way too.
I should give you a good link to some books. I am amassing every book that is in this list. Each and every book on that list is excellent.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
That is, until the big red Bulk Erasing Truck pulls up to your house, and find illegal literature on your zip disks. Welcome to Gauss 7K.
--
--
Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
This is the first argument I've seen that makes perfect sense why books won't die. I myself *love* my shelf of books. And DVDs. And CDs.
<BR>
<BR>Despite the fact that everything in my shelves could be scanned or stored digitally and archived, searchable, browseable, the fact that I have a shelf of stuff gives me satisfaction.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I've been hearing about e-paper for *years* -- and so far it's been about as much a success as nuclear fusion. It's a nerd fantasy. Until e-paper becomes as available, as cheap, and as universal as the last great printing invention (web offset litho) e-paper is and deserves to be a plaything of the rich and bored.
Da Blog
Actually I was worried about batteries, but several all day bussiness trips later, I've never run my Palm V out of its recharables, and an hour on the cradle when it gets home fixes them right up, and I've ran it for about 6 hrs straight on the backlight and not run em out. (of course, I have my CPU usage for the reader app turned right down, how many Mhz do you need to write characters on the screen :).
:)
And I find it just as bad to flip pages when I read
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I take great joy in all these posts. Maybe I'm overloading slashdot.
Anyway, none of what you argue is without merit.
But if Xerox, IBM, and Eink/Lucent have their way, instead of a shelf full of paper books, you'd have a shelf full of e-paper books.
Nothing you want goes away, but you get some of the benefits of electronic technology. Of being able to compare notes and annotations with fellow Asimov or Tolkien fans, of getting regular updates from local fan websites concerning your fav authors booksigning tour, or just browsing email from your favorite book ^^
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Recreational reading will stay paper for a while. Newspapers are vulnerable; so much paper is generated for the amount that gets read. So far, nobody has been able to really move the classified ad business to the web wholesale, but category by category (think eBay) it's going. Once that happens, newspapers will be much more marginal businesses. (Do more people in developed countries now have Internet access than newspaper subscriptions?)
We're going to see EULA hell. I think we need a political push to cut copyright back to 20 years or so, and make it illegal to use technical means to protect material beyond the limits allowed by copyright law.
I've tried that. I just can't stand reading material on the palm. The screen is much to small, and the resolution is very lacking.
The one nice thing that an e-book has over paper is search. Forgot when a character was introduced in a book, or who they were - search for the name and re-read the intro to them.
Past predictions of paperless offices and the failure of the BookMan and DynaBook are irrelevant. E-paper will be used just like regular paper -- think of it, perhaps, as "paper-plus" -- and so there will be no paperless offices. Similarly, the fact that people don't read long texts on the BookMan or the Palm is irrelevant -- books with e-paper will look and feel like regular books. Regular books will still be around, but, as I suggest in the article, there are many uses for e-books, starting with the replacement of the awful stacks of blurry photocopied course-packs inflicted on students. I'd suggest that huge computer books, which so frequently overwhelm their paper bindings even before they become obsolete, would be another candidate. But -- to reiterate -- these would be replaced by something that looks and feels very much like a ... book.
REB 1200
---
This
This is a totally cool application, giving you access to your library in a format that you already love, dead tree. It won't quite lead to the paperless office that everyone used to talk about, but should cause a nice reduction. Instead of throwing away a newspaper/magazine, you could just download the next issue, OR re-read an older one.
What we're looking at here is an ancestor of the Diamond Age smart paper that was so cool. I'm just waiting for the version that can tri-fold itself.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
Batteries:
Batteries/energy sources are advancing all the time. I would be suppised if these thing would be powed by flexible solar panels. When your not reading, but flip is over. And it will charge.
Priporiatary standards:
Thats always a in the begining, but they get srited, if you do something about it. HTML is a good example. While ther's alot of shit about the standards at the moment. fact is, all basic HTML can be read on any browser.
Just becasue people might begin to use e-paper, dosn't mean that important stuff won't be printed on paper anymore.
Duribility:
Sure, e-paper might never be as durable as real paper (well, except for the fact that paper can be soaked or burned, or riped easly). Does everything have to be rock solid? Cars, PC's, laptops, whatches are all very fagile when you think about it, but that hasn't stoped them.
Resolution:
You obvouly didn't do you research now did you.
e-paper isn't anything like a CRT, or LCD, or the new LED displays. That was the whole pint in making them. The resolution will increase in time.
Vaporware technology:
What thr F has flying cars, and blacklight power got to do with electric paper? You mean like personal computer, rocket ships, nuclear reactors?
Just becasue some technologies don't work, dosn't mean other wont.
Flexability:
What the hell is stopping e-books coming in differnt formats? How do you know they will have a web page as a cover?
Acctually, they could have much more fexibility. IE, play videos on the cover. No book I've seen has ever done that.
Software:
Huh? I have a Palm Vx, and I never have any of the problems that you say. Except for the scrolling, But that's where e-books are better.
Surly pressing a button isn't that much harder that turning a page. And I'm sure that someone could make an e-book that worked like that anyway.
I just can't belive how narrow minded are. If you want to rant about it. Please, give at least one decent point. No one is focing you to use one.
The bit where he talks about the "book of the future" seems to ignore the impracticality of having to have a power source in the book. That is unless that when you open the book the dark areas that would probably be words/etc start to generate power using teeny solar cells. Now that would be neat.
Frankly IMHO they are taking the wrong approach by integrating electornic circuits into this e-paper stuff.
The main application I see for e-paper is where data on paper is extremely temporary like printing assignments/reports for school/uni/the boss.
Here is a rant I wrote in 1999 before I even knew about the efforts at Xerox & E Ink
How do you think books are published? SOMEONE has to type or write them at the start. They don't travel instantly from the author's brain to the page. The author sits down at his word processor or typewriter and bangs out a story. Then either the draft is submitted, and the galleys proofed, or else the document file is spellchecked and saved as a final version... either way, the typing is already done.
Third world people have to spend their time getting sufficient food for their kids and fleeing from genocidal paramilitary types; they don't have time to read books.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
the idea of having information displayed appropriately is much more relevant. much of what is printed is unnecessary. certainly books which we think of as static--literature--will continue to be printed, but dynamic information--encyclopedia--can be read in equivalent ways. an o'reilly book would be really great as e-paper or even a couple of e-papers so that one could cross reference. the whole dynabook thing is really not comparable. a bulky reader is a problem, but sheets of cardboard are not. it is going to take a lot of time, and the technology of writing to this media will take even longer.
Given the usability issues raised with e-books, and the fact that the technology affecting them hasn't significantly changed in recent memory, it's doubtful they will replace books as a medium. And Napster is the proof. Both books and music contain digital information, and both are easily represented and recreated via computers or other devices. But for music, whole technologies have risen up to threaten the very existence of the retail and wholesale distribution chains traditionally used for them. It's practically a cottage industry.
Has that happened for books? Not at all. Sure, Amazon has changed the distribution chain somewhat, and there are more independent publishers today. But has the traditional distribution chain for books been significantly threatened? No way. Even for techie books, where it would make sense for things to be in electronic-only form, far more people prefer good old books over e-only formats.
When hax0rz start ripping copies of the latest Harry Potter, then we'll know something has changed. For now, books look pretty secure.
This is actually a cool idea.
- hundredes of pages to flip
- no backlight for easy reading
- plus all your favorite books in one, easy to carry package
Think about it, even if this e-book with 200 pages of e-paper costs a couple hundred dollars. You only need to buy one. Then you just need to pay for content.As the two people who actually read the article pointed out, the only part of the plan that is a bit iffy is how payment for content will be managed. Since it is so new, the publishing industry has a better chance then the music or video industries to build in copy protection schemes that will get us all up in arms. All the disadvantages that everyone is complaining about will be solved by the technology described in the article.
But really, I'd much rather carry one of these back and forth to work than all twelve O'Reilly books I like to keep handy.
$ finger #timmy
$ finger #timmy
invalid use of finger
>> What ever happened to Sony's BookMan
Bookman is/was a Registered Trade Mark of Sherwin M. Borsuk, now a Registered Trade Mark of Franklin Electronic Publishers (aka: My employeer)
Alot of what you complain about are addressed by our new device called eBookman.I am one of the developers. We just released the product yesterday. They should be showing up in your stores within a day or two. amazon.com is selling them also.
There are two needs for e-books, those needed in your hand, and those you want in your hand.
