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First US Public Library With No Paper Books Opens In Texas
cold fjord writes "Bexar Country in Texas has opened a new $2.3 million library called BiblioTech. It doesn't have physical books, only computers and e-reader tablets. It is the first bookless public library system in the U.S. The library opened in an area without nearby bookstores, and is receiving considerable attention. It has drawn visitors from around the U.S. and overseas that are studying the concept for their own use. It appears that the library will have more than 100,000 visitors by year's end. Going without physical books has been cost effective from an architecture standpoint, since the building doesn't have to support the weight of books and bookshelves. A new, smaller library in a nearby town cost $1 million more than Bexar Country's new library. So far there doesn't appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers. A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft."
Is it a presidential library, perchance?
A library without books is... pointless. Why not just build a Starbucks or a McDonalds. Or, actually, an empty room. What a waste.
Every time I've visited a library in the UK all the users are just browsing Facebook or playing games on the computers, or lending out DVDs of Hollywood movies. Cutting out the books entirely would seem like a sensible move because nobody seems to read them.
As the owner of enough paper books to burn down a small invading zombie army, I'm really torn between applauding their innovation and cringing at the thought that paper in hand will be going the way of scrolls.
@Whee
It is actually an interesting concept. Many Libraries that I am involved with in a support role are struggling to find a place in a modern world where the majority of people have the information that they need at their finger tips. People just do not visit Libraries in the way they used to.
They are often now becoming a community service operation for the disadvantaged and often have more people using the internet than people actually borrowing books but even then the level of visitation makes it hard to justify them staying open.
> A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft.
It already is. Theft by Conversion.
I used to borrow books from my library. Will they lend me e-readers or tablets?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So far there doesn't appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers.
Give it time, the place just opened. Broken, missing, and outdated readers will become an issue. Replacement cost of broken, worn-out, and technologically obsolete readers will be a major continuing cost, and throwing people in jail who lose/break them and can't afford the replacement cost will become a political issue.
Also, I wonder if the library will get any financial return from the user data that will almost certainly make its way to Amazon and B&N?
Wasn't this one of the background stories in "Robot and Frank"? I'ts not an idea I like. For me, reading is more than having access to the collection of words, reading a book is an experience I enjoy. There are probably many reasons, but I'm not a psychologist...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
10,000 books? WTF? Even if they're sloggy PDF files at 5 megs each, that's only 50GB of books. You could fit that on a USB Key. I have 60,000 books on a drive. They're assembled as a collection in Calibre, and then indexed in Dropout. I can get any piece of data I want from them. My Personal Portable Library five times larger and thousands of times more useful than BiblioTech. What a pathetic piece of crap.
There are plenty of online book sharing sites with millions of books available. For Free. Assemble your library NOW before the authorities shut it all down by force, or the neoliberal fuquads running the tech companies make it impossible by altering the direction of technology (dumb datapads hooked to private clouds is the first step...)
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Why do we continue to put up with this ridiculous artificial scarcity system.
Honest question. Their streaming service lacks a lot of movies and it seems they are always hanging on deals for it.
Why don't they take their vast DVD library and just stream 1 movie for every copy of DVD they have?
If that's illegal, why not build an array of BR/DVD players that can access the movies like some giant redbox machine and stream it that way?
Either way, they could greatly expand their offerings. I'd love to see this legalized, as I'm worried about the future of digital only content if it's illegal to build public libraries around them.
Not a bad idea, except: * A physical book, once printed, needs no further infrastructure to exist. I can read "Steam Plant Operation" by candlelight after I've been thrown back in time to 1300 with an undead army out for my blood. * DRM will be implemented in some way, so the ebook readers will depend on an external server, which may go down or be inaccessible for a number of physical or financial reasons. * It is too easy to retcon books or newspaper articles that way. If I go retrieve an NY Times about Snowden, where he is called a whistleblower, who is to say that six years from now Steven Harper won't be President and mandate retroactive editing "whistleblower" to "traitor"? Stereotypically Orwellian, yes, but a lot easier to implement with ebooks. Start innocuous, say by replacing "nigger" with "zombie" in Huckleberry Finn, and... The right way to do this? Do everything in pdf or similar format, with the ereaders connected to a local file server and the ability to use the ereader's memory as cache. I doubt they will be doing that.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
... is choosing a french word for the name in Texas.
while paper books actually do have some advantages...most libraries do not carry multiple copies of that book. A major advantage here is that every one of their readers can have the exact same book on it at the exact same time so 12 people in 12 households can all enjoy it at the same time.
