Slashdot Mirror
The End of Paper Books
Hugh Pickens writes "Books are on their way to extinction, writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. 'It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing an actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.' But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That way, if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. 'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization,' writes Kelly. 'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"
I've never seen a vinyl record or and 8 track cassette.
A few generations until seeing a paper book is as rare as seeing a lion? Thats a bit absurd, I dont know anyone who has thrown out their book collection after getting a kindle. I have a rather extensive collection and though they mostly collect dust now I have no plans on ditching them. I can see a day where new books are no longer published but just expecting all of the old ones to just disappear is ridiculous.
digital book needs to be screen reader open and not locked down.
any ways text books need to die fast.
Just think. With the death of paper books and the move to only digital copies (most of which will be slathered in DRM) you can eliminate the concept of resale, ensure that old editions of books become unusable, and revise history on the fly. Region lockouts, EULAs, acitvations and time limits. Then they can layer even more restrictions on top and enforce them via more bad pro-corporation, anti-citizen laws.
Sure seems like we're already on this road. All they need to do is require government licensing for access to a compiler...
Since after the EMP bombs all go off, no one's eReaders are gonna be working all that well anymore.
Doesn't *anyone* read science fiction anymore?
You people just aren't *near* paranoid enough.
"Inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building"
Not anymore. I'm sure someone will go looking for it just because. Also, California is quite prone to earthquakes. I'm sure they could have found a safer location.
Neat idea, but paper and ink don't last forever. If you're going to save physical books for posterity, you need to use materials which will last millennia.
I guess its our doom to be treated to an annual "end of books" prediction, alongside "the year of linux on the desktop", "the year desktops go away and everyone gets an ipad", "the year ipads go away and everyone gets a specific e-device for every task they used desktops for in ancient times", etc. At least this prediction has the tact to place itself out "a few generations", alongside flying cars and the end of disease.
And that was only around for about a century or so - and yet I can still go to the store and buy it. Books have been around for almost EIGHT centuries. And not to mention the fact that this digital copy thing is almost entirely constrained to a limited set of first world countries where the wealth and infrastructure exists for this type of thing. Regardless of how many doom and gloom stories like this pop up to get clicks and start fights in the comments, paper books aren't going anywhere for a hell of a long time yet.
Is this what the Library of Congress is supposed to be?
Sorry, dude. Keep your prognostication within five, ten years, and you have a discussion on your hands. Stretch it out to the point where most people reading right now will be dead, and you're writing a bit of fluff that, by design, can't be refuted or argued with.
The slashdot summary says: "[...]within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion." And how do we know this? Because Kevin Kelly says so on his blog. What evidence does Kevin Kelly give that billions of people worldwide are going to throw all their paper books in a dumpster? None.
Brester Kahle says: "A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future." This is not a great analogy. If you want to be able to grow a plant of a certain species, currently the only way to do it is to have a seed (or a cutting or something, but they don't tend to keep as well). But there are easier, more secure ways to verify that a book hasn't been altered. To verify that all the books in Project Gutenberg have been maintained in an unaltered state, all I need is a computer file listing a hash function computed on each of the books. This is cheap to carry out, and it's very secure. I can print the hash-function file on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere, and no hypothetical evil government can make the piece of paper go away if they don't know I have it. There is no single point of failure, because any number of people can store the hash function. Kahle's cache of paper books is a single point of failure. It can be destroyed in a fire or earthquake, in case of a revolution, etc.
A better justification for maintaining caches of paper books is that in case civilization falls apart, they'll still be readable.
Find free books.
Isn't this why various countries have archival deposit legislation? My wife has deposited copies of each of her books at both the National Library of Australia and the State Library of Victoria.
Funnily enough, Richmond is where the University of California keeps one of their archives of books...
If you're going to pimp an essay writing service, you should first know the difference between paper's and papers.
I've got books that are over a 100 years old and some have books hundreds of years old. Most of my files over ten years old are hard to access. Text files that are over 20 years old are very hard to read. Most of them are microsoft files and even Word can't read them. What are the odds of a file created toady being readable in a 100 years? There's this fantasy that the internet itself is perpetual but it may not exist in a hundred years. Files are easily lost, much easier than a book. One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books. If no one maintains a given book file it will cease to exist and no one will find it in a box in some one's attic 200 years from now. People will say maybe some one will burn a CD or DVD but few seem to realize those have a limited life. Few if any will be readable in a 100 years. Hard drives? I'm thrilled when they last 3 years let alone a 100. For digital books to survive they have to constantly have their files not only constantly backed up but the format updated. If eBooks take over and dead tree books vanish most of the books you know today will cease to exist. Like most things people will keep what is new and trendy and a frightening amount of human knowledge will pass. The end of paper books may be a bigger disaster than the loss of the library of Alexandria.
"Print is dead" - Dr. Egon Spengler - Ghostbusters. 1984. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/
Has anyone ever seen a lion reading a book?
That's especially rare!
I'm no librarian, but books do decay over time. Unless these books are being printed on special (and expensive) 100% acid-free paper, are never touched by human hands, and are stored in a climate-controlled, low-oxygen environment, these books won't last forever.
Having said that, I'm not even sure if this is a worthy endeavor. Real books will probably always exist, although they may simply become luxury items.
Where's the value in that?
I have been keeping a backup of all stone tablets in my shed for years. Soon to be free on craigslist now that my archive mechanism is out of date.
Older books (as in pre-word processor) on Kindle (not singling out Amazon, I'm sure iBooks and other digital stores share the same problems) are flawed. I've read a bunch of reviews of older books and there are common complaints regarding frequent typos from OCR. I am far more comfortable purchasing things written in more recent times in a digital format. That said, I confess an act of defiance in that I will not purchase the digital version unless it costs less so I still occasionally purchase paper.