A monolingual dictionary (ie: english) or bilingual dictionaries (ie: english-german) are things you might like to keep in your hand (a student learning german). If you are a medical person (ie: doctor) you might need to keep drug information in your hand as you visit patients at bed side. Another example is the Bible many people love to look things up in the bible. These fall into the category of 'reference' books. A fundimental attribute of reference is the ability to search, not just string matching - but smart searching. Example: doctor types "child and heart" - it is important to also find references to "pediatric and cardiac".
Typically reference is something you need in your hand, or pocket to peform a task. Much like a PDA, you need your address book, or to-do list.
In contrast, a novel, play or short story is something you want to read from end to end. When you are done, you put it down and get another one. These fall into the category of 'reading' books. Typically these are something you want in your hand, but do not "need" to perform a function, or task.
Duane.
Your argument that it won't happen seems to boil down to two things:
1) People prefer paper over anything that's been produced thus far. This is true.
2) People will always prefer paper over any future technologies. This is extrapolation, and is a mistake. There may very well be something produced that people will prefer. The options discussed in the article have some advantages that other technologies haven't.
3) People will always have the option to exercise their preferences. Not necessarily so: _publishers_ control distribution here. If they decided to go eBook only at some point, that's how it would be, by and large. Especially as the economy of scale for paper production collapsed and the one for ePaper ramped up.
--
Tweet, tweet.
I can see it now... picture school in 5 years...:
[Teacher]:" Good morning class, welcome to your first day of kindergarten! I'm Mrs. Jones!"
[students]: "Hi Mrrrsssss Jooonnnes!"
[Teacher]: "The first 6 months of your kindergarten will be spent learning how to log into a computer, and ftp/download. AFTER we all know how to RegEdit, and Reboot, we'll d/l our textbook and learn how to READ!"
[students]: "YAYYYY!!!! RegEdit!!! Thank you Superintendant Gates!!!"
While there is a lot of technology to be invented for the e-books to become reality, I think the biggest problems lie elsewhere. Like Gutenbergs technology, the e-paper will once again dramatically reduce the price of producing a new copy of a work, thus in essence make the copies of existing works more available.
What now becomes a problem is that we all know (honestly, don't we) how easy it technically is to copy anything that already is in electronic form. I see here a grave risk to authors' income - and I'm not so certain the traditional publishers will like to promote e-books, either.
As to whether the consumer prices of publications will drop, I'm not so certain. Today the publishers are eager to argue that the price is not due to printing costs, but because the author needs to live, too, but have any of you really tried the validity of that argument (try getting a cheap (the low printing costs only) replacement for a book that was ruined in a rain, for example; I'd bet you'll end up paying the street price, in essence a new license).
So, what we're talking about is something requiring a drastic change in both copyright laws and the economical system (yes, the economical system; just think how much money goes around in producing the paper and producing and transporting everything printed on paper).
I saw someone being worried about the licensing issues - and I agree; would my library just cease being if I didn't pay my yearly license? On the other hand, how can the author and publisher prevent me from illegally giving out copies of the work?
cheap, rugged, not affected by EMP, magnetic fields and ionizing radiation. Not destroyed by minor immersion in common household liquids. Data is permanent, margin notes can be created with burnt sticks or dark minerals wrapped in wood. Doesn't need batteries. Can be used to help start fires and be hung up in the outhouse when the e-order of e-toilet roll didn't get delivered.
Schools may be next, since textbooks are so expensive anyway. Once college kids start using them (trade in my 100 pound textbooks for one cool-looking textpad? Sure), they will slowly make their way into the workplace, then into homes.
And what happens when those textbooks, including sociology and history can be "updated" as seamlessly as the tech manuals? What about when all periodicals are online and you can only look up back issues in the publisher's central archive? I'll tell you what - we will be a hell of a lot closer to "1984" than a few automatic cameras at stoplights will ever get us.
It is important to be able to get perspective on how different parts of history have been played up or down. It is useful to be able to remind publishers of what their words were orriginally on an issue that they have now changed their minds on. Its even nice to read the first edition of the Stand and compare it to the "uncut". Paper books going away may save a little space, but I'd hardly call it a good thing.
*[rant] why the hell do /.ers seem to think that 1984 was all about cameras and farenhiet 451 was all about book burning? Those may be the most gripping and dramatic parts, but each book contained an entire world where the human changes and accomadations was at least as significant as the teasers. Smith's job as a rewriter of history was far more prophetic IMHO than the worry of universal cameras, but no one cares when that comes true. The four wall televisions and creeping impersonality that surrounded the fireman mean more in our world than the crazy idea that all books could be banned, but people read it like a one note screed against censorship instead of a comentary on PEOPLE.[end rant]
OK, anyway, the reason that there is no paperless office is the very "criticisms" some have made of paper. Its isn't rewritable, you have a long term record of the original mistake as well as the correction. (last nights Law and Order springs to mind)
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
This is a very naive idea. Did the price of recorded music fall when the cost of production fell?
I'll be very surprised if the publishers allow this to happen. Rather, I'd expect some type of expiration mechanism, even if it's the de facto barrier of being unable to copy the data to a new drive. The author is again glossing over the key issue of who controls the information.
OK, this author is hopelessly naive. Anyone who can mention such a capability without seeing that the potential for abuse vastly outweighs the benefits is more optimistic than me.
Semantics, semantics.
If you redefine books, the whole issue disappears. Print a book with e-paper instead of paper. Is it still a book? Yes. Has books disappeared? No. Have traditional paper-only books disappeared? Indeterminate. But the issue is no longer about books, it's about implementation.
Same with Moore's Law. If you redefine it to 'prcoessing power' and not 'MHz', I don't think the question is valid any more. We will continue to increase processing power (double every 18 months?) without having to worry about physical limits as concerning speed. Just change the question slightly, and a different answer will be produced.
As per driving flying cars to work and to the mall... with Telecommuting, the internet, and the electronic office, driving may become much less of an issue as well, even disregarding the fact we don't have flying cars. Though I want a flying car myself ^^
JonKatz will write interesting articles. There is no spoon.
We'll vacation on the moon. We're still working on that! Really!
Terabytes of data will be stored on a credit card sized device. Okay, so that's definitely wishful thinking, right now. But soon, I think!
Robots will do all of our house work: What, you actually keep your house clean?
CmdrTaco will learn to spell: Redefine the language to match CmdrTaco, and he spells fine!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
There's a certain tactile sensation to a physical book. The turning of the pages (and the corresponding rustle), the physical weight (which to some extent implies the weight of the ideas. I doubt that this can be done electronically. Not to mention that you don't have to boot up a book to read it....
Its sort of the myth of the paperless office. People have been saying we'll stop using paper for years and even though we could do that doesn't mean that we should or will. I work for an ISP and we have paper all over the place. I think the same will be true of books.
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
With "improve" I mean: the price tag!
Actually, one of Xerox's products aims to make paper a first-class citizen on the network. Drop your document into a networked copier, scanner, or other device supporting the open standard IFAX (essentially SMTP+MIME+TIFF), and it stores it on the net somewhere and prints out a Document Token -- a one-page paper icon for the document. It's a physical piece of paper that you can get warm fuzzies about holding in your hand, copy as is, give to people, mail, etc. But drop it back into any networked device again and it retrieves the original paper document, formats it and prints it (or emails it or OCR's it or anything you could have done to the original stack of paper it represents).
In short, it makes paper electronic and vice versa.
Disclaimer: I worked on the product, FlowPort
(from the article):
.NET (of course, without telling the public), and it's silently and seamlessly updated to reflect the Party's current views.
"Scientific texts could be continually altered to keep pace with research."
One thing that went through my mind instantly upon reading that:
Historical texts could be continually altered to keep pace with the political situation.
Wow, e-books will make the Ministry of Truth's job SO much simpler!! No more burning old copies and reprinting new ones - now all we need to do is change the copy stored on
We are at war with Eurasia. We are allied with Eastasia. This is how it has always been. And it says right here in the math text that 2+2=5.
Of course, there will be those free thinking types with old books who know the truth, but they are what execution squads are for.
I bet Orwell's rolling in his grave thinking "Wish I'd thought of that!".
-Kasreyn
P.S. Yes I'm being overly alarmist, but I felt like dousing these exuberant "wow whatta cool technology" flames a bit.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Sounds good, except:
- New display technologies will read like paper.
- a reader full of ebooks is lighter, smaller, easier to search, and more portable than a stack of books.
Furthermore, comics are usually on larger size paper than books. If these E-books are paperback size, it would render most comics unreadable.
Not like this is going to happen though, since I doubt E-Paper will ever be cheaper than the real thing.
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
Well, my library could consist of:
- books from project gutenburg
- free books, maybe from here or here
- technical books like this one and other technical documents.
