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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.
(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.
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
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!
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...
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
Ya, but consider the numerous disadvantages of books:
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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
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
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.
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.
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 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
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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