I see lions at a place specializes in the care of animals... it is called a zoo?
Does this mean I have to go to a place which specializes in the care of reading and reference material to see a book? I wonder what they might be called? A library?
Just buying a hardback or paperback and sticking it in a warehouse isn't going to do it. If they aren't cloth-based or special archival paper they will have deteriorated to dust long before the end of this century, no matter what the storage environment is.
What absolute rubbish. Books are here to stay. Period.
Digital technology has been around long enough
that we should have stopped killing trees A LONG
TIME AGO!
This bullshit of clear cutting damn rainforests to
supply the world with paper is absolutely insane.
Of course this probably goes along the lines of
petroleum products, first world countries will be
able to give it up easier than third world areas.
Trees are part of our air scrubbers... it's like...
hmm we need a car analogy... it's like, using
a car for a paperweight. I would MUCH rather
leave the trees to do their jobs (not to mention
providing an area for tens of thousands of the
world's species to live) than to have a "piece
of paper" handy.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap [...] but within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion
Ah, yes, I remember when lions were cheap and plentiful and virtually everyone saw at least a dozen of them on a daily basis. If only I had stocked up on lions back when I had the chance... :-(
This.
Richard Stallman's famous parable about the Right to Read, and what will happen if intellectual monopoly laws continue to grow:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
When you buy a book you own it and can re-read it as many times as you want. You can let your friends and family borrow it to read, or can even give it to someone else as a gift.
I hate to see books follow down the path that is being pushed for other media where you don't actually own a copy of the media but you simply rent or license it.
If a paper book ends up on some ban list it doesn't get revoked. Who needs the firemen from Fahrenheit 451 when you can simple push a button and automatically remove a copy of an e-book off of all digital reader devices.
This prediction has many ramifications, one of the biggest is the end of physical libraries. The end of brick and mortar libraries would be a huge shift for the public that rely on the services they provide besides the books, internet access, research help, employment help, technology learning just to start.
the lobbyist will ensure textbooks live well past their prime and libraries will continue to serve those without.
they will have deteriorated to dust long before the end of this century
I keep seeing this claim on this thread. I'm old enough to have some books around that are 30 years old that I got as a kid. They show no apparent signs of deterioration. I have some of my father's books from the 50's and only the cheapest of those (some pocket-sized cartoon paperbacks) show any signs of pages yellowing or becoming brittle. The regular books are all just fine. I have some books of my grandfather's, mass-market subscription "American Classics", cheap leather bindings, made from 1908-1912 that are similarly fine to read (they're up for sale if you want them).
None of these books have been stored anywhere but typical household bookshelves and cardboard boxes in attics. At my folks' place there's a library full of these, none turning to dust.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes paper books will disappear once...
1. There is a standard for ebooks that everyone can agree to. (i.e. not the epub/mobi/PDF/Custom Apps, other stuff format wars we have now).
2. The DRM is gone and/or and things like resale are easily allowed with ebooks.
3. ALL books are available as standard eBooks conforming to the conditions above.
4. eBook readers are cheap enough that basically everyone has them.
5. The price of eBooks drops to represent their approximately $0 per unit production cost.
Since none of those things are likely to come true any time soon, It will be a while yet.
Think about it, I could buy my last few text-books as electronic goods, but they weren't even DRMed eBooks, in most cases they needed a special App to read them. That means they're limited to the current version of iOS and/or Windows. They were also more than half the price of the paper books, and time limited to a few months. (With of course no provision to resell).
Why would I pay like $90 for a book I can't resell or even keep, when I can pay $120 for a book that I can resell for $80 in a few months? (i.e. a net price of $40) - or keep for reference? Right, I wouldn't. The only reason would be so I could read it on my computer and/or iPad. It just so happens I have a scanner, so I bought the paper version, and now I have both a paper version AND a nice PDF version.
For a lot of books like accounting, etc. I do want to hang on to them for reference. Even if I don't want to keep or sell them, giving them to friends for free is a nice thing to be able to do. At the end of the day, I could give a shit whether it's a paper copy, or an eBook on my iPad. Most of the people who are are hipsters, and the eBook will cease to be "hip" as soon as it starts to be common.
As for #3: Another thing you might not notice is that not all books are even available as eBooks in any form. I am an SAP consultant, and I thought it would be super convenient to have my reference books all as PDFs, but they are not available (legally) in PDF or any other ebook form. This is true of quite a lot of books. The ones that seem to be available in eBook format are usually the lowest common denominator cheap fiction books, that, quite frankly, nobody would miss.
Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies
Presumably he's never heard of National Libraries then. Nice of him to come up with this idea, decades, if not centuries after the rest of the world.
Currently, dead trees are be used as a poor-man's (or, more accurately, 20th-century man's) cryptographic signature to the authenticity of electronic books. If it exists in paper, then it can be forensically examined to determine if it is a forgery (the first being the sniff test -- are the pages yellowed and does it smell moldy?). How long can this last? How long will it be until we have the TNG replicator of books that can produce an authentic-looking but slightly altered version of a book on demand? Probably not long enough to make a physical archive worthwhile.
Someone needs to invent a cryptographic scheme that provides a digital signature anchored in time -- one that is impossible to produce at a future date. It seems impossible, of course, but then both public key encryption and anonymous digital cash (the latter originally invented by David Chaum but now manifested in BitCoin) are counterintuitive yet both exist.
I don't mean to get off track here but I'm not sure the analogy fits.