- articles from Nupedia
- university research papers, a lot of which are on-line now.
- mirrors of websites
All free, no fees. A prediction: a readable ebook will drive publishing toward free books just as linux is driving software companies to open source. It will never be a complete transformation in either case, but it will shake things up for sure.
I prefer real books with paper. Unless they highly improve what is already on the market than they can keep their ebooks to themselves. I already spend way too much time in front of my monitor, I don't really want to make my eye-sight any worse by reading ebooks. I'm hoping this electronic paper will improve otherwise I'll have to stay with the tree-cutters.
Still don't get it do you. READ THE ARTICLE. It's not a monitor it's electronic paper, it looks and feels just like paper.
Interesting posts, but it looks like we are missing the point of the article.
The point is not to say that books/papers will disappear, instead it is to say that they will be less common.
Think of it like this. When cars came out, did horses disappear? No, but we still do the same bottom line goal using a different medium.
The same for books/paper. Eventually, they will be replaced with "electronic papers" that rather than having a book made up of 1000 pages and weighting 3 pounds, it will be a lightweight, special type of a computer, than can display pages of text -- in the same quality and even better than what you have today on paper.
There are a lot of advantages for such a medium (as there are for cars over horses). For example, such a medium can now given you animated images on the "electronic paper", can be updated to address errors in the text without having to buy a new edition, and finally, one "electronic book" can now hold, multiple "electronic books". This means, when I go to school, I only have to carry one "electronic book" which contains, my math, biology, etc. books, and most of all it will also contain my "electronic note books" as well.
Now this would be a realy cool book to have.
---------------
Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Ya, but consider the numerous disadvantages of books:
:)
:)
:)
1) lack of backlight. Try reading in bed with someone who sleeps earlier then you. Backlights are your friend
2) wieght. Holding a book in a reading position for hours on end is hard. Esp a hard cover.
3) availability. I can buy a book from Baen's webscriptions, send it to my palm and have it the day they publish it (or earlier if I don't mind not having the whole thing at one time)
4) cost. I can buy 4 ebooks from Baen for 10$ or 2.50$/book. (incidentally, the author gets twice as much in royalties from ebook sales through Baen, to compensate for the lower publishing cost)
5) searchability. As you pointed out, rapidly seaching through an ebook to find out which side of the space opera George was on as he comes charging out of hyperspace is very handy
Against these benifits books have clarity of text (in a well lit environment.)
For me, the benifits outwiegh the losses. I'm hapy to be a convert
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Wow, I'm impressed. Thank you very much for this reply.
I just wanted to add that I very much look forward to checking out your product as soon as it hits the shelves. Rest assured that I will evaluate it with an open mind, despite my (obvious) bias towards traditional books.
Best regards
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
I have a friend who actually believes that kind of shit about musical instruments. He thinks a big bank of MIDI instruments can replace an orchestra.
You were being sarcastic, sadly he isn't.
There's something about paper that makes physical books easier to read. Plus, doing away with books would require someone to type in the book (yeah, yeah, OCR, but then they'd still have to go and check the book for errors, and that would be a pain as well) and very few people would want to do a job like that. Of course, menial labor is what 3rd world countries are for.
Yes, but this is all a cultural construct. We've (as in, "we" on
The entire reason that ebooks aren't popular are:
1) who the hell would ever pay the same for an electronic copy as they pay for a print copy? The actual texts are too expensive, given you're not paying for printing, binding, shipping, and bookstore overhead.
2) the human eye can't handle low resolutions of computer screens. if we had 1200 dpi, the way magazines and books do, reading on a sufficiently bright screen would be fine. this also assumes that other basic ergonomics and usability standards are met.
1-not a problem. I have many rooms in the house and a nice futon couch when my wife goes to bed.
.pdb :)
2-I dunno...that's never been a problem.
3-true...however I have such a backlog of books to read, that's not an issue. Makes library returns an interesting point though - you must bring your palm back in 2 weeks so we can delete the
4-Great point there - can't argue it. Do they have anything in place if something wipes out my e-copy? Yes, I can have a paper one burn, but electronic is much easier to lose.
5-oh yeah!
Since my last post, I've been trying to find a good document reader for the palm. There seem to be about 20 different possible formats, and a ton of readers. Is there a "one ring to rule them all" that means I either convert the files on a PC or don't need to keep switching readers? Flame me for this, but a Microsoft Reader for the Palm would help too!!!
Without colour it won't support Pron. No pron, and it will never be a success. After all, it has driven the internet to its current state... :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
That will be difficult to replace. Perhaps my views will change with the introduction and widespread use of the technology. I am willing to bet that it won't.
Books are created objects. The act of creating a dead tree based book is just as much a creative act as writing the thing in the first place. I think authors may be unwilling to give up this experience anytime soon
My euro0.02 worth anyway
Ian
Further information on this poster's latest book "Love,Sex,Death and Carrots" (ISBN 0 9521295 1 5) may be obtained by e-mailing interchangebwn@hotmail.com
Sorry for the plug but it had to be done.
Why even bother reading in the future? Matrix style data jacks will be the rage, right? We'll just bypass that annoying low-bandwidth optical interface!
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
People have an affinity for "things", especially in the case of the written word. As much as some of us might want to live in a Bauhaus, minimalist world, there's something warm and reassuring about a shelf filled with books.
It's an ego thing as well - "see how many books I have!". If we didn't like the physical qualities of books, of having them in our own homes, we'd all use the library a lot more ;-) .
Finally, there's something pleasurable in a tactile and visual way about a well-designed book. That's why people love coffee-table books about Bavarian castles. It's as much the book itself as the pictures and fluff text.
Of course, I'd love to have true electronic paper. But I don't see it killing paper books. Remember how the computer was supposed to do away with paper in the office? Maybe we'll see something similar with books.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How come Xerox hasn't made it more visible?
At least, I haven't heard of it ^^
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Great authors = Stephenson/Clancy/Crichton?
Reminds me of another technology I've seen -- DVDs. Think "Special Edition" books, with multiple languages and author's commentary in the margin...
Visit the
If you drop a paper book, you get maybe a couple bent pages, you drop a palm pilot/ereader, etc and you most likely have scrap. Its also fun to browse the books on the shelf and randomly look at one now and then as a title or author catches your eye, its alot harder to causally browse the computer.
Still got a point on the whole dropping thing, though.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
It will be a long time before e-books replace real ones, if ever. If for no other reason than books don't need to be powered, they will always be around. Heck, there are places in the world where paper books aren't really in yet...so e-books are very far off for them.
Think outside the more advanced nations, and the need for paper books is evidant.
Hell, I love technology, but when I want to re-read my favorites (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Catcher in the Rye, Mrs. Dalloway) I want dead (or recycled) trees and ink, not a glowing LCD.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Red light will tend to make skin look smoother. I assume this is because the redness of skin is uneven. This can be seen put to good use at your nearest, uh, gentleman's club. Try it out.
t
a Diamond Age smart paper and/or drummers joke here.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
So what kind of OS would these E-ink books have? something stable, I hope. It could be pretty minimal of course - It could have "less" built in and that's about all it would need.
Again, stability would be key - nothing like cuddling up with a good e-book, opening the cover, and reading that memorable first sentence: "General Protection Fault", or "Segmentation Fault", or "Kernel Panic!", or, my favorite, "Printer on fire!"
I suggest minix. No need for versatility, just reliability, small size, and easiness. Unless of course you want to play tetris in your Bio class. In that case, maybe Emacs would be a better OS =)
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
we finish converting to the paperless office. Remember how computers were going to free us from the confines of forms, memos, and various other forms of paperwork? And how now we are up to our eyeballs in paper because computers make it so easy to generate?
If anything, I buy more books now to keep up to date on emerging computer technologies. So, I guess once again computers are having the opposite of the intended effect.
News Report - 2055 - Geek Gets Burnt Up By Own Books
I agree, it would be silly to have all the manuals on one computer. But if you had them on three redundant, self-lighted e-books? You could even turn them all on for ambient light if the emergency lights went out. Even then, you may have the paper manuals on the operation of the ship, like modern planes do. But will your Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy collection really help you at that point?
Mission Control requests you shave that furry little butt.
