I don't think books will disappear. I could see a divergence, though:
High quality, "collectible" books kept for their prestige value.
"Consumable" books that you read for fun or to learn something fairly current (not timeless) drift more and more towards ebooks.
In other words, people buy Knuth's books to adorn their office shelves with, but probably won't feel the same way about putting "Twilight" (or worse) there, even if they enjoy reading them.
I think there will be a major shift with the next generation. A lot of the reasons for keeping hardcover books are due to tradition/"I grew up with this therefore I like it"-similarly to music.
I agree that consumable books will disappear faster than collectible books. In fact, I believe Amazon released statistics a while back showing pulp fiction sells better (compared to paper copy sales) than pretty much any other genre on the Kindle.
But I am not so sure collectible books will be around in 30 or 50 years. By then, the concept of a bookshelf may seem hopelessly backwards. A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless (or at least significantly less appreciated), why wouldn't paper copies of Knuth's books follow?
I still think the notion of a 'collectible' book is a good one, but probably not quite as phrased there.
Pure pulp will, I agree, largely leave the printed medium. Items like Twilight may I suspect stay around as they're 'a collectible series' in spite of perceived literary merit, almost as posters or similar do today.
I've compared the future of the book here before to the future of the horse in the early days of cars. They will retain a luxury and a prestige with enthusiasts for certain specific applications, but their previous general usage will likely vanish.
What will remain in print? Some may want classic texts like Don Knuth's TAOCP, though personally for that sort of thing I'd always rather have an eBook. I foresee primarily luxury 'coffee table' books - lavishly illustrated, beautifully made, designed to be objects of desire in themselves, independent of their content.
Otherwise, we're talking legacy content. I have a 1980 copy of a huge, library reference quality world atlas that can be pried out of my cold dead hands thank you, and a few other similar volumes, but pretty much everything else would frankly serve me better as an ePub file on a home server that could get synched to my various devices.
As an aside - I would LOVE a historic online mapping service. The ability to view a map moving through time, communities displacing, rivers changing course, harbours silting up, whole countries appearing and disappearing, simply by selecting an area and scrolling along a time axis, would destroy my ability to achieve anything productive for a very long time ;-)
> As an aside - I would LOVE a historic online mapping service. The ability to view a map moving through time, communities displacing, rivers changing course, harbours silting up, whole countries appearing and disappearing, simply by selecting an area and scrolling along a time axis, would destroy my ability to achieve anything productive for a very long time ;-)
In theory something like this could be achieved by wading through the regular releases of openstreetmaps[1] data. Although there you're more likely to see the results of the collection/moderation process than anything else. Still, possibly interesting to look at.
> A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless
I'm too lazy to search for the exact reference this very moment, but I remember reading about how Seneca was making fun of the wealthy, not-so-educated people of his age that were collecting papyrus books in order to show how cultivated they were. This was happening 2,000 years ago, I fail to see how such a long habit would disappear over night just because people in Sillicon Valley live in a different world.
I think the LP analogy holds very well here: when LPs came out, having a large musical collection was a major point of pride for most people. Today it's an edge case. I'm guessing that will happen even with "collectible" books, although I do think it'll take a long time-at least one generation, probably two.
How long were horses used for transportation? There were no alternatives to paper books at all until personal computers and PDFs. E-book readers aren't perfect yet but they're the first real alternative to books.
The first real alternatives to horses included dogs, canoes, camels, donkeys, mules, travois, oxcarts, barges, hot air balloons, steam locomotives, bicycles, coal-dust-powered Diesel cars, biplanes, and zeppelins, before we got to the Model T.
The first real alternatives to paper books included papyrus, microfiche, reel-to-reel microfilm, card catalogs, Rolodex files, the khipu, the filmstrip, the erasable notebook of ivory leaves, the phonograph, Indecks cards...
Surely microfilm replaced paper books in many uses some time ago.
