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The Evolution of Reading In the Digital Age
Doofus writes "'Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused.' is the subtitle of Craig Mod's thoughtful discussion aboutthe evolution of reading material from printed dead-tree to flowing digital content. I stumbled upon his blog post from a related NYTimes article, Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print. He breaks reading material down into two basic categories: 'Formless,' in which the content and meaning of the writing has no dependency on presentation, and 'Definite,' in which layout and presentation play a role in conveying meaning. Mod makes the point that as digital presentation improves, devices such as the iPad will bring authors newer and improved platforms upon which to display Definite content. Despite this, he says, some works will be better consumed in physical print because 'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects.'"
Like pop-up books. Or scratch-n-sniff.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Also known as PDF and anything but PDF. PDF and fixed layout where it's needed, but please stop producing novels as PDF. They don't reflow nicely on smaller screens.
Save the books..... burn the ipads!
The main problems with e-readers is A) books are expensive B) there are no libraries. How many people actually -buy- all the books they read? Yes, occasionally there is the odd book where the waiting list in the library would give me a copy sometime in the next decade and I will buy a book. Or the odd book on sale at Barnes and Nobel for $3 that is a hardback, and occasionally I wish to annotate a classic work of literature so I will buy it, but for the rest, I just go to a library. As for newspapers, I generally don't read any. I don't see the point. Any community event traditionally advertised in the local paper is easily found via Facebook or Twitter. National or international news is best found online where you can see all sides of the story rather than the one or two expressed via print media. It allows for more specialized interest stories, good luck finding a newspaper with coverage as complete as even Endgadget. Newspapers also rarely follow up stories or allow for user feedback except for some cherry picked editorials.
In short, E-Readers aren't going to replace print media when it comes to literature and print is already dead for most people under 40 for news.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Um, I don't think any "merchants" are confused. It is the publishers that are confused. Book stores as a whole have embraced E-Readers, look at Amazon and the Kindle and Barnes and Noble and the Nook. Other than Borders and a few other stores, the rest basically specialize in cheap books, something that E-readers lack (and pre-1920s works only get you so far) and book exchanges.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
From TFA: We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books.
Sounds like "dregs" I guess--if you talk like Sean Connery. I stopped reading right there. That's just a bit too much illiteracy for an article about books.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If cost came down sufficiently maybe I could end up stacking my e-books on the shelf beside the paper ones. "Buy the book and get a free, reusable e-book reader" isn't *that* far off, I think.
But that defeats the entire purpose of an e-reader. The point isn't to use e-ink and be all fancy but allow for one device that eliminates the eye strain of reading on an LCD, that can store lots of books and not take up lots of room and have great battery life. For example, when traveling rather than putting 4 paperbacks in a backpack, they can store one Kindle and have 200 novels in the same space.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If we get to the point where leaving your reader behind in a public place isn't any more likely to result in theft than leaving a book, readers will be well positioned to overtake printed books.
I think that day is still far off.
Electronic books are probably one of the iPad's killer apps. Maybe not the ones we'll see immediately -- the ones basically just ported from the Kindle or something -- but the next generation of books, or the ones after that. Interacting with the book is where the technology will really shine. Think about A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (from The Diamond Age).
'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects'
A) Leave the iPad out of this. We're talking about consuming text which isn't printed on paper, and we've been doing that since even before the *gasp* kindle.
B) Is this some kind of metaphysical crap? "they're complete objects"? WTF does that mean? I've been reading Descartes' Discourse on the Method off the screen of a netbook. Does this mean that somehow the information that I've consumed isn't "real enough"? If I printed that out on paper, read it, and then burned the paper, would that have made the content "embrace its physicality"?
Either I'm missing something, or this is a serious case of "get off my lawn".
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Do people get paid to throw Apple branding around like this? Are any of these issues in any way unique to, or only now forthcoming because of, Apple's late entry into the tablet computing market?
Better known as 318230.
The problem I see with content creators using this new canvas is that it subtracts from the freedom of the reader's imagination. In other words, it replaces an idea (a story) with a specific representation of that idea, which is rather like having a book author at your side jabbing you periodically to see if you 'get' it.
