Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

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I hear you, but feel like we are biased by what we accepted as normal in our formative years, and that filter doesn’t apply on what we are discovering now that we’re grown up professionals.

For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is filled with liquids everywhere, sometimes coming down from the sky. Updates are painful and costly and non scalable. Font sizes can’t be changed, you have to use an external device to deal with it.

Not saying there are perfect alternatives or that the tradeoffs don’t make sense. Just that we learned very early that books have these limitations and we’ll need to live with them to be a member of society. And we can agree all of these aspects could be and sometimes are fixed, but most people are just ok with books ‘sucking’ in those ways.

We’ve also had centuries to improve the technology of books and I think that makes a difference.

Although the weaknesses you cite seem like problems in search of a solution. No one ever expected books to have variable font size ... why would they?

Lastly let’s recall the book five hundred years ago is dramatically different from the book of today. For example your point about liquids is now in many ways resolved by the cheapness and ubiquity of books. 500 years ago, not so much.

On book font size, there actually is a market solution for the issue: if enough sales are expected the same book (same content) will be sold in different formats, pocket size, deluxe paperback, standard edition etc.

Same for translations, with even books with dual languages side by side.

I find fascinating how the arrival of ebook readers made us rethink how we relate to books, and a lot of annoyances got surfaced only now because there was no comparison point before. My favorite is how you cannot ignore the length of a book while reading it: you can’t pretend not realizing there’s only a dozen pages left and the story must come to an end.

While nobody expected books to have variable font sizes, the fact that ebooks do allow it to be adjusted means that people with deteriorating vision may still read them.

A magnifying glass was the original solution to this problem. They never run out of battery.

And you can use any glass with any book!

Yeah... and once you're no longer paying by the page there's really little upside to using a small font you have to squint at or use margins that are too narrow to easily scan the page. I have no idea how long the books I read are, but I probably read them a few hundred words per screen simply because it's way easier to keep my place. Average for a small paperback exceeds 300.

In the early days of the Gutenberg press when most were illiterate, they would gather together and the one person could read would read to the rest of the group. So, arguably, it was both easier and more inclusive for a blind person to read what there was to read then than now. At least they didn't have to rely on any special accommodations.

It's worth noting that it took 75 years after Gutenberg's press before some disgusted printer came up with the idea of page numbers. As the saying goes, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, who eventually becomes disgusted enough to make things change. Quality matters, pride in design and workmanship matters, and it's not at all bigoted to point out that China, which now manufactures most of the stuff in our 21st century world (or at least the components of it), has a culture of designing and producing absolute dung. We should not accept unacceptable quality just for apparently low prices.

Books are also capable of being copied before or when damaged, passed on trivially, and are not prone to sudden existential failure because a server on the other side of the world was deactivated.

They can't be stolen back by the publisher or seller, can be trivially transformed into different formats, can take annotations, can be rebound with wear, and even if paper has it's faults, reading a page of a well maintained page in 1000 years is as easy as as the day it was written, even if significant swathes of technological backslide occur, and is only prone to the challenge created by human cultural evolution as opposed to loss of the processor or software required to decode/convert/display it.

An HDCP protected chunk of media may as well not exist in 1000 years.

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