I think the last time I saw a horse being used for transportation (pulling a two-wheeled cart) was, uh, last week.
So it might be a lot messier than a simple replacement.
Books haven't been around for far longer because they are timeless, but just because it took a while for technology to become superior. We've passed that point and the transition is going to be swift.
I don't know if there is such a big similarity to music... We interact directly with a book, so using an ebook is a very different experience. But listening to music sounds pretty much the same whether the source is a computer, my phone, or a CD.
Maybe it is just because I grew up with books, but I really prefer to actually hold a real book to read it (although I do read ebooks when it's more convenient). The tactile experience of a real book is something that I think ebooks will have a very hard time trying to surpass. So I think that there will always be a place for them.
Although perhaps I'm starting to sound like someone who will only listen to music on LPs!
I think your last sentence hits the nail on the head. People still love vinyl because of it's "feel". Without fail, everybody I've heard who talks about books says the same thing: it's the feel.
I have a box of vinyl in my basement. It still doesn't get listened to in favor of the lower quality MP3s. With ebooks, you don't even lose the quality.
This was actually one of the key motivations behind starting my tablet case business (www.dodocase.com). I think there are many physical objects in life that create an emotional experience that can't easily be explained, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I am also a surfer and I found this explanation of riding a hollow wooden surfboard a beautiful description of just this type of experience.
"You obviously can’t actually feel the wood when it’s wrapped in a layer of glass & resin. But beyond the tactile, there’s definitely an emotional aspect to paddling, sitting, and standing on a piece of wood in the water.
You ever driven a Ford truck from the 50′s? Slept on the dirt in wool blankets? Cleaned a big fish? Sipped 40-year old Scotch? Chopped down a tree with an axe? Like surfing a wood board, all of those kinds of things awaken something inside of us that the plasticine era has covered up in layers of shiny dross." Benny http://www.hollowsurfboards.com/Q&A.htm
A lot of the historical symbols of pride have become meaningless (or at least significantly less appreciated)
Can you give an example? A hundred years ago a rich man wore a handmade suit and a Rolex and drove around in a Rolls Royce. In a hundred years time, the only difference is that the car will fly...
A hundred years ago a Rolex was the best timekeeper you could put on your wrist. Now it's a ridiculous bauble that can barely keep time despite constant expensive maintenance. Technology has made the rich silly.
More than a hundred years ago far more absurd things than Rolex in the face of quartz digital were detailed by Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class
Note that what you're describing are items that are symbols of pride due to their limited accessibility. I don't think social symbols based on indicating wealth will ever go away. Collectible books like TAOCP are a different type of symbol and usually not indicative of great wealth. These non-wealth based symbols often disappear (over very long periods of time), especially when you can access the same product in a more convenient method.
There is one definite use for this: technical books. I had a clear-out recently and got rid of books on obsolete products. They were literally worthless - you can't even buy e.g. Oracle 7 now, even if you wanted to, or download it, so I couldn't donate them to a school or something. But all in all, what I threw out probably cost well north of a grand, new.
Those are the 'current' books I wrote about. I think keeping the knowledge in them is likely a good idea, somehow or another, but see no compelling reason to keep physical copies of them.
Knuth's books aren't only timeless, but they are beautifully typeset, printed, and bound. I don't feel like I'm missing anything special along these lines when reading an ebook novel, but I have yet to see the experience of reading a really nicely produced book on a digital reader.
Even if you had the TeX PDF output to read, it's not quite the same. Now maybe younger folks today are so used to reading things digitally that they won't care or notice the difference; I'm not sure.
Knuth wrote TeX in the first place in the 1970s because he missed the experience of reading a really nicely produced book on a digital phototypesetter. History may not repeat itself, but it does seem to have an echo sometimes.
I was disappointed in the binding of Volume 4A. It's the cheap hard-to-hold-open kind most publishers seem to have switched to around 2000. They didn't even give the pages wider inner margins to compensate.