Secondly, if you read the article, this is actually a poorer area of the city in which many households do not have internet access. So putting it all on the web would still NOT benefit them.
Do I think there should be an online library? Of course, its ridiculous that we do not have one yet in fact. Its a holdover from money-grubbing publication houses who want to continue to create an artificial scarcity of their product to keep prices higher than they should be. But is this a bad idea? A waste of money or time? Not at all, its a step in the right direction, and a big one at that.
Over the long-haul, more electricity is going to be used by these libraries than ordinary libraries, costing more per month than others. Money to pay IT professionals is another thing to consider, as well as the costs associated with e-readers needing to be replaced. Not to mention the fact that there's no benefit in having an electric library - oh wait, yeah... no shelves. Pffft.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
George Orwell, 1984
What good will it do? You obviously can't read.
this if anything is 'embrace extend extinguish' on the part of private industry. According to policy, e-books get a 14 day maximum checkout and devices in the library have a 60 minute time limit. you can check out a maximum of 5 e-books, with 1 renewal only per item.
My library on the other hand permits me to check out 50 real books at a time, with a 31 day checkout time. I can renew my checkouts 3 times and if i accidentally lose or damage a book, the replacement cost is significantly less expensive than a new $200 e-reader. I also get to read a real book as long as I goddamn well want to in the library and unlike the e-reader once ive checked out a book, my library cant kick in my door and steal the book back if its determined im for some reason not permitted to read the book after the fact. The readers contents one presumes are just as dynamic as if id purchased one from amazon.
I dont need to charge my library books either..
Good people go to bed earlier.
If I wanted to read the Internet, I could stay home.
And lose access to the paywalled resources to which your library subscribes for use within its facilities.
That works well for pre-1923 works but not for anything newer because publishers demand to derive revenue from patrons' use of the works. For example, a publisher might sell a 26-pack of two-week rentals for a particular e-book to a county library, and the county library doesn't want to "waste" these rentals on people who happen not to live within the area that pays property tax to the county that funds the library.
I've not been since 1995 "the year I got internet"
Ebook readers are available for as little as 49€ in Europe. That's not so much more than a good, ordinary book (well, lets say two or three books). The average reader would borrow two or three books, but will now carry only one device
But now the library has to pay both the maker of reader devices and the publishers of post-1922 books (or in your case, books with at least one author who died post-1943).
Which is exactly WHAT for a municipal library?
In the early 1990s, students at my middle school were required to make a speech about a controversial topic based on research. A common method for this was to use the "InfoTrac" system on the catalog terminals to select, preview, and print articles. Another was the "SirS" binders.
Okay, time to bring up a new topic.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Clearly if someone has the digital file en masse for these kinds of e-libraries, then it's "not hard" to POD it. Then people could get their cumulative favorite 100 "tree books", but the library doesn't have to stock the massive 30,000 item collection with Long Tail problems.
POD is here. *Five years ago* the Hardvard book store had a prototype (cover art rights issues, sure) that produced books as solid as anything done by the pros "in about an hour".
But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Publishers have started to configure digital restrictions management for e-books to "wear out" after being lent 26 times. See articles on About, BoingBoing, and The Digital Shift.
Not the ones I have known.
The bookless libraries could also be merged with various homeless shelters within local communities. Libraries these days are largely patronized by homeless bums who want to watch porn on the internet.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
I didn't mean to say that the internet is a better source for all information. My rationalle for calling it a better source was simply that it is a better source for most of the information people need. I am easily in the top 5% of physical book purchasers for personal consumption in the developed world (probably top 1%), but even I realize that most of the time I need to learn something I do not turn to books (either physical or e-books). They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on). And for novels, if you are into that kind of thing, but those transition to e-books even better than the non-fiction books I read.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Preservation of information for future generations, and conversely providing information generated past generations to the present.