After spending the last several years in the tech support industry, it is my feeling that electronic anything (banking, books, buying/selling) has a long way to go before it's accepted by the masses, but not for the reasons most of the Slashdot crowd would expect. To put it quite simply, most people who grew up before computers cannot deal well with anything computerized. I call it CISS (prounounced "kiss") which stands for Computer Induced Stupidity Syndrome. This is the phenomenon of otherwise completely normal, intelligent human individuals become blithering idiots when placed in front of a computer. Their brain shuts off. I have tried to find a cause for this but I have yet to pin it down. In the case of electronic books it should be simple. Hell my four-year-old Palm Pilot Professional can read all of the Baen Free Library books (With minor modifications) and I've already read two of the books with it. So why can't other people do the same? Like I said, I don't know. Maybe it's resentment. They don't like the idea of electronic books. Everyone has a bit of ludite in them and most of the people I know who didn't grow up with computers somehow think an electronic version of something will be somehow less than the original version. Maybe it's fear. They're afraid that with all the news they've heard about all these companies excercising insane levels of control over something they've already "sold" to the public, electronic books will be another SDMI or worse. Maybe it makes them feel their own mortality. They realize that something new is coming out and some primitive part of them starts gibbering and raising a clammour. Whatever it is, I fear the only way to get past it is to "replace" these people with their children, a generation who have grown up with computers and who seem to exhibit an amazing resistance to CISS.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Depends. For many, if not most, instances, yes. However, let me describe a situation in which the opposite is true.
During the holidays, when I go to visit my family, I like to bring along something to entertain me on the plane. (Or when everyone's changing diapers or clothes shopping, etc.) Originally, I'd try bringing a few paperback books. A little bit bulky when stuffed in my laptop case, but reasonable.
Then came books on CD. I own three of O'Reilly's "CD Bookshelf" series, plus "Design Patters CD" and "Effective C++ CD". (Yes, I find these entertaining reading. Deal with it.) Wow! When I total it up, that's the equivalent of 21 physical books on 5 CD's. That's an incredible weight/bulk savings.
The kicker, though, is that they don't need to stay on the CD... I very easily copied them to my laptop's hard drive. (I think I'm violating a couple of licenses, but that's moot.) Now I have no CD's at all! Plus now I've supplemented it with some HTML Gnu docs and a big chunk of Project Gutenberg's archives. That's hundreds of books with no increase in bulk at all.
In this instance, the electronic texts are far more portable than physical books.
I think this is the most accurate statement I've seen in this entire thread.
Oh. I love a shelf full of books too, but the thought is that there's nothing stopping them from being shelves full of e-books, if/when e-paper approaches the price point of regular paper.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I'm a lifelong technologist who's been on the Internet since the late 1980s. I make my living designing and promulgating services that run on the World Wide Web. I should know better than most that print is dead, the book is obsolete, the future belongs entirely to digital transmission, and the screen's the place for reading.
But books continue to matter, now and for any plausible future. Not as the only means to transmit information, entertainment, and knowledge--that hasn't been true for more than a century. Not as the dominant force among media--that hasn't been true for decades. But as a vibrant, healthy medium--one that serves a variety of needs better than any alternative and that makes good economic, ecological, and technological sense for the new millennium--the book just isn't going away.
One absolute article of faith in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s was that the DynaBook, or its equivalent, was just around the corner. This device offers better readability than a book and easier navigation. It is light enough in weight and has a high enough battery life so that it is as portable as a book; with rapid replacement of contents, it functions as a universal book. Every projection I've seen had such a device on the market long before now, at an extremely modest price.
It hasn't happened, and there's every reason to believe that it won't. Reading from digital devices, whether portable or desktop, suffers in several areas--among them light, resolution, speed, and impact on the reader--and there has been essentially no improvement in any of these areas in the last five years.
Many futurists have conceded this point. They now admit that people will print out anything longer than 500 words or so. It's just too hard to read from a computer, and it doesn't seem likely to get a lot easier. If every long text is printed out each time it is used, there are enormous economic and ecological disadvantages to the all-digital library: briefly, a typical public library would spend much more on printing and licenses than its current total budget and would use at least 50 times as much paper as at present.
What ever happened to Sony's BookMan, their portable digital book? Why didn't the DynaBook ever emerge as a real device? Why aren't we all using Personal Digital Assistants for most of our reading? The answers are complex, but the overall situation is clear. The PDAs being produced today and designed for tomorrow aren't intended to function as book replacements: the screens are small, hard to read, and awkward to navigate for lengthy text. It's increasingly clear that the public as a whole has no need for--or interest in-- digital book equivalents.
Two-thirds of adult Americans, and a higher percentage of children, use their public libraries. Roughly two-thirds of adult Americans purchased books last year. I'd guess that an even higher percentage reads magazines or newspapers. Is it possible that electronic tablets could achieve such ubiquity in the next few years--or even the next couple of decades? I doubt it.
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
The Complete FreeBSD is an excellent book. It's not as long as it looks, the last half of it are the man pages, all nicely printed in dead tree format.
I looked at your list, it looks great! Hacking Exposed is actually one of the next ones on my list, along with the FreeBSD Handbook (not on your list), which I am also going to be purchasing in the near future. (My list is long, and neverending it sometimes seems)
As for the firewall book(s) - there are 2 of them. Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, by Wes Sonnenreich and Tom Yates appears to be very good. (I just got the firewall books a week or so ago, so haven't been all the way thru them yet) It focuses on RedHat for the Linux angle. It's written in plain english (Gettin' Jiggy with PPP is one of my favorite subtitles) and seems very informative, covering a lot of ground.
The other one I have is Firewalls 24/7 (not sure of the author, don't have it in front of me) and it focuses on all kinds of OS's as firewalls. It is more of an administrator's guide, I believe. It seems very well written also, and easy to read. I am very happy with both books.
Of course, you are more advanced than I am - I've NEVER built a firewall. It's one of my projects I need to complete for work as a learning experience (I LOVE my job..can't believe they pay me for playing with and learning all this cool stuff). I will be building one at home using FreeBSD - then connecting my home computer to the net thru it. I got the books because I like to lay down the basic framework of understanding in my mind, then go for it.
That being said - I think the books are excellent, and could be put to good use even by someone like yourself, who is fairly advanced.
If you've not checked out half.com I really reccommend it for buying books (and dvds/cds/vhs/etc). My Linux/OpenBSD Firewall book is listed at $45 - I believe I got it for somewhere around $14. Excellent deal, and the book is in perfect, brand new condition.
I would gladly trade my 50 pounds of text books for one ebook. I did have a freind who bought all of his textbooks...scaned them...and returned them before the end of the first week of school and the end of full refunds... carries his laptop around campus. sure beat a couple hundered dollars in text books each semseter.
I can't wait until it's easy to download pirated versions of Java/Oreilly books via gnureadster(tm). But seriously:
I will have a bookcase with real books on it, until someone with guns forcefully removes it from my house. You can't display great works of literature, or get the inspiration from a library, by reading an MP3-style playlist, and double clicking "War and Peace".
I enjoy not having to crypto-sign a release for a friend to borrow my copy of "1984", or even "Java in a Nutshell".
I think the only place for this is high-volume, low-cost books/literature:
Newspapers
Magazines
etc... etc...
When Computer books cost $80 or more, and travel books the same size/weight in paper can cost $9.95, it makes you wonder. The cost in publishing, is writing, editing, promotion, and distribution - of which only distribution is made partially easier with e-books.
I don't think many people would choose to have Java in a Nutshell for a mere $4.95 discount, in e-form only, dependent on electricity, etc...
Hacking Exposed is actually one of the next ones on my list, along with the FreeBSD Handbook
Hacking Exposed is nothing short of AWESOME. I do suggest that you pick up the second edition though, which came out a little while back. (Unfortunatly for me, it came out 2 months after I got the first edition...)
As for the Free BSD handbook, is that the red hardcover one about BSD 4.4? I have heard good things about it.
Of course, you are more advanced than I am - I've NEVER built a firewall.
I would hardly consider myself more advanced than you. The funny thing is that firewalls are far easier to build than you might imagine. Understanding them is the hard part, it sounds like you are well on your way towards that!
If you have any questions on them you can always mail me (despam my hotmail address) or check out our (very small and humble) message board off of our tiny LUG solug.org.
I had not checked out half.com before, it looks good, but unfortunatly with the exchange rate between the U.S. Dollar and the Canadian one I rarely shop online. I get a large proportion of my computer books from: Halfpricecomputerbooks.com but this is because it is a Canadian company, and I can drive to the store (6Hrs away...). (Heh, I have spent at least $2000.00 CDN there!) Due to the value of your dollar it should be of benifit for you to check it out too, although the prices at Half.com look better I must admit.
I will add your two books to my "get list"... Just what I need... I was at the grocery store today and they had one of those "discount computer book bins"...