I decided I'd mention it if I had occasion to write him about anything else. Surely he's seen it, and I imagine it's just hard for a book to avoid this fate now. It's a pity, though -- I'd rather have an electronic copy (assuming no DRM) than what his publisher put out.
I'm really lamenting the demise of physical books and am happy I went through college when I did. Without a doubt having a whole volume of books at hand in a lightweight device is awesome. But reading a book is about much more than just the content to me. None of the devices on the market adequately model how I interact with a book and I think fundamentally they can't.
E.g., I constantly refer back to previously read material. I never know 100% where it is or know in advance that I'm going, but I have a rough idea of where it was by the thickness of the book. If I'm reading a novel, I like to refer to some previous dialog. If I'm reading a math book, I like to go back to the motivating example. When the depth component is removed it's surprisingly difficult to find my place. Likewise, I can navigate through a book by thumbing through it much faster than I can press the "prev" or "next" button or try to perform a binary search by entering in random page numbers.
Having said all that, I have a Sony Reader and I keep it in my bag when I commute. If I end up getting stuck someplace longer than anticipated, it's really handy to have a whole library at my hands. It's just not my preferred way of reading.
My Nook is good for travel, but now the novelty is wearing off I use it less for that. Last week I went away for a week carrying only a small cabin bag, which should be the killer app for the Nook, but when it came time to pack I didn't feel like dealing with questions like "Is my Nook charged?" and "Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?" and "If I start charging now, will it have enough charge to make it for the entire flight?" so I just shoved four paperbacks into my bag. Heavier and bulkier, but less effort.
Does it have an exchangeable battery? I recently went on a four day hiking trip and switched off my phone most of the time, so that I would have power in case of an emergency. Only later did it occur to me that I could simply have packed another battery. I was thinking all complicated, solar chargers and what not.
For my digicam I have two batteries. One is always in the device, one is either in the charger or packed with the camera fully loaded. I find that works very well.
The other advantage of a paperback on a flight is the FAA allows you to use it during takeoff and landing. I overlooked that the last time I packed my ebook reader.
Don't know about the Nook, but I have a Kindle (had it for 3 months already) and I use it everywhere.. in a bus, bathroom, waits on a queue... and the charge is good enough that I can take it for a weekend and not worry.
It should definitely last for 4 paperbacks. Maybe your Nook is the color version?
Charge isn't a problem if I plan ahead and charge it before I go. But if I'm packing a few hours before my flight I'll look at my Nook and see that it's gone flat.
And even if it isn't charged, you just need a standard micro USB cable, not anything proprietary. I can use the same cable (including the car charger!) for my phone and for my Kindle and for a number of other little peripheral devices.
That, and the only time I've ever had my Kindle go dead on me was when I accidentally left the WiFi on and used it constantly for like three weeks.
Though you can do the same thing with the Nook. The Nook Color (like the iPad) requires more power than conventional USB to charge quickly, but you can use a standard micro USB cable to charge it.
I think this just explains that physical books will be practical and widespread until we see some groundbreaking eBook user interface that can match those benefits (I'm not holding my breath).
I work principally in academia, and I recently bought a Kindle to cut down on printing costs for PDF files (acquired from various sources, principally JStor). I find it increasingly unsatisfying.
1. I have to cross-reference page numbers for every citation. When you're talking about hundreds of citations from dozens of sources, you come to regret not reading the originals in the first place. I don't see the day when citing Kindle locations becomes acceptable among the standardized citation guides (MLA, Chicago, etc.) since many users convert PDFs by themselves, and different settings (e.g. omitting introductory pages, dedication pages, title pages, etc.) mean different locations.
2. Annotations. Everyone tells me how easy it is to insert notes and highlight passages, but the currently available methods do not give me the same flexibility as a simple pen:
2A. Discontinuous highlighting/underlining. Sometimes I don't want to highlight every word in a particular passage, but Kindle does not allow me to do this; as soon as the highlight ends, the next highlight can only be treated as a completely new annotation.