At any stage in the history of man, was seeing lions a common occurrence?
Didn't lions only at most ever range over select parts of Africa and Asia?
Maybe I'm being picky, the summary reads to me like lions used to be lying around the sofa like my kid's books now are...
This is just rubbish!
Prediction: Paper books will be around as long as there are humans.
Other forms of books will also proliferate but nothing approaches the experience of reading a book made of paper. The touch, the smell, the feel of pages flipping through your fingers. Books engage our senses and the imaginary worlds they transport us to are identified with the physical sensations we experience as we journey to them.
Electronic books will have a surge, but people will return to paper books as they realise the subtle sense of loss they experience in using electronic media to read.
Sorry, I have no interest in reading a book on a LCD.
If books go strictly to the e-format, I'll just find the online copy (not paying for it) and print it myself.
Course, I don't mind if someone prints it for me - I'll even pay for the book then. I have over 7,000 books. I'm not the only one out there with a decent sized library.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
... and like the one that said microprocessor capacity would double every 1.5 years or so?
Who said that? He must have been a real loser! Tech morons and their predictions!
I've got three Louis LaMour paperbacks can I get a cup of coffee?
in Isaac Asimovs future history, it is predicted that the book will be reinvented as "The Holmes-Ginsbook Device" and then be shortened to book , by deleting the Holmes-Gins part. One wonders how Ginsbook ever got his/her name...
'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive."
That's just plain ignorant... I don't think it would
be feasible to try to chase 'the end of the internet'.
I'm sure the scale of what is added to the internet
outpaces the ability to mirror it. Thus, without a
curve-breaking introduction of non-volatile storage,
I don't think a whole mirror will ever be achieved.
[Short of search engines... who claim that they
can't reach the deep/dark net]
Which is another point. Who will ever be able to
claim they have mirrored the entire internet... if
you don't have access to the deepest parts, you
don't have a true mirror.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Trees are part of our air scrubbers...
Young growing trees are air scrubbers. My understanding is that once fully grown there is a significant drop-off. That would suggest that wood based products are green. Assuming of course the harvesting and replanting are done in a reasonable manner. Also look at books as a carbon sequestration device. :-)
If all the physical backup copies are in one known location they'll be easier to destroy so that the incorrect or politically correct versions can proliferate through the digital media. (we are post 1984, after all.)
Another copy should be kept in a secret location or in a very secure digital form with heavy error checking to keep errors from occurring or accumulating.
Electronic only media can be altered retroactively. People in power don't like history? Re-write it.
Impossible to do with existing copies of paper books, trivial with DRM'ed electronic only media that is streamed from the cloud.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
There are still some books that I will only buy in paper with cash.
I've converted entirely to ebooks (more specifically, entirely to epub ebooks). I still have my old paper books I bought years ago, but I haven't purchased another paper book in years. I read on my phone and my Nook Touch.
Short term, the huge amount of copyright-free books available from Gutenberg and others provides a wealth of reading material, and all of the major DRM schemes have been cracked so you can "liberate" your purchases (the only one that hasn't is Apple's FairPlay for ebooks, and that's because nobody gives a crap about Apple's store). Long term, the ebook industry is going to have to follow the music industry's example, getting rid of DRM and charging fair prices that are equal to or less than the cost of physical media (as opposed to ebooks today that are routinely priced above even hardcover prices).
Oh yeah, and ebooks should never be provided as PDFs. PDF is not a valid ebook format, and is an insult to the reader.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since after the EMP bombs all go off, no one's eReaders are gonna be working all that well anymore.
Back in the 1950s, there was an Civil Defense effort to collect the information necessary to start up an industrial society. The info was copies to microfilm and placed in major fallout shelters, along with some simple microfilm viewers.
I'd really like to find a copy of those microfilms.
Eh... I'm still secure in the fact that my paper books will never run out of battery power and I won't have to recharge them to continue reading.
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
What's the rationale here? That Amazon and Apple are going to buy and shutdown all the public libraries, including the Library of Congress? There's a fine line between being forward-thinking and being, well, nuts.
In Finland, every publisher is required by law to submit a copy of every printed work published in the country (not just books, but newspapers and magazines as well) to the National Library and a few other university libraries (so the system has redundancy). This has been going on since 1829. I suppose many other countries have similar laws.
It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive.
Is it really that amazing? Who would want to spend the resources to archive 20 gazilla-bytes of (mostly) crap?
Anybody want a peanut?
Heck, listeners are going back to vinyl recording right now. Not a huge amount, but it is one of the growing sectors in a shrinking market. And this is without an "on demand" production model.
As I sit here I am wearing clothes with cotton fabrics. Synthetic fibers did not make cotton obsolete.
I expect that there will always be the use of printed physical books, even if paper is not the physical substrate. Will it be the majority? Most likely not, but it will still be an important component.
Why is Snark Required?
The only way to protect against single points of failure is duplication. We need potentially lots of paper copies, in lots of libraries. The best solution is to get rid of copyright on older books, to make them public domain, and allow anyone who wants to scan/print/share/trade/etc their own personal copies. People can then keep those physical versions (the originals, and the ones they printed themselves from scans) in their attics for as long as they like.
What is needed is for the west to bring back electronic manufacturing. Once that is done, then this is a none issue. However, publishing companies should be running.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The fact that many books will be supplanted by digital versions is obvious and is already happening at a very fast pace. The idea that this trend will continue linearly is very dumb. There are applications for paper books, be it because you want the object for your physical collection, be it for taking notes or be it because a prestigious conference wants to print its proceedings.