I can walk into my nice, but hardly cutting edge public library and look up my hometown paper's front page for December 8, 1941 and read about the reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack. I can look for science fiction books published in the 1950s by publishers that have gone out of business. I can find strange, but interesting books that have never been digitized and are very hard to find, like a military history of the bicycle written in the 1960s.
If I go to a *world class* library, like the main branch of the Boston Public Library, I can examine rare manucripts, maps and sheet music, although they have been making an effort to digitize that stuff. If I needed a service manual for a fifty year-old TV set, this is the first place I'd look.
I can understand going primarily ebook for a community that can't afford a real library, but even such a library needs stacks where it preserves books of local interest for future generations. Given that they've given up physical books and all the associated expenses, 10,000 books seems like an awfully thin collection to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bexar county is pronounced "Bear" county. Didn't want anybody to sound ignorant.
Pirate Bay, you can check out and leave :)
Like most libraries, our local has embraced all manner of e-technology. Although the vast majority of users still prefer 'real books," they also offer e-books, e-reader loans, music downloads, and audiobook downloads, as well as access to a large group of databases.
As an end user I'd call most of this a disaster. Books are simple - you sign it out, take it home, and renew it until you're done reading it. If someone else needs the book they can place a hold, and you can't renew it any more. If you need a book not on the shelf you can place a hold.
I had been using them for audiobooks to listen to in the car on my Android phone. This worked great except that pretty much the only company servicing Canadian libraries is Overdrive, and their software is bar none the worst that I've encountered.
Still, it was just usable enough that despite the really poor selection of audiobooks, the limited number of "copies available", the lack of any way to renew books, and the really, really, really horrid interface on either PC or phone, I could live with it.
This year Overdrive updated their software, with a new added "feature": you could no longer limit downloads to WIFI. Or even pause a download in progress. As a consequence one ill-timed audiobook download consumed my entire month's cel phone data cap in less than a day.
I deleted it, and let my library know that I was using Pirate Bay from here on - faster, easier, better selection, and no chance of getting hammered with data overage charges.
Beyond that it's pretty well known that publishers define an e-book as only being downloadable for a few dozen times - alleging that this replicates the physical life of an actual book. It's an obvious lie, and ignores the longstanding practices of rebinding and repairing books - something that libraries have done for many decades.
Our library has a pretty remarkable section of CDs on loan, and actually has surprised me many times with the stuff that they have on the shelves. The downloadable music offering Freegal lets you grab a grand total of THREE songs per month. DRM free, but kind of useless.
At the end of the day I wish that our library would go back to lending physical artifacts - the restraints on them by the publishers makes any attempt to provide e-content pretty much impossible.
Three Squirrels
No books, only computers and e-readers. Extremely convenient. For everyone.
I can think of several places where groups of people would like to control the information, and many who would do it if they could
Many on the Religious right would like to either scrub or reword evolutionary and or biological references. Physics and astronomy texts are a little suspect also.
Many on the industrial right would want to alter, remove references research in Greenhouse gas
Many on the left might like to remove non-PC texts
No doubt many groups would find objectionable stuff they would like to change. Any of these groups might like to alter or remove text, and if public bookburning events are any indication, it's pretty pointless to argue that they wouldn't.
Some sort of trusted authority with a massive hashtag listing?
Although I would really enjoy the rewritten stories about Jesus and the founding fathers raising the flag on Iwo Jima, and working tirelessly to end slavery.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Moments after the enabling regulations for the Banning Of Other Known Sources of Sufficiently Unverified Codexes ("BOOKS SUC") Act of 2051 are published, e-book readers across the nation delete all content excepting certain approved technical references. Subsequently, the long work of weeding out the hoarded dead tree editions begins.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I'm pretty sure this isn't done is due to the example the RIAA made of MP3.com. MP3.com was doing a decent business, but then they offered downloading/streaming if a user put in a CD and their software verified it.
They were utterly destroyed by the RIAA in short order.
I don't think any other companies want to try to dip their toes into that water after that.