2B. I can't draw. Arrows, lines, maps, even illustrations are an important part of my annotation process. On the bottom of one section of Plato's Meno, for example, I have about a half a dozen drawings trying to make sense of a particularly interesting geometry problem (about which several papers have been published) [1]
2C. Multiple language/character support. This is a particularly difficult issue when dealing with translations. Even if I'm not reading a Greek text, I may be on-the-fly translating between English, French, German, and Greek (often 3 or even 4 of the above within the same paper!). As such, quite a few of my notes are in Greek, and so you can imagine my disappointment with the Kindle.
3. Jumping between passages is difficult. Sure, I can search the text - but I guarantee that's actually slower than flipping through pages. And if I direct students to a particular passage? That one kid using a Kindle in the corner of the room is still looking for it by the time we have moved on.
These are not all just Kindle problems, they're obstacles that eBooks and their complimentary software have to overcome to actually obsolete the physical book. I don't mean to suggest that these issues can't be overcome [2], but I believe the paperless revolution is much further away than some like to believe.
For the small amount of for-pleasure-not-work fiction that I consume, I'm probably not going back to paper.
[2] No doubt the failure to adopt these features stems from low demand -- most of the demand in the industry is for popular literature, not the sort of people who are writing all sorts of things in the margins of their books. There are also some curious UI/UX problems that need solutions, e.g. scanning pages.
I think the general answer in that the current generation of Kindle and similar readers were created to read paperback novels, not for technical documents. The same way it takes a lot of hard work to create a word processor for technical documents (compare TeX to MS Word), it will take a lot of work to create a good reader for such documents.
I've found my iPad to be pretty good at dealing with academic PDFs, but there are still some difficulties that make it annoying. I started taking it to my discussion classes instead of printing the day's paper out, and it worked great. The PDF is reproduced exactly as it prints, and you can quickly scroll from one page to another, search, and zoom in on interesting bits. The ACM two-column format works well with the iPad's PDF reader and iBooks.
Later in the year the professor showed up with an iPad as well. :)
(There are apps to organize and cite papers with, like Mendeley, that help somewhat, but I haven't found a great one yet.)
1) is pretty easy to implement. Ebooks are searchable; page numbers are hacks around the limitations of paper books. Example:
<quote source="Dune (Herbert, Frank)">A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.</quote>
This perfectly identifies a location in the work, regardless of page numbers and other nonsense. A smart viewer will have no problem linking it to the correct place.
It's worth learning to use the highlighting and bookmarking features in the iBooks/Kindle readers.[1][2] I felt exactly the same way as you until I started actively bookmarking and annotating as I read, which makes it much easier to cross reference and skip back. It's made a world of difference to how I feel about e-books.
Well the point was I don't know I want to reference back to something until I encounter something new. Good writing isn't all foreboding. So a depiction or conversation may seem innocuous but become much more relevant 70 pages down the line. I'm not good enough to predict those situations, but have strong enough recollection to want to go back and review the older passage.
Agreed, the same goes for reference books. In a paper book, I'll often find things that I didn't realise were important at the time, or a later conversation will bring to mind, and I'll recall something fuzzy like: "It was in the lower half of the right-hand page, a few pages after that diagram with the donkey in it", but can't recall anything that will allow hard searches.
I think this is a technology issue-skipping back pages or searching is difficult with today's e-book readers, but I can easily see it becoming easier with e-books than with paperback books in the future. As with many technological advances, I imagine it'll take more initial effort to learn how to efficiently read the way you want with e-books, but once you do it'll be significantly faster.
In other words, someone needs to develop what Vim/Emacs is to text editors, for e-book readers.
I guess, but the behavior I have with books wasn't learned (outside of the obvious in learning to read, use a ToC, look up an index, etc.). Flipping back to a previous section is just a natural behavior -- it's flipping through a stack of anything. There's no analog in ebook devices. Perhaps there could be one, but it'd have to be a learned behavior, not a natural one, and thus will always feel unnatural.