We will probably end up in a world where most "perishable" low-cost/read-once books exist only in digital because they are not interesting enough that anybody may care about printing them, where high-value publications, proceedings, etc. will remain on paper because the value of the medium is by far surpassed by the value of the contents and a hard copy still makes a lot of sense.
You often see this kind of asinine ideas that trends will never stop when some equilibrium will be reached: smartphones and tablets are growing, therefore the PC is going to die soon, etc. Wake up: new and old find ways to live together, and a successful innovation does not necessarily displace everything that was before it...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Modern paper doesn't last very long. Paperbacks from the 60's are already brown and fragile. ...and how are you going to know which book is where? Electronic or paper catalogs?
I would guess that multiple electronic copies would be easier and much cheaper. Problem there is that you need to keep upgrading your storage format or design one to last longer.
Problem with storing this in the cloud is that an evil empire (it is already half born) would be capable of taking it over and changing the few copies that everyone links to.
Sure a COBOL manual will not serve you well these days (well, beyond probably getting you a $200k/year job if you study it well). But stuff on algorithms, data structures, etc. will hold up and be of use even if quite old.
You are right though that even these days knowing UNIX scripting is a powerful tool...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
FileTick: Someone who hoards files for the sake of hoarding files.
In the event of catastrophic disaster, when future archeologists come pick through our fossilized detritus, they will have some curious, and possibly informative relics of our era to mull over. Imagine them finding the treasure trove of a FileTick, the ilk such as these guys.
Anyway, I wouldn't get too excited about the extinction of books. For one, they are very fun to make, eat and possibly even read.
Take the Red Pill.
But I like *real* books! You don't need any hardware in interface with them! You just read them! Why add levels of abstraction & complication to something, in a short-sighted attempt to *ahem* re-monetize them? You don't even own e-books, you just lease/rent them. This is really just an attempt to kill the used book market, as iTunes is an attempt to kill the physical recorded media market. They want to take away your ability to own *anything*.
A large number of solid state systems have already been tested to survive EMP, there ways to protect against EMP and ways to repair systems damaged by EMP.
http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf
An EMP isn't going to destroy civilization, hell 20 won't.
I was with them all the way up to where the warehouse was in California. What? The most seismically unstable place in the U.S.? Richmond is right on the bay opposite SF, so if CA sinks substantially (or AGW really does raise sea levels fifteen feet) there go all the books! Why not store them in Yucca Mountain with low level radioactive materials to keep the bookworms and moths and fire out?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"You people just aren't *near* paranoid enough."
No need to be paranoid: Spain translates more books into Spanish every year than the Muslim world has into Arabic in the last 500.
Take a hint as to how educational standards will decline once paper books are rare.
....We did it to ourselves.
It's just not gonna be the same getting them to sign somewhere on my kindle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have several '70s and '80s books here, not counting my '90s technical manuals and such.
(not counting my magazines spanning from 1979 to 2010)
A book has texture, smell, I can take a book anywhere, read it in my hamac, in my couch, on the throne, it has a smell, paper has a texture, turning a page while I'm reading a book is something a ebook will never be able to replace...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
We need Netcraft to confirm paper book is dying
It's the massive surge in lion numbers that we should be worrying about.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
About Vinyl when the cassette & CD came out... However Vinyl is still rather popular.
Many people insist on getting the Vinyl version of an album over the CD version.
when I was 20 I scoured used book shops etc, even got very good deals on old rare books.
if you don't have those where you live, here is something that will add ~30,000 books of all kinds to your family library : http://www.gutenberg.org/
and all of them are free. there are a great many classics, browse, search etc that site for those kind of publications. only downside, few modern books..
"The books are being stored in cardboard boxes"
Sounds like good news for those starving termites.
live theatre, music, radio, cd's, television, cinema, relationships.... oi vey, end of life itself....
And I'm I supposed to be prostrating myself at his feet at this point due to his phophetic abilities to predict the future?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I've not bought a vinyl record in over twenty years, but I still haven't ditched my old collection. And there is even a revival of the vinyl record.... Even if it goes to the extreme with (e)books we will have a market left for paper books. I for sure will support paper books till the end. ...and I still haven't begun talking about resale or second hand market. This just p---es me off with the digital market, the content providers want to own you marrow.
So, what about the problem that pulp and paper making technology changes in the last 100 years has resulted in paper with a much higher acid content than older paper? Modern paper (especially that used in cheap paperbacks) doesn't archive well. How long will it take to generate a container full of brittle paper fragments?
I get that its purpose is to be a long term archive, not a source of constantly accessed information (yes, I RTFA) but one of the benefits of a physical medium is its, you know, physicality. Exploring content by aimlessly perusing a library has different advantages than clicking on PDFs, and this project (cool as it is) doesn't seem to take that into account. If you can't enjoy the "bookness" of books, how is this better than a hard drive, and why should future generations bother keeping something like this around?
...and what about judging a book by its cover! More fun than judging a cardboard box by its label, that's for sure.
Has the CD and digital distribution caused vinyl to die? Quite the opposite. The market for vinyls is small, but quite vibrant.
I'm sure there will be a market for physical books because some people will simply like them. Digital printing will make it possible to make a physical copy of any book relatively cheaply.
While I think that it makes a lot of sense to dump physical books I don't think they will disappear completely for quite a few more generations.
.: Max Romantschuk
Most books sold these days are on cheap recycled, low quality paper. They will naturally degrade in a very short time. I'm talking years here. Higher quality books, those on non-acidic, high quality paper, high quality bounding, could last virtually forever if you keep them dry.