But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)
The reason is that most people don't want to OWN dead tree books anymore. Too big. Too heavy. Too much to move. Most people read it once and done.
And the publishers aren't going to give POD away for anything less than a paperback price.
POD works for technical books, where you need to access it randomly, and away from a computer.
Other than that, nobody wants it. E-books are easier.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And the publishers aren't going to give POD away for anything less than a paperback price.
Yeah, the publishers are the problem, protecting their obsolete business models via government monopolies. Without those, we'd already have a per-unit fee for content that reflects the true costs of distribution (and readership would be way up, "promoting the progress").
The potential is huge, but in the meantime I rarely pay more than $5 for a book (Amazon Marketplace), DRM free.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Even with name brands, Amazon's cheapest Kindle is $69 which is pretty affordable. That comes "with special offers" but in my experience the ads are completely unobtrusive. (They appear when the device is off - in which case you most likely have it in a carrying case - and when browsing through your book listing - which is easily ignored. No ads appear while you read books.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The cost of distribution is not a fair price for a book.
Let me know when you are willing to work for the price of transpiration alone.
I'll swing buy and pick you up, and you can dig me a swimming pool out back for free.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Doh! Transportation.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They spent $2.3 million on a public library, and they fill it with Apple? This is absurd, everyone and their brother will be using them and they'll be locked down anyways. They can buy equivelent Windows machines for half the cost and they'll work just as well if not better. For eBook readers why not Kindle? A Kindle costs $199 which is half as much as the cheapest Apple tablets. Besides this would have given Amazon a chance to step up and become a champion on education. It really is a waste of tax payer money to purchase Apple products for continuous public use.
We have a nice discussion going, but I think you missed both of my points.
"Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from."
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what.
A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.
B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
"The outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" 7x4.5 inches, 410 pages.
and "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism". 8.5 X 5.5 inches, 230 pages.
Each cost about $5. I get all that old time feel of having a physical reference, including turning down page corners and making pencil notes. And I just walked in, paid the cashier, and walked out with them an hour later. So no problems for me at all!
"They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on)." All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but ... that's the point of a book!
The whole point of POD is ... on demand. You can bulk buy the 1000 books in digital format, then for the few you want in that old time format, you'd go down to your properly equipped store (theoretically *any* store!) and get your physical copy.
The tech has been here for half a decade. A little bit of sunk cost for the machine. But paper wise it might be as low as $2 a copy in raw costs. But the publishers are fighting it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Bexar county in seated in San Antonio. The library is in the far southern part of the city.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book.
I know I am in a very small 'paranoid' minority on this one but- POD gets you the ability to read the book, without having a psychological profile of you developed based on the relative times spent on each page. A profile that can and will be sold to advertisers (if only to fund the library building and license costs) . A profile that can and will be stored forever by the NSA so that should they ever find a reason to 'target' that 'collected data' it is there, and able to either help them understand and/or misportray your personality.
This news is soooo september 2013....
Papyrus scripture only?
If the only users of libraries were people who only read text, I would be OK with an all e-reader library. However, I've noticed that my local library's children section is well used, and a lot of those users are early readers and parents of early readers who take out books where the illustrations matter as much as the words. And many of those books are large format that don't do well in a smaller format. It seems like a library going to an all e-reader format is abandoning an awful lot of the books for early readers.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
Most POD systems are capable of producing all standard sizes up to 8.5x11 as a normal part of the process. It's on the order of a penny per page, plus a little under a buck for the cover, depending on who does your POD. A good deal of backlist titles are produced via POD in order to avoid large print runs while still keeping titles in print. Commercial POD is actually at a point where it's cheaper to print and ship a galley of a book to use for editing or review than it is to print it as a "manuscript" with a desktop laser printer.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what.
A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.
B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
I wasn't too clear (since another poster misinterpreted me in the same way), but when I talked about standardizing the books I meant that the provider had to do it, not the consumer. My point was that once the provider did that, the book is just as ready to be an e-book as it is a POD. And when you compare the pros/cons of these two formats, I personally think that e-books win out big. I think that POD is a great idea, I simply think that e-books are making the idea irrelevant. There are still some hurdles, such as people still preferring paper over an e-ink screen, but advances in technology and simply the changing of generations will take care of that.