Personally I don't think learned behaviors have to be unnatural. Writing and driving are learned behaviors which feel completely natural to a lot of people.
In fact, writing is an interesting example because many people say that they can think perfectly while writing by hand, but not while typing. But the ones I know who have been typing since they were extremely young, or have just been typing for a long time, often say they can think perfectly while typing. I have actually noticed the transition in myself-5 years ago it was very hard to think deeply while typing, today it's completely natural.
An e-book searching system doesn't need to be nearly as complex as typing. For example, you could theoretically have a little scrollbar that you drag your finger across and can easily anywhere from the beginning to the end of the book. In just a couple weeks I imagine this would be totally natural behavior.
I'm quite happy with simple PDFs and a laptop or at home on my desktop. I don't know what PDF readers you're using, but at least Okular has bookmarks, notes, markings, underlinings, highlights... Dog-earings and other book mutilations are so primitive! Index searches aren't as useful anymore, I love ctrl+F. :P
I find PDF search for tech books almost wholly useless, whereas the index does a really good job. I guess it's because it has that human touch to give a high relevancy score shrug
Well, depending on the PDF some have hard links in the index, table of contents, etc., so that balances out any problems of ctrl+F and saves the step of thumbing to the page or entering the page number and pressing enter... I'll admit for me the fastest way of finding stuff is usually through the table of contents. Even so I still can't think of a case where PDF search absolutely failed me and I could only find what I was looking for in the index or ToC, and my primary reading materials are tech and math and science... For the fiction I read it's superb for finding quotes or dialog if I can't remember a general area in the book where it was (which is frequent, especially if I hadn't read it for months). Looks like Okular doesn't have regex search though, too bad.
I think this is a noble aim, however isn't this partly the duty of national libraries such as the British Library[1] and the Library of Congress[2]? Having said that, perhaps the point is to take such archives out of the hands of government organisations?
I do work for the Library of Congress and no, it is not part of the mission of the Library to maintain a physical copy of every book ever written, though it does have extensive collections. Regardless, having redundancy in efforts will only make the efforts more effective.
Edit: To expound on my last point, It not just redundancy in the collections, but redundancy in the effort which is important. If the LoC stores two copies of the same book in two geographically dispersed locations but makes the same brain-dead mistake in preservation process at both, then it doesn't matter that there were two copies. Entirely separate organizations using entirely separate methodologies are much safer than one organization. The general process for storing these books seems to be very different than that of the Library so it is good that he is duplicating the effort.
Part of it seems to be that for copyright they want to own the physical books that they have scans of. Instead of destroying the books in the process like is common, they are taking care to preserve the books.
Agreed, that's clearly part of it, but the overall thrust of the article seems to be 'if we don't do this physical books will disappear', which seems to be duplicating the work of national libraries.
It's a pity they seem to gloss over that, since the duplication of that effort does need some justification - perhaps the national libraries don't cover enough foreign books? Or they don't trust the government? Also it's a bit misleading, acting as if it doesn't already happen.
It is partly a matter of redundancy. Unthinkable as it might be, libraries do burn. They do have budget cuts. They get burglarized. Their archivists make mistakes. Better three universal libraries than two. Better four than three. When we're sure we have too many we'll deal with that; they are far easier to destroy than create.
It is true that things might be more efficient if everyone pooled resources and, say, kept track of the fact that we have ten distributed copies of Book X in the world but only three of Y, so we should be looking out for more copies of Y. Which brings us to a second reason to start a new public archive: as a pilot project to explore different ways of running public archives. Modern infotech is evolving fast; presumably there is lots of room to experiment with different strategies, and the national libraries have only so much budget for research.
Redundancy is why so much information survived from ancient times. When Rome collapsed, scholars elsewhere hung on to its knowledge and continued building on it while Europe pulled itself back together.