Java In a Nutshell (O'Reilly) $9.99
LPI Linux Professional Institute Certification $19.99 (I already have it at $75.00 but I can give this to a friend who needs a copy)
Apache Server Commentary $19.99
Learning Debian/GNU Linux (O'Reilly) $19.99
(Ok, I did not need this last one, but hey, it was an O'Reilly and it was cheap!)
This book habit is bad. (I suppose it's better than drugs...) I can already hear some of the more recent books of fiction I bought calling me...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
How long until we start hearing tech support horror stories of people trying to cut out passages from an epaper book?
This could have some very interesting uses in the children's book market though. Reusable coloring books come to mind, as well as small animations and the like.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Don't know about you but this article just give the creeps. It's so "yada yada yap yap what a bright future with this Gyricon thing
Digital technology and books, magazines and newspapers are certainly going to collide, just as Wolff said. And, as he also said, the results will have an enormous social and cultural impact.
And then nothing on the real problem behind e-books. Yeah sure : enormous social and cultural impact. You name it, dude! What so great with books is not that you own them like you own your car or your house. The object doesn't need to attractive or up to the latest hype. Nop.
As many posters already noticed, the good ol' paper book is completely self sufficient, durable, always on, outside the reach of any external control on whether or not you have the legal right, the appropriate license to read it, the proper kowtowing to copyright holders and authorities. Once you have it in your hands, buy, borrow, copy or steal, it's yours, inalienable, always there for you until the end of times. Barring the suit or police thug being literally over your shoulder, nobody can get in the way between you and a book.
With e-books will come software and control, no matter what. Closed DMCA protected software, of course, so publishers can entrust their precious holdings to e-books. Combine that with always-on ubiquitous wireless for permanent license checking and you and up a Brave New World that strongly smells of Big Brother and Kafka combined. You haven't paid your annual license fee : sorry but no reading tonight. A controversial author dies and his heirs want to suppress "inadequate" writings : just globally revoke the license. A court deems a book libelous : broadcast the court order and zap the book out the universe so no one can make its own opinion. Someone is indicted for "anti-social" behavior, prohibit him to access "dangerous" reading, for his own good of course. You want to lend your e-book to a friend
Those e-books just scare me. The latter this nightmare comes true, the better.
Sig . I just love nuclear bombs, gas warheads and the scent of napalm in the morning. They make people understand that technology can go wrong.
this was written a while ago on the same topic sort of interesting
o ok /
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/thelastb
Dunno. Why is the wrong question. It's a flimsy piece of plastic, with a plastic case and a few printed pieces of art.
A *similar* feeling occurs for my webpage, so it isn't out of the question that I can adapt.
But there is something, strangely enough, intangible about things that are tangible. Being able to flip through my comics, my novels, my references. I will want a print copy for sheer ownability, not for utility.
So if I get a library of e-books, I still may use the services of 'custom' printhouses to print out and store my top 10 fav publications just to sit on my shelf. The same may be true in a few years with my music collection, when over 15 gigs of music are availabe to my PDA, my PC, my notebook, or my car, that my favorite pieces I may still have the albums and cases. I do that with software; keep the boxes for display purposes
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The paper medium has survived the "killer apps" of Radio and Television, whose to say it won't survive now? I know I myself enjoying laying in my room reading Asimov, Tolkein, and Faulkner, and the mere tactile feedback of reading a book that is yellowed with age from being from the 70s and before is enough as a reminder that whatever great authors today - Stephenson, Clancy, Crichton - they are merely standing upon the shoulders of the greats who went before them.
Incidentally, check out this study by Xerox/EuroPARC comparing computerized methods of studying versus their paper equivalent. If I recall correctly, they found paper based studying led to higher grades then their computerized equivalents. However, the computer was much more popular for items such as research. Paper and e-Paper both have their roles within society, just as technology and agriculture remain two vitally different but vitally important aspects of human culture.
Information is the catalyst for revolution
However, I'd say the largest problem with book replacement technology is that it fundamentally fails to enhance the technology of printed media while costing much more. What advantage do you really get out of an ePaper eBook that's as big as a classic book? It costs a couple orders of magnitude more? That's just silly.
In order for a technology to succeed it should at least enhance upon anything it happens to be replacing. Would a 1 horse-power car have been successful? Unlikely.
It's been very frustrating to watch the various digital book technologies being presented without any real answer to the very basic business model question: "How is this better than a book?" Some of the naive answers presented include:
- Holds more data
-
More compact, more light
-
Links with the text
But lets not mention the other disadvantages eBooks bring to the media. Here we go, please answer true or false:Is this really an advantage? DVDs demonstrate that while we like a little bit extra with our content, the sort of storage difference we're talking about isn't just Shakespear an commentary, but all of Elizabethian literature and exhaustive commentary. It's conceivably the entire O'Reilly library. It is, for practical example, the entirety of Usenet from inception to 1994. And that's on a crappy 640MB CD, not even a 5GB DVD. While this sounds great, it is not in the best interest of publishers, which means they aren't interested, so we get no support for our eBook there.
Okay, granted, it'd be nice to have Cryptonomicon or the Complete Works of England, or Every Biblical Text in a bitty little reader, but not many people want to pay ten times as much for the priveledge. Sure, convenience is a premium, but that's a bit steep.
Sure. Neat feature for a text to include, as anyone who's read a well formated PDF can tell you. However, its usefulness relies on how well the text formatter understands the apporiate useage of hyperlinks, which is a null set, in my opinion. Or maybe the power set of the null set. Maybe. Other web-by features have come up, but frankly I personally got over needing pictures in my books about the same time I started walking, and I don't really want to deal with animated banner ads while I try to read The Sound and The Fury. Especially not if I get to pay hundreds of bucks for the privledge.
Have you ever lost a book?
Were you out more than 40USD?
Have you ever been frustrated because your book ran out of power as you were about to finish the climactic chapter?
Have you ever dropped a book?
And not been able to read it when you picked it up again?
And been out more than 40USD?
Would it be worth it to pay 1000USD+ to have the Oxford English Dictionary about your person? Until an eBook can not just replace but improve on traditional books, they won't fly. And improve in some tangible, useful, indispensible way.
One quick notion on that front is a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Perception, where text is presented word by word in a fixed position, saving the reader the need to scan lines. While this sounds like a trivial luxury, research seems to indicate it boosts speed of acquisition and duration of retention of text.
What, finally, is the point of altering a cheap, durable, stable media to make it expensive, delicate and prone to bugs, unless you add some significant value in the process.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
1 - *grins* I've never been able to get over the attraction of reading in bed. Can't get to sleep without it. :)
:)
:)
2 - Well reading a large hardcover in bed (as opposed to sitting at a table) is hard on the wrists for me at least
3 - *grins* sorry, wasn't clear... they publish it as they edit it, I assume, so you get more as you get closer to the publication date.
4 - Yep, you can go back to your web-library and download new copies (in various formats, everything from html to rtf to microsoft reader, rocket book, or pda compatable formats.) if you accidentaly nuke yours, or it's been a year and you want to reread it because the sequal just came out...
5 - *laughs* the bane of any space opera fan
I've been using mobipocket. They have a freebie publisher, so I can turn text or html files into mobipocket ones. *grins* I hear you ont he microsoft reader one, but that's never likely to happen as CE and PalmOS are direct competitors, and you've not seen MS Word for linux yet have you?
And Baen supports mobipocket directly which is a plus since I've been buying from them.
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I'm hoping for a future where space travel is not only regular, but annoyingly regular. Where cross-planet flights often go into orbit, where we regularly visit space-stations in orbit, or travel to the Moon or Mars. Maybe it's a huge corporation, 'cause widgets can be make cheaper / faster / better in space, or maybe it's colonization, or maybe it's just government flights, but we're going up every day.
At that point, the folks in charge start considering safety vs. cost. It's a dirty little fact that car manufacturers weigh safety recalls vs. projected accidents and consumer opinion, and some occasionally faulty components don't get replaced. It will be the same for space flight.
What this means is, once components get good enough, they will start thinking about the cost of fuel and space for all those manuals, and start requiring the electronic copy. Maybe two or three redundant copies at first, but eventually just one. And you won't be able to go up with the paper copies, eventually, unless you declare them as luggage and pay for them. Of course, your seat cushion will act as a floatation device, if you happen to survive a water "landing" from orbit.
Now, that would make an interesting science fiction story...
- read when I like and where I like
- read in any order I like
- quote from for the purposes of research or in the creation of a derivative work
- sell to someone else
- lend to someone else
The new technology may be great but it's how the content will be restricted that worries me.--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
My boss has the first edition of Hacking Exposed, I knew there was a new one - saw it reviewed on some website somewhere, which was the first I had heard of it actually.