Captain Picard flips a dog eared page of Moby Dick while the crew explores strange new worlds where no [person] has gone before.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Authors can publish themselves! Cut out the middle man! It's already happening. Indeed, pirating of books is rampant, I myself have the top 1000 sci-fi books in digital format from a torrent, only took a few minutes to download. The future is here.
Will it also be the end of paginated layout?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Your precious books could fall victim to MOLD or even bookworms and very easily turn into sawdust. Contrary to popular belief, old file formats are easily readable today. Making back-ups with different technologies (SSD, CD, TAPE, CLOUD) is prudent. One can never have enough backups. Also, if your back up fails, chances are one of the 6 billion other people on this planet will have a backup copy of your book.
Modern libraries do a lot more these days than just lend out books. Libraries are centres for knowledge and learning, they will adapt.
Um....if a tyrannical government doesn't like a particular book, they ban them or burn them in a nice big bonfire. Digital copies on the other hand are virtually impossible to erase once they are out in the wild (I'm talking about DRM free copies of course).
BOOKS, like computers are TECHNOLOGY, just like anything else Humans have invented. Mass produced books have only been around for about 300 years (I'm talking about massed produced CHEAP books). There may always be a market for fine crafted leather-bound volumes of 'Classics', but for a growing world of 6-10billion people, Ebooks will make up 95% of the market in the near future (say 10-20 years). It's happening. E-readers will continue to come down in cost, e-printing technology will continue to improve and adapted. It's happening. The good thing is that the world will become more literate, and better informed. It is a travesty than even in this modern age, illiteracy is still a HUGE problem in the developing world. Ebooks and digitized media will be their salvation.
Do they make sure that all the books are on acid free paper? What happens in 50 years when they open the boxes and find a pile of crumbling paper? Are cardboard boxes even acid free?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This may seem a little strange to some readers, but I have religious reasons for not wanting to see real books disappear into the mists of time.
For one day a week, in order to observe my Sabbath, I don't use any kind of electrical item, including my Kindle or Android phone and so having paper books to read is an absolute must, especially during those long summer afternoons, when night doesn't fall until 2230.
More than for just personal reasons though, I don't ever see a point where a Kindle or its future progeny (a Star Trek like datapad maybe) will replace our prayer books, Torah scrolls or the plethora of written work that we've accumulated over the ages.
"...'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"..
OMG!!!! We have superseded clay tablets and parchment, and nobody thought to take a complete copy of the works of Homer and Pythagoras! Now we don't know ANYTHING about them....
We're DOOMED!!!!!
Paper books will never go away until book readers are disposable, can be read in bright sunlight, are fast and simple to use and have power that lasts forever.
While the publishers screw around with non compatible formats and DRM this will never happen and they probably have very little interest in this happening as they would loose any control they now have.
Get in the car.
I own a kindle and a collection of 4000 real books. Generally after reading an interesting book with my kindle, if I really like it, I just add to wish list in amazon.com and then buy it when the price is low. I use "real" books as a bookmark for knowledge and as a safe copy of the book. Also having a real collection of book, help you visually to remember what have you read and have an invaluable "social" value, when you want to borrow books to your friend.. and hey they can also be used for interior design. About music I dont' know.. while I still have my vinils, I just put all my cds in a box after converting them to mp3 in my itunes library
what a hoarder
Think of all the old data you have lying around "saved" on CDs. Can you get to any of it? Do you know where anything is anymore? It is just too much trouble to find some particular file. A railroad car jammed with books is even worse. Can't find anything; can't even get to books in the middle of the plastic wrapped blocks. Wife wants me to get rids of my books. I'm keeping them.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Why consider "the physical copy" a failsafe when the "numeric copies" could be corrupted ?
For years now, books have been written as digital things entirely. Then, sometimes, they are printed out.
Original, Copy ... imho the original is no more the paper.
Here's a scifi disaster story for you: A huge solar flare wipes out every computer and electrical grid on the planet. The people foolishly have stored all their knowledge on computers, which they cannot now use to retrieve it. Therefore, nobody knows how to build most of the things that they used to build, and the society dies from the sudden vanishing of their body of human knowledge.
The day this happens is the day before civilisation ends.
Everything digital which is made available over the internet is readily controlled by the corporation or government. Printed books are not.
You can type, edit and print your own book using an ordinary printer for the cost of the paper and print. Once you have the book in your hand you can give it to whomever you want. It is virtually untraceable (unless you registered your name and address with the vendor when you purchased the printer). In any case the book itself cannot be detected without a search.
If you disagree with the government and plan to challenge them on any point then printed books and pamphlets will become more important to you than your internet connection.
What are the odds of a file created toady being readable in a 100 years?
Pretty high. If your format is plain text ... ASCII is almost 50 years old.
The hard part is finding a working DECtape drive to read the files.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Am new to this e-reader thing. Got a Sony PRS-650. So far so good.
Question: Is it possible to push selected entire Slashdot discussions incl. all comments (-1) onto the thing and read it offline? If so how would I go about it?
Idea is to select a few interesting stories before a long commute and read them/the discussions on the train...
Advice appreciated!
I am always amazed at the desire of people to preserve rare things: species that go extinct, rare books, old buildings unfit for any possible human use...
We do not keep them for any reasonable value, the only reason we keep them is for our entertainment. We want to see a live white tiger or Coliseum in it's fossilized flesh. We want to touch original copy of Gutenberg's Bible, while millions of Bibles are gathering dust in top drawers of night stands of every major hotel chain.
Books are not for keeping, books are for reading. Don't be afraid that the some book gets corrupted. If millions of people find a use of the text in it, it won't get corrupted, and if not, then the book is useless, corrupted or not...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The Caxton press allowed ordinary people to spread ideas. Technology over the last six hundred years has made it even simpler to spread the word of any given belief or following.