"Stop poking me, Mr. Dawkins! I'm just using 'Goddamit' as an interjection."
Although the format change is a big part of this, the real change afoot is the amount of effort it takes to publish something. In the past, with the exception of self-publishing, the only way to get your work out there was to pitch your idea to a book publisher, who would then decide what was and was not print-worthy. Today, I can go to blogspot.com, sign up for an account, and spout off about anything I want, making it accessible for the world to see.
That means big changes for the publishing business. I'm actually not thrilled about paper books going away; it's not easy for me to read a sceen, even a Kindle screen, for hours on end. But the publishers and bookstores are really terrified. I could defintiely see Barnes and Noble or Borders turning into something like a coffeehouse/social club, marketing e-books and e-media, and still making money off of ancillary stuff. Problem is that you can't support thousands of places like that. Time, Random House, McGraw-Hill and all those guys in New York are probably shaking in their boots. Eventually, they're going to have to find a way to make money on something that's easy to disseminate and hard to resell. It's similar to the music industry...they've been on the same talent search --> contract --> album --> hit song(s) --> concert revenue --> album business cycle forever. Now publishing has to switch to something else from talent search --> contract --> book --> sales revenue --> book.
It's also going to be extremely difficult to make a living writing material. I really love to write, but I know it's not a sustainable career. Those of us with the itch to write have had magazines to submit articles to, but even that might dry up. The worst change IMO is going to be journalism. Instead of a newspaper of record, we're going to have thousands of bloggers, all with their own agenda, Twittering and blogging all over the Web about current events. I really think investigative journalism is going to go downhill, which is bad. You need to pay reporters to go out and spend the time digging up actual facts, not posting opinions. That's how we get the conspiracy theorists sneaking into the mainstream with things like Obama's citizenship being questioned.
Well, there are a few other things that seem to fall out when you go to ebooks, diagrams and pictures can 'move' if you want. The book's language can change. If your eyes are tired, the book can read to you. The book can remember what page you last read. It can find related material regarding any of the characters, both fictional and real. It can find a map for you of the country the story is set in. The list gets longer if you want, and all things you can't get from a printed version. When people eventually have fond memories of sitting in the front room reading a story on their ebook, paper books will be a thing of the past. When there is an ebook laying in a basket in the bathroom with Readers Digest and that almanac thingy on it, paper books will be a thing of the past. When you can go to a library and 'borrow' a cartridge with a book or two on it, paper books will be a thing of the past. The problems are part cultural and part functionality. Both will be overcome. ebooks have the capability of combining moving images with text, creating an art form that does not yet truly exist. Remember when people used to say the book was much better than the movie? Any of these features can increase the value of the media, the price, or the DRM capabilities. Publishers will have to get over the desire to sell a separate copy to every person who reads and just let them share. Anyone remember when they thought photocopiers were going to ruin their business? This is more or less the same thing.
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tl;dr ;-)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
or perhaps, you should get a real e book reader instead of using a mobile phone to do that...
B) Is this some kind of metaphysical crap? "they're complete objects"? WTF does that mean?
I don't know why people are talking about pop-up books: all books are tangible. Your "copy" of a book is forever linked to a physical object that, as time passes, becomes different from all other instances of that book.
Can you imagine someone paying $1m for a first edition of an ebook download? (that's just a recent, extreme example that happens to be a comic book - people cherish rare editions of books of all kinds, even when the content is widely available elsewhere).
Imagine you were giving someone a gift or a presentation? Which would be better: (a) hardback copy of their favorite author's latest work with a suitable inscription or (b) an iTunes gift card.
How will future authors cope at book signings? Hey, Mr Pullman, could you validate this X.509 certificate and write it back to the SD card? Its not for me, you understand, its for my daemon...
My 1979 paperback copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide" (the yellowed and dogeared one) is certainly a "complete object". It's still got the price tag on the back (80p!?)
...and what is that funny stain on page 30 of "American Gods"... :-)
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