Wow...those are some neato books you picked up at the supermarket. Now you just need to find the time to read them all...*L* That's my problem, I accumulate them faster than I read them.
As for the FreeBSD Handbook...I am not sure what it looks like in it's bound form. The same thing is available on the web, but they decided to publish it book format. I've heard it's a great book. I had actually placed an order for it (at Clearance price!!! $23) at LinuxMall.com. After a couple weeks went by and I hadn't heard anything I called them and found out that they merged with another company and we sold out of the Handbooks. BUMMER! Now I'll have to cough up the $50 for it full price.
If you ever change your mind and decide you may like to try half.com out I can help you out with the exhange rate on the first order at least. Because I am signed up there I can send you a $5 coupon good for your first order over $10. If you would like to try that, go ahead and let me know. I'll have to check it out and see if they have any special rules for you Canucks. :)
e-Books - going to be huge, no question about it.
Will paper die out ? Well, I still covet first editions in nice bindings, solely because of the aesthetics. Taking a lesser version of that, one-use paper will always be more cute & cuddly than that impersonal info-gadget, so I certainly wouldn't hold my breath waiting for paper to vanish.
The real difference though is one that this article skated right over. Paper is one-use with pre-packaged content, e-Books are on-line and live. The difference between "The History of..." and "What's Happening to..., Right This Minute" is a very big difference. It's not so big for Tolstoy. It's not even very big for Steven King. But it's enormous for a medical textbook.
Like the rest of you web-dev geeks, I must read through the whole of the W3C site every few weeks, what with checking the odd snippet ten times a day. Usually it's because of my failing memory, but often it's because some small part was revised last week and I need the current version. Now can you imagine how you'd work with that on static paper ? It's cases like that that will push the e-Book, not some chapter-by-chapter "stop if you don't like it" licensing deal on a new novel.
..authors such as Stephen King invoke the DMCA to prevent people making unauthorised copies of his latest book, as a result of the fact dead tree versions are predicted to disappear ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It's not like we haven't heard this spiel before. For years the likes of Lotus and Microsoft have been saying that our offices will be completely digital any day now and paper documentation will become a thing of the past, and all the while companies like Xerox have continued to make money on the simple reality that everyone, everywhere, still needs paper.
It's natural and obvious that the e-book publishers would be announcing that "that the day of ordinary books, magazines and newspapers was almost over." They, after all, want to make money on its replacement. But there are some things computers just can't replace, and this is one of them. E-books will supplement paper books in the Western world, but they will never replace them.
ye[
--
I think having a precursor to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is exciting enough, but I can think of a much better use for this stuff.
Imagine how wonderful it would be if you could edit your code on a huge drawing board, like the mechanical engineers of a few decades ago used to use. Think how much better that would be than scrolling it through a few small windows on your monitor. It wouldn't matter if it took a few seconds to redraw; once that was done you could navigate through it effortlessly just by moving your eyes.
Extend that further. Remember the room in Isaac Asimov's novel Foundation, where two members of the Second Foundation inspect the Plan? The walls were covered with a diagram of the Plan, and they were able to zoom in and examine specific areas, or zoom out to get a broad overview. As a professional programmer, you could afford to wallpaper a small room with this stuff, or at least a corner or your cube...
In the future chip burning protests will be hot.
I'm eagerly waiting for electronic paper
to hit the market. But at the moment there
is no variant that offers a contrast better
than 10:1.
Normal monitors offer contrast > 200:1.
The book of the future would use the epaper. If used enough, it has the possibility of being bound into a book form, with memory in the binding and possibly touchscreen pages (to make notes). The book would maybe have 200 pages, probably hardcover. For longer books, it could be multiple volumes.
Benefits:
Disadvantages:
For me I think it would be a great merge of old and new. Lets hope someone does something like this.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I've just finished reading three texts that I've downloaded for viewing on my Palm Pilot. The text wasn't as easy to read as a paperback. I had to do a lot more 'paging' to get through it. But there were some nice things about it. Since I had my Palm with me throughout the day I could read a few 'pages' before my next meeting started. I read about a chapter as I waited for my wife to complete her shopping. I'd never carry my latest novel to a meeting or even in the car, but my Palm is there almost all the time. I can carry several novels in the Palm, so I can move on to the next as I finish one. I can beam them to my friends with Palms. I don't do a lot of reading of new materials, so for a while I can live with the selection I'm finding for the Palm, and the Project Gutenberg list has a bunch of texts that I can translate for Palm reading. I think if it's an integral part of my PDA or whatever device I'm carrying all day the e-book of sorts could be a fairly usable item.
- Sig this!
Don't quote me on this, but I've been told by my psych professor (PhD in neuropsychology) that studies have tested recall abilities comparing print vs computer display materials. CDM subjects did significantly poorer.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
Don't people buy books to learn how to use computers?
What do you think Li-ion batteries and Apple chargers are for ? 8-)
Having read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and the coda written by Bradbury that followed, I feel that he probably would not mind too awful much as long as his books were not censored in any way shape or form. Fahrenheit 451 was more about the censorship of these books than the actual non-existance of paper books. Personally, I don't like staring at a screen all day, but I do love to read books. I think something is going to be lost if we start curling next to the fire with a blanket, glass of YO-J and our palm pilots to read my old Dr. Seuss books. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
...wouldn't computer books be the first to go? Yet if you've been to any large chain bookstore lately, the computer section is huge. Computer books are selling more than ever. If you can't get diehard techies to replace their books, you ain't gonna get Oprah's book club to go e-book only.
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
Every time I see something like this, a prediction of all dead-tree books dissapearing, I'm thinking of one thing. Myself.
I can go for hours at a time (my record is around 6 hours), reading from a paper book without even stoping. It does not matter on what topic: novels, computer, math, etc. However, I am simply unable to do the same on a computer. Even on a 17in Samsung 753DF monitor that I have at home, set at 1024x768, I cannot read for more than an hour at a time, and that is a stretch. And laptop displays, or PDAs are even worse for me.
And this is not because I have bad eyes. I just had a check-up, and I have 20/20 vision (or whatever you call not needing any glases of any sort). It's just that I get tired a lot sooner when I have to read from a computer screen then when I read from a paper book.
So as far as I'm concerned, if I'll ever have a choice between an elecronic book and a paper one, I'll always choose the latter. And if only the electonic media would be available, I would still print it out.
Let's see now, how many 5 1/4" floppies do I have in my closet? How can I read them without a 5 1/4" floppy drive? And what about that RLL encoded 30Mb hard disk with no working controller? And these are only 15 years old or so and already I can't read them.
Regular books are in it for the long haul.
E-anything is bound to be obsolete and inaccessible in a ridiculously short time. Well, publshers might even prefer it that way. But, for things which are to last a long time, electronic media is generall not hte way to go.
(albeit CDs seem to last a long time, and devices to play them don't seem to be disappearing.)
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
Many of the issues are obvious, like
No extra cost for beautiful color charts and images
Quicker distribution, particularly internationally.
Generally wider distrubution
Easier to search from one's desk, instead of tromping around from library to library or ordering obscure journals.
Some electronic-only journals are free or much less expensive than print ones.
Rob Kirby, a prominent mathematician, has an excellent summary of the ridiculousness journal pricing (profit margins on the order of 40%) and it is great to see experts working to try and straighten things out.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I can remember when the ushering in of the computer era (early 80's) would eliminate the use of paper everywhere. Nope, did not happen. Paper use went UP. So much for the paperless office.
Will paper books dissapear? Yes, but not for quite some time. Our current generation grew up with paper books. We like the smell and feel of them. My copy of The Lord of the Rings has pages falling out of it, and I would not have it any other way. The technology may be there, but the consumer desire to use something other than the dead tree version other than for the "nifty" factor is not.
Something about the way material is distributed will have to change for this to happen. What do I predict? Napster. Napster for books. MP3's were around before Napster, but Napster is a major influcence on the proliferation of MP3 devices. When books are more easially distributed, E-books will take off. Yes, you can get them now, I read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot, or rather, I STARTED to read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot, then I went out and bought the book because it was annoying on my Palm. I like my Palm for occasional reading, I read A book of Five Rings and Sun Tzu's Art of War on my palm, but I read those in brief stints. True, this new technology is *NOT* a palm pilot - its better, but I have a bias, and I will stick with what I know, as I suspect will most people until they are given an incentive to switch.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Books still have a long life ahead of them.