Now just watch that freedom be taken away as ebooks replace the paper variety.
It's not that the new type of book exists in electronic form. It's that ebooks will be distributed over the internet and consequently will be traceable. Everyone who gets a copy will be known to the authorities. You will not be able to secretly read about anything. Your interests and political views will be on display and parseable.
It's a step forward if you want to read about how to grow yucca plants; it's a step back if you want to read the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf.
The world is going to become an increasingly bland place as more and more human activity is banned and controlled.
National libraries of record already keep copies of everything published. So, for instance, the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bodleian Library keep copies of everything published in English. So we already have a triplicated, geographically diverse, and properly environmentally controlled system, which is going to preserve the books a lot longer than a shipping container on an industrial estate.
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While I think you'll be able to find them if you want, and you'll see them in movies, most people will choose not to own physical books in far less than several generations. I suspect physical books will be like vinyl records in 20 years.
I think libraries will stop buying them in ten years and stop storing them in large buildings in 20. Optimistically. They'll stop offering them when the demand doesn't justify the cost. That may be a lot sooner than 20 years. Does any of you live in a community with overflowing coffers? We think of libraries as long-term stores of books, but they may ditch them before we do.
Geeks are an exception. Geeks like to keep large book collections as a visible testament to their intellect. But most people don't see the homes of geeks, so most people won't see them even there.
It'll be pretty much only geeks, and old geeks at that, that regularly see books. Everyone else will have pitched them.
In about 20 years.
The day after the fire, flood, tornado or some other destructive calamity involving a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California everyone will be asking "Where is the backup?" - GONE!
Maybe now the 'forestry industry' which so brutally fucks up forests worldwide can slow down. They are even mowing down the lungs of the planet in amazon. for their profit. hmmmm ..... i think i remember this theme from somewhere.
Read radical news here
You do know that 1.5 years is well within the remaining lifetime of the overwhelming majority of people posting on slashdot? As opposed to the end of the 21st Century, which is most likely beyond the end of the lifetime of the majority of people currently posting on slashdot? Which is the point that the poster you responded to was making. If you want to make a prediction about the future of technology that is worth anything, you need to predict what is going to happen in the next 5-10 years. Every prediction that I have seen in my lifetime that stretched beyond that has been mostly nonsense. There are too many things that can happen in the meantime for current trends to mean anything.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
...coffee table books, pop-up books, craft books, art books - these are all "niches", but also books that are more often inherently "bookish" (i.e. the book experience is far more than the text - it's the color, the texture, the specific format, the specially designed elements (pop-ups, etc.)).
What parent is going to read "pat the bunny" to their kids on an ereader?
On another tangent, most e-books typography typically sucks worse than a cheap 60's paperback; I'm sure this will improve, but it's been years since there were technical excuses for this NOT to be at least good for the typical book.
Only way to get rid of all books would be to as described in Fahrenheit 451. New books may not be printed by publishers when they would rather use electronic distribution, but so long as consumers purchase the paper books, someone will print them.
but the majority of the people in this world can't afford a kindle.
I've stored two hundred Kindles in a hermetically sealed vault.
'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded First Foundation'
That seems more accurate.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
While e-books have come a long way, they will never gain universal adoption. Some people still will prefer the physicality of a book. MP3s could replace CDs and CDs, Tapes and tapes, cassettes and cassettes 8 tracks and 8 tracks records because they are not media that we physically interact with. There was (for most people's perspective) an increase in quality without a change in experience. The same can not be said for e-books. As a very early e-book adopter, the thing driving the revolution forward is e-ink technology that allows books to finally be comfortably read in electronic format, but it still can not replicate the feeling of finishing a book and putting it on your bookshelf or the feel of turning pages through the book. For some people this doesn't matter and e-books will be it all, but for others who like the physicality of an actual book, they will still purchase books. Also, there are still many portions of the world that lack the technical base to move to electronic readers. You can see this in the same reason that people buy hardcovers when paperbacks are available. (I could however see eBooks as the death of the paperback and possibly the physical magazine.)
Even if in the very long run, we end up moving towards electronic books when they become completely ubiquitous, the case for archiving physical copies is stupid. You don't verify changes have not been made by referencing one physical work kept by a single organization. Anyone familiar with textual criticism knows this is bullshit. You verify it by looking at the MILLIONS OF COPIES and looking for differences. If someone wanted to make a change, they would have to update them all or the change could be detected and corrected. The storage of a single physical copy for archival purposes is both unnecessary and ineffective. The thinking that it is necessary is in fact actually outdated more so than the claim the author made that physical books are outdated.
AJ Henderson
An anonymous warehouse in Richmond, CA is the new Library at Alexandria. Is this progress? Anyway, kudos to Brewster Kahle for doing something very, very important.
Perfect spot for a "forever" archive. Eathquakes, flooding (rising sea levels), toxic petrochemical spills, raw sewage spills, and high crime.
Besides, modern mass produced books are not made to last as long as the handcrafted, high quality books of the past.
When they figure out how to let us read from our devices below 10,000 feet on airplanes, I'll start reading more ebooks... :D
Conversely, traditional books are heavy. I recently schlepped along a textbook on vacation to cover a class I'm teaching, danged thing weighs 3 pounds! Really cut into my wife's souvenir space, and I ended up not even taking it out of my bag...
I do appreciate the discourse on this sea change in the promulgation of literature, but I think the really important dynamics are that people continue to be compelled to write, and that the rest of us can get ahold of their works to read. I think the medium is secondary...