They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on).
All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but ... that's the point of a book!
That was all completely true up until a few years ago. If I wanted to learn statistics just five years ago, I would want to read a Statistics textbook first and only enhance my learning with online sites. But today I am going to sign up for a MOOC or watch Youtube videos. This is a very new thing for me, and it is a big transition because I still have about 300 books in my office that I rarely read anymore (every other month my wife tries to get me to donate most of them). I needed to learn some basic compiler skills (mostly scanning and parsing) for a personal project, and immediately bought a book on the subject out of habit. But I have barely looked at it at all, since I was able to learn far more from a MOOC and Google searching.
Just looking at how much change there has been in just the past few years, I have little doubt that the highly specialized information that still makes me buy books today will be in better online formats in the near future. So if we are talking about the next 5-10 years, I see books being even less important when compared to online videos and tutorials. These will be carefully created by an author to flow and demonstrate a larger premise, but the format won't be a book.
This is all obviously just my opinion.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I don't, unless we finally get ereaders that are literally indistinguishable from paper books. There are just times that I want to read a book, not hold an ereader.
Never connect the wi-fi. Done.
In some old-time Science Fiction stories you'd see POD-like activity, but the documents (usually newspapers) were printed on media that would self-destruct after a time. Doing POD on stock paper for a lending library would kind of defeat the idea of a lending library. Might as well just buy the book.
I can do POD at home, thanks to a decently-fast laser printer and various binding tools I've acquired. Not as good as a dedicated POD setup - can't do folio binding or fancy covers, but enough for the latest 450-page technical spec document. I can see myself going to a commercial facility if I have something really special I want the full treatment for.
I don't do POD as often since I got an e-reader, but sometimes it's useful.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book.
I know I am in a very small 'paranoid' minority on this one but- POD gets you the ability to read the book, without having a psychological profile of you developed based on the relative times spent on each page. A profile that can and will be sold to advertisers (if only to fund the library building and license costs) . A profile that can and will be stored forever by the NSA so that should they ever find a reason to 'target' that 'collected data' it is there, and able to either help them understand and/or misportray your personality.
The minority may be larger than you think.
More than one author has written about books (usually grimoires) where "while you read the book, the book reads you". No longer is this just amusing fiction.
So far, I endure it on ebooks (although I reserve the right to read them in airplane mode to minimize the chatter). But one of the vendors I have history with publishes a monthly technical magazine that basically can't be read at all without an Internet connection. Even as a "downloaded" PDF.
So I don't. They're not nearly as essential to me as they'd like to think they are. And at that rate, they never will be.
If everything is online and in electronic form, then everything can be censured instantaneously whenever it suits their whim:
1. Certain books wont be made available to you but only to "authorized readers". Think of books on chemistry and physics that could potentially teach you how to make explosives.
2. Other books could be censured completely.. think of the works of John Norman and the wonderful Gor series making him one of the most hated authors in feminism.
3. Most books can be instantly rewritten to contain whatever truths are expedient at any moment. Think of Orwell's 1984 and the re-editing of newspapers and other media.
THAT's why you dont want online books and also why you don't want "AGENDA21", for these are exactly the people who have these things in mind.
e-readers have made the entire POD market obsolete. (Mostly obsolete-- there's still "vanity press"-like operations, but they've always been small-beans.) Why would I print a book on demand when I could have it on my Kindle faster and easier? Oh, and cheaper, too, once you have a dozen or more books being printed.
Comment of the year
Great, now all we need are the robots... and hipster music and I'll be the 1st to say now get off my lawn!.
But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet. The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Cognitive discord, oh my! Just because something is printed doesn't suddenly make it better. Any POD book can be view digitally too. It never needs to see paper to become "long form content".
It's not just the first bookless public library? This is Texas.
I can't help but notice the similarity between the people who hate e-readers and must have the physical book, and the audiophiles who hate digital music and must listen to vinyl while they peruse the cover and liner notes.
"I like books with lots of pictures" - W.