I don't doubt that eventually, it'll be possible to produce an electronic book that is acceptable to the vast majority of people (as opposed to today's solutions, which are generally not acceptable to most people).
For those of you following along at home, here are the major issues you need to resolve before electronic books replace the paperback:
Display resolution & contrast - I see good progress here, maybe in a couple more years.
Portability - Okay, no problem there
Batteries - You need either really long life, or solar cells. If I can't read it on the beach when I'm on vacation, it's not a "book".
Content rights management - I don't want to have to buy a new "e-book" for each novel I want to read, that'd be a waste. On the other hand, the authors need compensation.
Distribution outlets - Yeah, well, obviously the Internet. But who's going to manage the whole author->reader chain? Traditional publishing houses?
A reasonable user interface - Take a look at Acrobat Reader for an excellent example of how >b>not to design an interface for reading books. Ideally, you want something that takes advantage of the unique strengths of the medium (hypertext, multimedia, etc)
And, last but not least, cost. Books are still pretty darn cheap. Any electronic competitor needs to be either far superior, or not much more expensive, to compete.
On the other hand, anything that reduces the demand for paper has got to be a good thing...
fully replacing paper, or even just physical printed books, will be feat equal to reinventing the wheel.
tcd004
Check out the guts of the PENTIUM 4
BWstockphotos
But from an historical point of view, this could launch our society into sort of a dark age. Not dark as in an unenlightened age, but dark as in, if something happened to destroy our technology and knowledge, future archaeologists would have nothing to learn about our society from.
Books can be thought of as analogue, as they degrade, they are still usable for a long long time, whereas digital, when it starts to degrade, it is very usable and then can become unusable in a relatively short amount of time.
And personally, I kinda like holding a book when I curl up to read (like I ever get the chance these days!)
It's really neat what we can do now a-days. I remember hearing about this digital paper last year. Cool...
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
What comes to mind is two words... Paperless Office.
That didn't real happen now did it. Computers just made us consume more paper.
I am continuously guilty of printing of text from web pages so I can read it. It's easy to say, and it has been said in the past, that paper will dissapear but I haven't seen any evidence of this, at home or at work. The truth of the matter is that the faster we can work with the aid of a computer, the more paper we'll generate.
It's much more convienient to take a book on a subway, to the park, on a plane, etc. than it would be to plug in a laptop and scroll though one. Why would people want to use up their laptop's valuable power to read a novel anyway? It would make more sense to download the novel or resource material and then print it out to read it.
But maybe I'm too old fashion.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Everybody loves the books. They are everywhere. On the trains, in the planes. Books will never go away. I hate books. I hate to read.
...18...19...20 Submit
If books don't exist in Farenheit 451, what were the "firemen" burning all the time? Grocery lists?
Let's keep the stupid (not to mention incorrect and irrelevant) literary references to a minimum, shall we?
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I think books will die when we have a true paperless office
Just look at how many books technology sells, and tell me that books are gonna die.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I have heard futurists say that this era will be among the most poorly recorded times in human history, simply because digital information can be destroyed far more easily. The Library of Congress archives every issue of every periodical around as far as I know, but does it archive Slashdot comments?
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--hongpong.com
How could the human race be expected to rebuild civilisation without access to the knowledge of previous generations. Remember folks it's happend before....the dark ages, the burning of the library at Alexandria....
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
- Your battery dies...
- The book prompts you to renew your license...
- The embedded Windows OS GPF's...
- A kid runs by with a squirt gun and shorts out your e-book...
And damn, you can't pick up your new thousand volume capable device at the local grocery store.I'll keep my paperbacks for now...
--brian
Will e-paper be as effective at containing messes during housebreaking the dog as the New York Times?
On another topic, will the e-paper give off toxic fumes when burned? Newsprint makes excellent kindling for the fireplace: it burns fast and hot, is easy to manipulate, and doesn't poison the people settling in for a romatic glass of wine in front of the fire.
All in all though, it would be nice to have tough, waterproof pages that can stand up to reading and rereading as well as assaults by toddler.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
1. i love books too, as i love horses. doesn't mean we still ride them to work.
2. electronic paper IS something you can hold in your hands. it has all the advantages (clarity far better than CRTs, etc.) without the disadvantages (weight, size).
3. my favorite part: "Technology can do wonderful things, but it will never replace genuine human communication." i could make all manner of clever comments about "genuine communication" and its relation to technology, but i find most humorous the irony that this was a post on slashdot...
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fight global cooling
Electronic paper has disadvantages now, but they are most technological. When they become technologically possible and cheap, they will be quickly adopted. Tech manuals will be first (can you imagine a Linux book that updates with kernel revisions?), because the industry can afford it. Schools may be next, since textbooks are so expensive anyway. Once college kids start using them (trade in my 100 pound textbooks for one cool-looking textpad? Sure), they will slowly make their way into the workplace, then into homes.
In terms of quality, CDs are inferior to LPs, but they are smaller and easier to keep in good working condition. Eventually, I expect digital formats without physical medium (provide your own) will take over. Paper will go the same way. I can't imagine a future where geeks go to Mars carrying 500+ kg of paper manuals. Mission Control won't allow it.
Since aquiring my PocketPC i have actually been reading much more often. At any one moment, I keep around 10 novels on compact flash and have found myself reading between appointments, in bed (no booklight needed) and in meeting its great you can read a book and still look very busy. When travelling I dont have to lug around 4-5 paperbacks and I never loose my place if i fall asleep reading, since if remembers where I dropped off. Sure I still enjoy the smell of printed paper and still buy my share of both paperbacks and hardbacks but for convenience sake I find ebooks a more than worthy addition to my library.
This will happen of course, but it will be the day that battery life is next to endless or the low power is dirived from a passive source so the the longevity of the media is like a book. Also there will need to be non-backlit screens, surfaces that mimic paper to the point that it is no longer adventageous to store books in the current format. Books are just a median, like anything else. Right now books are perfect. They are to cheap to product, have a long life, and don't need power. Once you can stick it on a shelf without a external powersupply and come back and read in 10 years later, that is when book will vanish.
Neck_of_the_Woods
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
It will? According to the article (oh, that), it looks like paper. I think the strain is a few inches behind your eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I read in the Wall Street Journal today that, because of the patent that has been filed on behalf of Johaan Gutenberg for movable type and for the concept of 'two-eyed reading', Whistler is going to require all users of WinXP to wear a specialized pair of glasses (called 'DigiOpthoLooker Things', or 'DOLT' by MS) that, unless the text being displayed onscreen has been licensed (licenses are valid for 12.3 minutes or whenever the reader gets off the toilet), will turn jet black.
MS, in turn, is being sued by God and Douglas Adams (who filed for a speculative patent for his 'peril sensitive sunglasses' used in HHGTTG) for patent infringement on, in God's case, patent 0000000000001: Looking at stuff.
According to the WSJ, God has a pretty good case, and MS is looking to settle out of court, but only if God will turn Linus into a turnip.
This latest barrage of lawsuits does not bode well for the elimination of the paper book as we know it.
Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, I need to stop drinking so much coffe.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
I would have thought so too, but this new tech is NOTHING like what You see today. The advantage of the mylar coated tech-thing they're creating now, is that it's so much more like a "real" book than the ones that are around now.
I've actually been to my local library to check out an "e-book" in it's present form, and it's not really nice to read on those limited calculator like pads. But that's not what this development is about. This will be so much more like a real book, have the general feel and look of paper end everything, only diff is that You can set bookmarks, make searches, and don't even have to strain Yourself to turn the page.
In my opinion, the E-book WILL survive, but for the very foreseeable future it will co-exist with the regular book, since As You point out, they're part of our history. Additionally the production costs are a lot bigger at present. But as the E-book becomes cheaper and easier on the eyes, I truely believe that it will eventually become accepted.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
A couple not so encouraging eBook stories.
... but it's just less fun, more expensive and heavier," said Robert Hertzberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "That's not much of a marketing motto."
E-Books Barely a Blip on Publishing Radar says E-book sales barely show up in the $96 billion U.S. consumer electronics or publishing markets.
""Reading an e-book is just like reading a book
While Wired asks What if E-Books Cost Less?, one publisher is lowering prices to sell more books.
There is more to replacing books, but simply
inventing something bettrer. One way it will happen,
technology is much cheaper and as easy to use as
books themselves are. The law is made that reading
paper books is illegal, so everyone hands them in
and starts to use new technology.
Other way, is it would offer nothing else was
offering to us before, like books were in the
beginning.
Simply being a better techology, is not always good
enough.
just 2c
Publishing companies view public libraries as their worst enemy. Publishers want to be able to collect fees for every time their product is read, and want the "free" libraries to start passing this cost on to their patrons. This would have the effect of denying knowledge to the segment of our society most in need of it.
