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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.
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
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
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.
- 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.
Not to mention: one time I printed out a bunch of documentation on some obscure configuration setting, which included copious info on "what to do when your computer won't boot". Someone saw my stack of dead-tree dox, and in before you can say "Digital DNA", they chucked it and wrote me a nasty email about dead trees and things of that nature.
You can probably infer what happened. I needed the docs, they were on the computer that wouldn't boot, along with the bookmarks and pointers to said data.
True story.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
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