On the broad scale of history, neither national governments, nor their commitments to historical preservation, are something you can rely on.
I do not mean this as a modern-day political snark at any particular government, I mean this as a historical comment.
Of course there's no guarantee your archive will survive indefinitely either, but if we treasure them and have several of them the odds go up substantially.
This reminds me a bit of the library of alexandria.
Physical books all in one place have a bad habit of being more vulnerable to destruction.
But hey why not, it's just one copy of the books. I think it's a great idea to at least attempt to keep an archive for this reason:
"When they were making microfilm of books, they thought they would never have to rescan them. When they were being scanned at 300 dpi, they thought they would never have to scan them again. We know someday these books will be rescanned. They will be waiting here in boxes."
Movies didn't cause theatre to disappear completely.
Light bulbs didn't cause candles to disappear completely.
Printed books will get a feel of classic/high end/fancy. Parents will be reading to their kids from printed books (as well as electronic ones) for a while.
Interesting article however I don't think I'll ever grasp the concept that physical books could one day disappear entirely from the household.
If you take an example as puerile as my son's latest acquisition 'Where is little duck?', I struggle to see how an electronic replacement can supersede the physical interaction he has with the different textures and the constant struggle he has learning how to turn one page at a time (he's only 13 months old btw!).
I love ebook technology and whilst I can't justify the cost of a kindle currently, I could definitely see myself reading more if I had one but I think to say that technology will render physical books defunct is sensationalism.
And yet your example is squarely in the center of the problem. How many children's books from 1850 are in your house? How many children's books from 1950 are in your house? What percentage of your own children's books are still in your possession?
Children's books have a very short shelf life. New ones get published all the time. A very tiny percentage become Curious George and get reprinted for decades, but the rest go out of print. The printed copies get used by children and therefore become ragged and nasty. In ten years you will have thrown them away. Hopefully you will have thrown them away: Clutter is no good either. If we want to preserve them it should not be your house's job.
This is why archiving is hard. It is why backups are hard. It all seems so redundant when the objects are shiny and new and sitting right there, they're in the stores, they're on all your iDevices, they're all over YouTube. And then one day you wake up and the original film of your 1970s-era Oscar-winning movie has fallen apart. This actually happens! You've got to think ahead.
The danger of the digital era is that we get tempted to rely on a number of physical copies that is so small that we get blindsided by black-swan accidents. That's what this is really about. The movie Metropolis was ultimately saved because it was distributed in physical copies and a film archive in Argentina didn't throw theirs away like everybody else. That sort of thing is in danger of stopping. Make copies!
I am 100% in favour of archiving and I agree with your point entirely. My frustration is directed towards those who believe that within the next few decades, printed books will be obsolete.
I tend to agree that we have a little time, but then again these things happen quickly when they happen. If you don't prepare in advance, you end up trying to invent your archiving plan in the middle of the fire sale.
This needn't actually be that hard if we do it systematically.
I don't see that there is a significant difference between ebooks replacing paper books, and books replacing scrolls, or mp3s replacing CDs replacing vinyl.
Aficionados may still use the legacy format, preferring it due to some special advantage, but for the normal man-in-the-street, the more convenient format will definitely replace the old.
Pop-up books and textured books for small children, like the "That's not my ..." series are a different matter, and I can't picture quite what their replacement will be; but normal story books, whether illustrated or not, will easily be replaced by ebooks, once colour e-ink is good enough and cheap enough.
I don't think it will happen to you or I in our lifetimes, we already own too many books, and the effort and expense of replacing our existing paper collections with electronic copies is too great.
It will happen to other people in our lifetimes. People who are young children today are just as unlikely to buy paper books in adulthood as today's youth are to buy CDs. I wouldn't be surprised if your son's high school studies are conducted without paper books.