300 years from now, after the fallout of some world war has cleared - a small group of survivors will come across this warehouse. The will open a container and pull out these tomes of knowledge, and wonder why the hell anyone would waste space, time, and money preserving books on Drupal 3 development and Intelligent Design. Yeah, thanks a lot future-past.
Personally I belive there will always be room for printed books, I'll continue to buy them until there are no more trees. They fill a need that an e-book and some kinda of e-book reader won't ever be able to fill.
So to sum that up; You can have my books when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
for at least 50 years now and they are still around.
"...Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book..."
That's brilliant!
And if the idea gets off the ground, let's give it an official name, like the Library of Congress. Perhaps even a website, does anyone know if http://www.loc.gov/index.html is available?
-Styopa
Samizdat
I hope that children's books are an exception. Sitting with a child turning oversize pages with beautiful graphics, pop-up pictures and touch & feel pages will be a difficult experience to replace with e books.
There's a general problem that's usually overlooked in discussions of "the end of paper books" -- the role of publishers. They are not printers (though they may provide printing if they can do so more cheaply than farming it out) ... they are filters. They are supposed to "recognize the good" (often, but not always, as a simple matter of profitability) and "create the good" when an author is unfocused, ill-organized, or unskilled. They supply important expertise in the form of editors and publicists.
E-books promise to disintermediate both the publishers *and* the distributors, including current giants such as Amazon. All an author needs is a server, and not even that really if he/she is willing to let an aggregator get a small cut.
In doing so, the non-printing functions of the publishers are either minimized or ignored. This, in turn, likely means that some set of opinion-leaders will have to determine what is to be viewed as "the good" in some context or another. It may also mean that someone will want to acquire rights in order to "own" as oppose to merely "license" -- and these may well be the existing libraries, acting for the "public good."
It seems likely, in at least the short run, that they'll print copies for security's sake in case the author/aggregator's server goes down (or is simply forgotten). Whether they'll continue to do so past the next 50 years or so is a very open question, in my view. The issue will likely be one of preservation under the worst possible electronic disruption (i.e., a "Carrington Event").
Is when you'll make paper books disappear. And the hands of thousands of folks I know.
mark, who will keep his vinyl records after digitizing, too
Nassim Taleb talked about this in a podcast with The Economist a while ago (this is a link to the story that went along with it: http://www.economist.com/node/17509373), where his point was that books would likely be around more or less forever - they're technology that has been around for hundreds of years. Compare that to something like the Kindle (and such) which have been around for a much shorter period of time. His point was that betting against very established, proven technologies due to a very short period of success from a new/shiny technology isn't always a great plan.
(Or at least that's how I remember his interview without re-listening to it.)
I have lots of books...does that mean I will be attacked by lions?
Nick Carr wrote a book last year called "The Shallows" about internet causing less "deep reading". Perhaps human attention is normally jumpy and deep reading is a learned behavior.
should be storing monthlies offsite...
Or rather, a MURDER of the english language (lol, read on, this is hilarious - 5 yr. olds write better):
"It's enlessly amusing to see such incredible ignorance." - by Professor FalconDUMMY (1289630) on Monday June 13, @06:57PM (#36430124)
Look - we're not here to decipher your "hieroglyphics", and you're correct (especially about yourself, lol!) - however? It's endlessly you illiterate DOLT!
Now, for everyone's amusement here? I managed to do a translation of your "troll speak", and, with CONSIDERABLE effort, for the benefit of others here (and for their amusement at your expense trolling dolt) and, I have consolidated your single day 'fine effort' & attempts at writing properly (lol, not - 4 blunders in writing in a single day? Please... lol!) here:
"THE CONSOLIDATED ILLITERACY COLLECTION BY PROFESSOR FALCONDUMMY" (world reknowned master of illiteracy, lol!)
---
FROM http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2235170&cid=36431020
"its hillarious" - by Professor FalconDUMMY (1289630) on Monday June 13, @08:07PM (#36430760)
LMAO! Hahahahahaha... Now that? That's HILARIOUS!
So you know?
The correct phrase, and spelling, is "it's hilarious" using the contraction for "it is" properly, and spelling hiliarious properly... apostrophes boy, learn about 'em!
(Not what you 'ScRiBBLeD' in your droolings on the printed page fool quoted above!)
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This one take the cake:
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2231292&cid=36430236
Soemthing more complicated for me... Would have liked to arrive earlier but definately left on time! - by Professor FalconDUMMY (1289630) on Monday June 13, @07:13PM (#36430236)
It's "SOMETHING" and "DEFINITELY" you illiterate moron! The only thing that appears COMPLICATED for you is writing properly, hahahaha...
(However, you MAY have a future in "encryption", lol, because your "hieroglyphics" style of writing is unbelieveable! LOL!)
---
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2222626&cid=36381748
"Climate deniers have done a lot of damage to the credibilty of all scientists with their vile lies and obsufcation of the issue." by Professor FalconDUMMY (1289630) on Wednesday June 08, @07:27PM (#36381748)
LMAO - You've done CONSIDERABLE DAMAGE to the English lanuage Roman Maroni (see the film Johnny Dangerously, lol) and to your own attempts at "acting intelligent", because your spelling is HORRENDOUS!
(It's credibility and obfuscation, moron!)
As you can see? Professor FalconDUMMY is trying to "obsufcate" (???) the english language. His own form of encryption, perhaps? NO, it's just trollspeak (illiterate trollspeak, lol).
(Wait, wait... read on, it only gets BETTER, lol!)