E-books will become a deadly weapon that can be wielded by publishers in their war on libraries.
Will e-paper ever replace regular paper? Probably not. But I for one wouldn't mind getting at least some of my reading material directly from the internet.
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Home is where you hang your @.
In the future book burning protests will be replaced with magnets.
Books also depend on technology. You can't read them if it's dark, or if it's raining. Assuming that civilisation hasn't collapsed completely, is it easier for me to give you a copy of a book by beaming it Palm-to-Palm, or by photocopying a paper version ? Will a quality-made computing device outlive a cheap paperback on corrosive paper ?
The digital longevity issue is a good one. I can (and do) read 40 year old data sets, but I often can't read a 5 year old one. The reasons behind most of these happenings is that >20 years ago we defined data formats by doing just that; defining a format as fields, groups, rows etc. Ten years ago we instead would choose "WordPerfect" format -- devolving the format definition to an application vendor. Now it's these application-based formats that are the ones being lost (mainly), not those where the format was explicitly noted.
Fortunately, the future looks brighter. XML is a good start, but the increasing usage of schema-based formats with simple and commonplace syntaxes can free us entirely from application dependency. Who cares if the last XML parser is lost ? The XML syntax spec is shorter than a French holiday phrasebook, and we can just re-write one from scratch. Schema languages are increasingly self-describing and semantically powerful, so we can re-interpret our data by reading them.
i've recently purchased a book from audible.com.
first of all, after downloading the book, i realized that the book was in a proprietary format and i was forced to use a proprietary player (which basically sucked because it stuttered from time to time). i was unable to hear the book on my linux machine and had to install a microsoft product just to listen to it. what the hell is wrong with this picture?
that's like purchasing a book from the bookstore and having to read it with a special decoder spyglass! or how about purchasing a music cd that only plays on Sony CD players?
this is a serious issue and it needs to be fixed before it gets out of hand.
for this, i played the book on one machine, and recorded the audio onto another. then, i changed the recorded format to MP3 so i'm able to listen to it on my linux machine. i should make the MP3 available to the public just to spite those idiots...
BOYCOTT AUDIBLE.COM !!!
golgotha
Three words:
Ben Bova "CyberBooks"
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Whether books are supposedly going to go away the issue still remains. When is there going to be a good way for people to read without using projected light. Is there any alternatives for this? Books seem to be the best alternative so far.
I have a fondness for long novels, unfortunatly they are hard to carry around in a pocket all day, being so bulky, like the Cryptonomicon hard cover I carried around. Lately I've been greading them on my palm pilot. It's perfect, light, backlit, I don't have to carry another thing around with me (since I carry my palm anyways).
It has all the convience of a book (I can read it in front of the fireplace, etc), and all the convience of a light small device.
A year ago I would have said no way. Now it's 'bring on the ebooks!'
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Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Books are just another irritating reminder of our heritage and culture and must be stopped at whatever cost!
Regular books are in it for the long haul.
E-anything is bound to be obsolete and inaccessible in a ridiculously short time. Well, publshers might even prefer it that way. But, for things which are to last a long time, electronic media is generall not hte way to go.
(albeit CDs seem to last a long time, and devices to play them don't seem to be disappearing.)
I've dealt with a well-known large aerospace company. Do you know how they long-term archive their design data? Microfilm. Because in 30 years, it will be relatively easy to get back. A microfilm viewer would still be easy to build, if there are none around. Put it on microfilm, and forget about it (OK, you think about it a little once in a while: "do we still have viewers and printers?").
They don't want to archive data in some application format, because in 30 years, they would have had to do constant maintenance on their archive, to ensure they could get the data back ("is Adobe Acrobat Reader 75.3 able to read our old pdf files?" "Nope." "Data migration!"). That is not the point of a long-term archive. You put it away, and if you need it in 15 years, you go over and get it.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Maybe they'll be burning palm pilots...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Do you think the world was saying "Oh..well there go paintings..with photographs, nobody will bother with having paintings done."
Just because there is an "alternative" to paper based books doesn't mean it's a "replacement"
...until you've read this article from boston.com:
"E-Ink Corp. of Cambridge laid off 37 workers last week after shifting the emphasis of its operations from large signs to handheld electronic devices."
"E-Ink sent about three-quarters of the 50 workers who worked on its original product out the door as it moves into the next phase of its development, according to a company spokesman"
Guess I should go print and read it.
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"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Since I just got a Rocket eBook I've had this conversation a few times recently. Something that my friend pointed out is "I can't loan you my ebook after I'm done with it." He's right -- when I buy them, they're hard coded to my device. Unless I loan him the reader, which would be in sticking with the old "book license" methodology that only one person can read it at a time. The problem, of course, is that then I can't read any books while he has my reader. That's no good. Something that's assumed about paper books that's different from ebooks is that paper books have the "reader" inherently installed. Each book is therefore a standalone thing. eBooks, at least for the moment, are not. You have to think of the book and the reader (the content and the display?) as two different things having two different licenses.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
If the technology ever gets good enough, we'd never have to worry about books becoming obsolete again. The problem is screen resolution. MS Reader's ClearType is pretty decent, but until someone comes up with a screen that won't hurt your eyes after a few hours, there'll always be a market for books.
At first blush, the ebook thing looks like the perfect answer to the hassles of packing and transporting the collection. However, once one _tries_ to delve into the world of ebooks, it quickly becomes apparent that it's not all shits and giggles. The most grating issue is control, followed quickly by compatibility. Very few ebook publishers allow the reader to control the presentation of the data. I've got the glassbook reader, the adobe reader, the MS reader, etc., etc., etc. Then there are the standalone systems like the one FatBrain used to use (tho I received an email last year telling me to hurry up and unlock my books before the new system went live) which writes a license key to the registry of your Windoze machine. Control, control, control. It didn't take long for me to figure out that I was no longer purchasing a book. I was purchasing a license.
Can you imagine if you bought a book from B&N only to discover that you need to use a special light bulb from Random House in order to read the book? And that it will only let you read books that _you_ purchased. You can no longer borrow a book from a friend. If a friend stops by, he'd better bring his own bulb if he wants to show you his new art book. And what if your bulb breaks? You're screwed unless you've got receipts for your entire library and can convince the publisher that your old bulb really was destroyed. Upgrade your lamp? Better keep the old one around so you can read books from the "old lamp" era. Nevermind the fact that each publisher uses a different bulb. And God help you if your electrical system runs at 220.
Until publishers get over their control issues and pick a standard format, there's no way ebooks will be anything more than a niche market.
I recently wandered into a channel called #bookwarez on IRC. Instead of going to Barnes n' Noble to *buy* books the way you're supposed to, you can get them for free in PDF or HTML format. Most of the books I've seen available are tech-related (Teach yourself [language/app/cert] in 21 days), but I've also seen many fiction titles as well. This form of warez is new to me, but the fact that it's out there is kinda interesting. Most of the books I've seen are zipped up pretty good and I'd say 1000 pages = 2 megs. Makes you wonder what *won't* be available for free if you search hard enough. This brings up many ethical issues, and I don't advocate or reccommend that you go out and do this, but it is something to think about.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
And here is where the e-book fails. Every book looks the same, smells the same and feels the same. This makes it alot harder for the brain to associate to and remember what we read. And it's really boring too. The first thing I do when I get a book, is smelling and touching it. Seriously. It's as important for me that the book "feels" right as the content is. All in all, the good old book is alot better for humans than any currently existing e-book.
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There could perhaps be a window... [and] a hatch with explosive bolts on the spacecraft... and pitch and yaw thrusters so that the astronaut occc... pilot could have some... could have control of the re-entry procedure.
-- "The Right Stuff"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I see it as being too easy to tack on more charges to the consumer. When you buy a printed book today. It is yours. You can look at it when you want, and how you want. It is hard, if not impossible for a company to charge you for every time you read it.
Now, consider e-paper. It would be easy to come up with means to charge you everytime you want to read the book. You could be charge everytime you use index. You could even be charge on on the number pages you read. Essentially, buying a book and reading it will become services. You pay for the priviledge to "read" or "use" the book in only the methods the companies want you to use it. Think it won't happen? It will. Why? This could eventually happen if publishers/authors decide they don't like you reading a book more than once. Since they own the information, and with the current changes in the laws, they could easily dictate where, when, and how you read a book with e-paper.
I deffinately have mixed feeling about e-paper. I like the idea, but I don't like giving the publishers a new way to charge me.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that