I can't imagine buying paper fiction for myself any more, unless I have a very good reason for doing so (I recently had to kill several hours alone on a rainy day with nothing but my wallet, so I bought one).
I think an issue is the leap involved. Vinyl required record players to be used- thus the leap to CDs is replacing mechanical players with more sophisticated mechanical ones. Books, however, require no analogous external player. eBooks, on the other hand, require readers, which are digital and subject to mechanical failures. eBook readers also have other external requirements such as a need to be charged, Wi-Fi access to download books, and so on. A paper book is self-contained.
The other thing, in terms of elementary schooling, is that it is far more cost effective to distribute paper books than eBook readers to hundreds of children. It's possible that a nigh-indestructible e-paper could work, but only if it's incredibly cheap, and the electronic formats of the books are much less expensive than traditional hard copies.
If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a book a year, and each book costs between $5-$10, replacement costs are not substantial. If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a kindle a year, then we're talking serious money.
I hope physical books don't disappear for a long time. Maybe once ALL books are available as ebooks in open format and without restriction on what I can do with them. I'd like the ability to trade, borrow, or resell my books.
Also, if there are the equiv 'used' bookstores that sell ebooks for $1.
I'd love it if Amazon offered me a discount on kindle versions of hard books I've already bought from Amazon. I'd like to clear out the thousands of pounds of books I have and just keep the digital versions.
I'd even promise that the books go to the recyclers, not on the used market.
it could be interesting to monitor the gradual disappearance of physical copies of books by (for example) monitoring the frequency of listings of that book on ebay, or the amazon marketplace (based on the assumption that books that perish are not re-listed, although I'll admit that books are 'sticky' and could bounce around owners until settling with owners who are keenest to hold on to them long term, so you'd perhaps expect decreasing market volume/listing frequency even without any perishing)
Or there might be a revolution in "print-on-demand" making it possible to do for $1 per book someday.
Insert previous book for recycling credit, which gets pulped later, new book prints on recycled paper but with ink that can also be easily extracted later.
Babylon5 had a newpaper printer I think where you inserted the previous day's paper and got a new one. People will always like hard copy for some casual mediums.
Brewster Kahle is great: here is someone who has a track record of achieving material success but has turned his energies to filling a public need.
In a deletenothing world, where ideally URIs never change, new material == a new URI, it is easy enough to assume that digital material will last forever, but I am a bit pessimistic here. For example, what if a systemic software error invalidates most of S3?
I must agree with other people here that collectible books will probably always exist. I have a 50 pound tome of da Vinci's total corpus of work a customer gave me for Christmas - thumbing through that is simply a different kind of experience than accessing the same material through a web browser, even without rich media like video.
Lots of talk about "books won't really go away". I'm reminded of the victrola my Grandmother kept until the day she died.
Kids these days (mine and their friends) don't own music collections. Its all on the web. They just download, listen, discard music.
I believe a generation will grow into EBooks and have utterly no use for bulky, unsearchable faded paper books. I will be left in my crowded house, filled with books, and the grandchildren will know I am an old coot. And I am happy with this.
Lots of talk about "books won't really go away". I'm reminded of the victrola my Grandmother kept until the day she died.
Except that books have a far, far, longer history than records/CD/magnetic disks as a physical, portable medium for instant-access.
There's no reason a dead-tree book can't also have an e-ink inside-cover that allows for full-index searching. Books have evolved but are unlikely to just go away, and the "flip pages with your finger" UI has proved immensely durable.
Also, what are we to make of all those kids buying vinyl? :)
I'm on the "dead trees or their equivalent forever" side myself (search doesn't work well with paraphrases, and the physical book has more physical cues for random retrieval of imperfectly remembered passages), but "the 'flip pages with your finger' UI has proved immensely durable" requires a link to this classic clip from Øystein og jeg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
Come on - an EBook like Kindle doesn't require net access - you can have thousands of books in your hand. And the current model runs for a week or two between recharges. Those are hardly issues now, and will become non-issues in the next year or two.