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FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2222626&cid=36381748
its endless fun hoisting them with their own petard of scein tific corruption. " by Professor FalconDUMMY (1289630) on Wednesday June 08, @07:27PM (#36381748)
Well, what about YOUR CORRUPTION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THERE, "Roman Maroni"? LMAO!
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FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2235170&cid=36429940
"Personal I find the "free market" does a fine job of slandering itself." - by Professor FalconDUMMY (128
On being an admitted TROLL that stalks & harasses others here on slashdot:
(Quotes from troll gmhowell say it all)
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"I've been trolling people for 36 years. Why would I stop now? I've also never denied trolling" - by gmhowell (26755) on Sunday April 17, @05:03AM (#35846218) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2087330&cid=35846218
---
"I never denied trolling you. And the only person I troll under the AC banner is (name withheld). - by gmhowell (26755) on Tuesday December 14 2010, @02:55AM (#34543612) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34543612
---
"I saw an opportunity to troll you" - by gmhowell (26755) on Monday December 13, @06:56PM (#34541134) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34541134
---
"I do whatever amuses me at the moment. Sometimes that is trolling. As far as AC? I only do that to avoid undoing moderations." - by gmhowell (26755) on Wednesday April 20, @12:49AM (#35877174) Homepage
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This IS why nobody here takes you seriously, or pays you any mind, gmhowell (or should I say George M. Howell): You're a troll!
(Steer clear of that scumbag gmhowell people)
>Who would want to spend the resources to archive 20 gazilla-bytes of (mostly) crap?
What may appear to be crap to you may be quite significant to others years (and maybe hundreds of years) from now.
I like Internet Archive, sometimes there are websites of good reference material, i.e. Radio-TNC Wiring Diagrams Index at http://users3.ev1.net/~medcalf/ztx/wire/index.html but this site is gone. However, you can find it at IA. It may not all be complete (a non-profit cannot do everything) but considering this private group has done something the govt and big corporations will never do. I've use them when some of my webpages barffed and I cannot find the images on my computer.
mfwright@batnet.com
>Every prediction that I have seen in my lifetime that stretched beyond that has been mostly nonsense.
How exactly do you intend to prove that?
(The problem here is the reporter, not Brewster, btw).
Funny enough while listening to the BBC today I caught a story about how Google is digitizing a quarter million books dating from the mid 1700's to the mid 1800's. At the time I had to ponder about the fact that there are actual books still in existence that are 400-500 years old, yet all books published from the early 1900's are basically falling apart due to the introduction of sulfuric acid into the pulp process. Now we are going digital, a process that depending on the storage media can last anywhere from seconds to decades. To my knowledge no one has yet developed a hard drive that is not subject to failure at some point.
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I hope he plans on storing two copies of said paper in geographically distant locations.
One would think that with a model like that (similar to the libraries at Alexandria or Constantinople) that a single destructive event (caused by nature or vandals) could destroy all of the books. I would suggest regional storehouses of books with multiple copies of same at all locations with accompanying "soft copy" in the form of extremely durable optical storage, engraved metal sheets, or some other long lived substance. In this way, no natural or man made event could destroy all written knowledge. One EMP event (i.e. Atom bomb exploded in the atmosphere above the continent, extreme solar flare or extrasolar event (Cosmic Ray Burst) etc. can render much of our electronic infrastructure inert) including ebooks. All written knowledge would be lost without the "storehouses". I'd say stock a lot of incandescent bulbs in there too!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
until this happens.
Many of the books I use have pages much larger than a kindle screen -- and because of the technical illustrations on them, actually need large pages.
Many of hte books I use have color illustrations. Until the book readers support color, I'll still use paper.
Many of the books I use bristle with post-it note bookmarks for frequently accessed pages. Until an ereader has an easy way to flip back and forth between 20-50 bookmakrs, I'm not interested.
Much of the time I have a dozen reference books spread out over a table. Until I have a screen that allows me to do that, I'm not interested.
***
On the otherhand, having field guides in a waterproof Kindle or Nook would be wonderful.
***
For light reading, ebooks are fine. But I'm not willing to pay more than 25% of the new price for an e-version. With the typical paperback, about 60% of the cost is associated with printing and shipping. Out of the remaining 40% the publishing company pays for its editing, marketing, the layout and the author's nickle, and the bookstore's margin. Selling direct to the public bypassing the bookstore should result in the same margins at a much lower price.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Couldn't they have put them on the other side of the San Andreas fault. Maybe in an old missile silo?
Consider for a moment, that there are countries in this world, where market penetration for books is very very low: http://www.booksforthirdworld.org/ http://www.booksforafrica.org/ I have participated in both of these programs through donations, etc. Consider also, that many manuscripts can only find their way into forbidden societies through the book form, not through the internet. Yes, there are statistics for places like China and the Middle East. It seems to me that the OP is very Arrogant, and presumes that the US has a position of supremacy to the rest of the world. Very sad indeed.
Nothing to see here -- move along now...
Just finished a good book on my Kindle ... I want to share it with some friends... WHOOPS.... now they have to buy a kindle have an Amazon account and must read very very very fast.... the only good part is that I can share as far as Sweden and beyond if I want and do not have to pay postage. I am sure the Germans want to collect VAT... ;)
More Bother from the eula or something: Titles that are eligible for lending, as determined by the publisher or rights holder, will have a message on the product detail page. Scroll down to the "Product Details" section and look for "Lending: Enabled" as shown below:
And this interesting book is not eligible. Yet another reason to befriend a library.
Buy at the local bookstore and donate to the local library... And yes even libraries suffer from "The Filter Bubble.... "
so support them and widen their view of the world...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Given problems like peak oil, likely not.