Object Lesson: Why we need physical books
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
This despite the fact that the Kindle has caused more new people to read, and more new people to write, than any technology since, not to be hyperbolic, but... perhaps the printing press?
Now, if you want to talk real issues, let's talk about the challenges of archival, or the danger of making the written word inaccessible to the poor, or the fact that you can't give away or resell an eBook, or lend it to a friend. Those are genuine concerns we should all be thinking about as more and more data goes digital. But, of course, none of that seems to matter to folks like this... they're far more focused on what's happening to them, personally. It's a surprisingly egocentric perspective.
As a random aside, I have little interest in someone who owns many books. Now, someone who's read many books... those folks are worth talking to.
The only problem with archival that would make physical books superior is after civilization collapse that destroys the supply chain for computing devices.
Assuming DRM can be stripped, which it can be for most of the major ebook sellers including Amazon, ebooks can then be converted to epub which are just dialects of html with some xml metadata.
Even if html becomes deprecated in the future, there will be converters for html to new better formats.
Unencrypted ebooks can be backed up off-site, to cloud storage, to m-disc dvds or blu-rays stored in safe deposit boxes.
Physical libraries can be destroyed in fire or natural disaster almost as easily as an ebook collection on a computer. Physical books take up space and cost more, and cannot be cheaply backed up. There's a conflict between securing physical books against wear & tear and destruction, and allowing access to them.
It's worth distinguishing the sharing/lending issue as a legal problem, not an inherent deficiency of ebooks. Ebooks are better for sharing/lending in many ways... there's no need to spend time or money physically transporting them, and no need to worry about a friend accidentally spilling coffee on your favorite book.
For an optical disc to last that long and still be readable, you'll need:
1) Archival-quality discs (e.g. http://www.mdisc.com). Normal writable discs will delaminate.
2) A drive capable of reading the disc, and capable of interfacing with your computer. Optical drives have a limited lifespan -- the drives used in Sega's Dreamcast, for example, are beginning to fail. Likewise, interconnection standards have a limited lifespan.
3) A file format that can still be read using existing technology. Will converters be likely in 50 years? Maybe. 100? Less likely. 200? Extremely unlikely.
That's just optical discs. You're also talking about live archival, for example, to "cloud storage" -- this costs a lot more money than a book sitting on a shelf, uses a lot more power, is locked to a specific set of authentication credentials, must be paid for if the data is not to be lost.
That's before factoring in DRM and advances therein. Sure, you can strip Kindle DRM, with extra effort, but how many people will do so and then accidentally store the result in a place where it will keep for 50 years? What about when DRM gets better?
Ultimately, we suck at digital archival, and ultimately, there's only so much we can do with a medium that requires a great deal of complexity just to extract any amount of meaningful data whatsoever. There is a huge archival and preservation advantage to simple mechanisms that have fewer failure points.
On a smaller scale, when someone moves, they have to move, or pay someone to move, their archive for them (I got a taste of this back in November).
Physical archives do require maintenance, but unlike servers, they don't convert electricity to heat at a prodigious pace, have a much simpler set of failure modes and environmental constraints, and generally remain readable even if you forget about them
Not at all. Technology is fundamentally opaque, non-durable, and transitory. Hell, just try finding something to read a 5 1/4" floppy disk, assuming the magnetic tracks are still intact. And that's only, what, 25-30 years ago? Imagine what it'll be like in a hundred.
Archivists have struggled with this exact problem. Digital data is so ephemeral... how do you persist it? There's been research into more durable forms of storage that might still be accessible, but in the end it's tough to beat physically etching something into stone or writing it on paper or vellum.
I like to read. I have filled my house with books not because I fetishize books, but because I've read them, find value in continuing to consult them, and plan for our children to have access to a well curated library of books that I've loved -- without them having to rent access or my having to maintain digital copies forever.
I also like ebooks, and have a Kindle, but there are usability problems that real books solve very well, and digital books not at all -- and vis versa.
But I find the digital reading experience, with a good epaper reader, infinitely superior... resizable text, built in lighting, far lighter and more portable... for me, personally, there's really no comparison.
To me, and I've said this since the Kindle first hit the street, the perfect compromise would be if I could buy physical books and get a free digital copy as part of the deal. But, of course, that's anathema to the publisher view that I should pay for every medium in which I consume their content.
As things stand, I now usually buy the e-book (or audiobook) and if I love the book, I'll buy the physical book. The only physical books I buy are for series where I've already been buying them as physical books before I got my e-reader (and cookbooks).
The most recent physical books I've bought are Jo Walton's Among Others and Nicole Krauss' The History of Love. I'm planning to pick up The Rook at some point too (although I think it's best as an audiobook).
This was my reaction as well. "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office) is a much better treatise on the utility and relevance of treeware.
"They'd always ask it with the kind of voice people use in the presence of large sculptures in museums. They'd ask me, 'Have you read all these books?'" He waited again, but Billy Kinetta was not playing the game. "Well, young fella, after a while the same dumb question gets asked a million times, you get sorta snappish about it. And it came to annoy me more than a little bit. Till I finally figured out the right answer.
"And you know what that answer was? Go ahead, take a guess." Billy appeared in the kitchenette doorway.
"I suppose you told them you'd read a lot of them but not all of them."
Gaspar waved the guess away with a flapping hand. "Now what good would that have done? They wouldn't know they'd asked a dumb question, but I didn't want to insult them, either. So when they'd ask if I'd read all those books, I'd say, 'Hell, no. Who wants a library full of books you've already read?'"
Has anyone had any success with big e-ink devices? I'd love to switch, but they are a bit expensive, slow and lack good format support.
Moving around the world with tons of books is sadly very inconvenient.
Well, save for the fact that technical books are rarely coil bound. At least a digital book stays open when I set it down on my damn desk!
wouldn't the value of that dimension decline over time? for the next generation of readers, the majority of reading will be done in digital formats, and the the level of emotional attachment to physical books will be significantly less.
So there's obviously some value to the experience of reading from a physical artifact, and the younger generations are also obviously able to identify this value.
Given that, I wonder if we're still in a generational swing here.
It's possible that's not the case. But I'm not convinced this study absolutely proves that "there's obviously some value to the experience of reading from a physical artifact, and the younger generations are also obviously able to identify this value." It could simply be that people prefer what they grew up with. shrug
If this was the case, there wouldn't be a generational difference between that age group and older age groups, since everybody born before 2007 would have "grown up with" regular books.
The one study looked at reading preferences of 16-24 year olds and found 62% prefer paper.
The other study analyzed reading behaviours (not preferences) of 18-34 year olds, finding 64% (UK)/79% (US) read a paper book in the previous year.
Now, from behaviour let's say we can infer preference. In that case the second study found that an overwhelming majority of 18-34 year olds read print books in the last year, which seems to align with 16-24 year old preferences (though, again, it only speaks to behaviour not preference). That would seem to refute the idea that there's a generational difference at play, here.
Of course, I could be missing some key point. It wouldn't be the first time.