Lets admit it - books have no advantage whatsoever beyond our lifetime familiarity and affection for them. They will go away as surely as victrolas, snuff boxes, spats and buggy whips.
I've been hearing about "the paperless society" for probably 30 years. Have to I'm starting to become skeptical. I see the death of books as very much akin. Sure, it seems to make sense on paper, but ...
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Used to be a generation of kids you were all free-love and pro-dope who then seemed to have gone 180 on all that. Maybe not the best comparison, but the interests and needs of people change as they get older. OTOH I really don't see people raised without a land-line ever deciding they're missing very much, so it goes both ways.
(I'm beginning to think we need to watch middle-aged women to get a real sense of the future.)
I still buy a lot of physical books, but not very often in a physical store. I only buy a few CDs, but those too I get online. That's just where I can find them. CD's, though, are not interesting as objects and do nothing to enhance the interaction with the content. A book, however, offers a set physical, spatial, 3D cues about the content (e.g., that interesting quote was at about the middle of the book, or five pages back).
In a way, vinyl beats digital in that regard; it's been a while, but I recall the way one would interact (so to speak) with a record. Side A; side B; getting up to flip the record. It offered a different kind of connection than a CD or MP3.
I'd like to see the printed page use e-ink or something so that I can get the best of both worlds in a morphing bundle of bound flippable pages holding everything I want to read.
somewhat related: individual titles do disappear, without a trace. I have an 1876 French poem collection on my shelves about which _nothing_ is written on the internet.
I don't really feel books will disappear. I know personally I read most of my books on ebook, but on occasions I will go buy a book of an author I like and I know many people do the same as I do. Also the library of congress made it its goal to archive all the knowledge both to a giant database as well as in the paper form. So I feel the article is slightly off in that regard.
Won't disappear completely, just as mechanical watches haven't ... but they'll become luxury items, focused more on "I want this and I want it as well-made as possible" than the functional content.
I've got 26 bookcases at home. The prospect of moving is staggering (last time the sheer mass bumped the predicted cost by $2000). There are piles of books I so want to read but know I'll never get to ... and will never part with. Oh, to have electronic copies of 2/3rds so I'd at least have the content for the prospect of reading some day without the weight/volume, and to replace the remaining 1/3rd with high quality renderings for the sensory experience of "I _own_ this".
Wake me up when digital displays can match the graphical resolution of the printed page. And when the display is attached to a reader device that will never, ever need to be recharged. And is incredibly lightweight. And gives off the satisfaction of physically flipping through pages.
I ain't touching this unless it has haptic features that simulate the sensation of page-flipping, full ability in annotations and scribblings on the e-pages (I want to be able to use a ruler with my markings, I want digital pens, I want to be able to use digital crayons for all I care), and it is medically confirmed that reading e-ink produces no more eyestrain than reading paper.
Page-flipping is obsolete. All these things you want, already exist in books, so stick with books, when your generation dies, the next won't care about those quaint things and they'll move forward with the new medium.
I can't help but think fifty years down the line we'll see a huge spike in cancer rates caused by continuous exposure to electronic devices. If not from EM radiation, then from the materials they're made of.
And I'm generation Y, we'll invent clinical immortality and we're going to live forever.
Maybe so, but every new technology comes with side effects. I'm sure the number of paper cuts sky rocketed when books became popular. People's ability to remember things probably also decreased because you don't need to rely on memory so much when you can write things down. And I'm sure someone from the previous generation was loudly protesting all this new fangled writing.
That someone was Socrates: "The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it's not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you're equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in consequence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment."
High quality, "collectible" books kept for their prestige value.
"Consumable" books that you read for fun or to learn something fairly current (not timeless) drift more and more towards ebooks.
In other words, people buy Knuth's books to adorn their office shelves with, but probably won't feel the same way about putting "Twilight" (or worse) there, even if they enjoy reading them.