I interviewed at a print on demand book binding automation shop about five years ago. Naturally one of the topics was the sustainability of paper media on short and long terms. I'll be the first to admit that the interviewer had a vested interest in selling the idea that paper books aren't going away any time soon, but the argument was compelling.
As long as children are taught to read on paper books, we will have an emotional connection to the printed page.
I've taught my children to read first using board books and then moving on to paperbacks. Printed books are uniquely suited as teaching materials for children. They are robust to dropping, food spills, and drink spills (if you're quick to react). Losing one book doesn't imply the loss of the whole library.
Most of my kids' book reading takes place at home so the portability afforded by e-readers is not a concern. Children love repetition and reading the same book over and over helps them internalize the information so being able to carry around thousands of books electronically isn't a use case for them.
Maybe some parents are teaching their kids to read on tablets or e-readers. If so, I'd love to hear your experience and the pros and cons.
Books spawn a similar hierarchy then electronical devices -- there are colouring books, crossword puzzle books, children's books, comic books, textbooks, academic books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, all kind of booklets -- just to name a very few! There is no way all of them are magically replaced by their electronical counterparts, namely eBooks, tablets, smartphones, notebooks or classical workstations.
Many of the example books are "as alive" as always because they are just cheap -- such as many children's books, puzzles and colouring books. Nothing electronical can be that cheap.
I guess mostly the expensive books, such as in academia, reference manuals or encyclopiedias are replaced more and more by their electronic counterpart. But even there, it's a matter of taste.
I will give to you toddler picture / teething books. But for every other item on that list “there is an app for that.” Atlases for example don’t compare to google maps.
As to price, Tablets are already going below 50$. Once you start talking about multiple books electronics quickly became cheaper.
PS: Coloring apps can be printed out, which does not save on paper but still develops fine motor skills.
There are also apps for toddler books. If it's not about the price or usage scenario (pro tip: Don't give your electronic device to your toddler), there is still the overall feeling of a book. The comparison between a scrollable, zoomable digital map to a traditional atlas is the perfect example. For recreational purposes, I love the beautiful art and feeling of large and bulky picture books and atlases. Even a 12" IPad doesn't come close to that feeling.
As far as I'm concerned, trees are a renewable resource... we can (and do) plant and grow more. Clear-cutting for farming is the biggest issue with tree loss, and that's pretty much outside the US. Not paper production. Growing trees takes carbon out of the atmosphere, using it and burying it making room for new trees is not a bad thing.
Beyond this, an actual book gives you a lot more context to help remember things... the feel, shape and even the physically relative position of a given page vs the book as a whole. You lose that when you go digital. You also tend to be tethered to some DRM scheme that can take your books away.
> You can't do anything with them except read (linearly).
And write on them, scribble in them, underline them, draw in their margins, use colored pens and pencils and highlighters, check the index, flip through them, give them to anyone with your annotations and get them back with theirs, rip pages out of them, sew them back together, rebind them, burn them, store them for thousands of years without electricity or maintenance in no higher technology than a clay jar (assuming acid free paper!), hold them upside down and learn to read them that way, stop doors and weigh down papers on a desk with them, or just admire them on a bookshelf.
But yes, the most obvious thing you can do with them is simply to read them linearly, and this lack of frivolity is by far the best thing about them.
Old books now seem to be broken to me. You can't do anything
with them except read (linearly)
At times this is a plus too. While reading online many a times I get distracted by some reference and go tangential looking for more details on that than moving on with the book.
The „trick“ I use is I‘m offline by default and have to „turn the internet on“ on most devices (except the phone). Been doing thst for 8 years now, works pretty well.
What you're describing is functional attachment. Emotionally, how would you feel if all of the printed books in the world were to disappear today? Would you miss them?
I don‘t think I would. I just don‘t see the point anymore. Don‘t get me wrong, I once was a romantic too! :) I used to spend entire afternoons after school in the bookstore or libraries and had a pretty good library. Now when I see paper books I groan a little. Too heavy, too much material/waste, too impractical, and most of all kind of fusty. What‘s the point.
Trees are a renewable resource... we can, and do grow more when they're used for paper. Or do you worry about running out of lettuce or carrots?
I get that it may be impractical for some... for some of us, we have a VERY hard time remembering long form content without the additional context a physical book provides. I simply cannot hold over 200 or so pages of content without that extra content... I get completely lost most of the time around page 50 in an eReader. I don't know how to describe it better. I can eat through 800 pages or so of a highly technical book in a weekend. I'm lucky if I can get through 100 pages on an eReader in that same time-frame.
Why do I get as irritated by this? Because, I'm not trying to stop the production of eReaders, which do have a LOT of actual environmental waste, compared to a few thousand books.
I don‘t have an opinion on the macro picture of whether paper books are a net drag or benefit to the environment because I haven‘t done the math. I was only responding to OP that being taught on paper books somehow means lifelong attachment. I grew up in a paper world and like I said now even have „negative attachment“ to paper. That‘s one counterexample, and I know a few others. Soclearly it‘s not a general truth.
This 100%! Kids are on the iPads all the time but for games mostly. And they do repeat a lot of steps to pick up the tricks and trade of the game they are on. I mean the new tech more than covers all of the requirement. IMO, it is the education machinery that is not ready for change yet. Or may be it pays more to keep things the way they are.
I've tried every format and device and I can't read e-books. Nothing, to me, beats a real book. I don't enjoy the experience for one, it strains my eyes (yes even e-ink). But also, and this is something I wouldn't have considered back when I was younger and it seemed like books surely must die in their dead-tree form, I actively seek ways to not be interacting with electronics and books are sublime for this purpose. I work all day on computers, I carry a small one in my pocket that bothers me constantly through the day, so when I want to read. I want to read. I have no desire to have that experience coupled in anyway to the internet or electronics.
For recreational reading, I strongly prefer real, printed ones.
For reference materials, I strongly prefer electronic ones (stripped of DRM and converted into a non-proprietary format). I can keep my entire technical library on my phone and I can grep through the entire set of books for something in particular that I need to find. I remember the days when my technical library was in printed form. It took a lot of space and often I'd be unable to predict which book I'd need at home vs at work, and end up not having it available. On this front, electronic books were a total game-changer for me.
Huh, I have the reverse preference. Recreational books are read sequentially, like tape, so they suit e-book readers well. Also, they're usually plaintext. Reference/education books - with those I need fast random access, which mostly rules out the usual digital form, and extra formatting and media used (tables, images, figures, equation) make them problematic on e-book readers.
Same for me. I would say an electronic book has the advantage in searchability, but a well curated index might actually beat a naive text search most of the time.
On desktop, maybe, but I haven't used a decent enough reading software (like most web stuff, Amazon cloud reader is barely fit for purpose, and while I don't know what's "state of the art" in epub/PDF readers on desktop, the few I tried didn't facilitate reliable search and fast navigation either), and most technical e-books I keep as PDFs anyway, because the formatting almost always matters.
On e-book readers like Kindle, a profound disagreement. I can easily find what I'm looking for in a 1000 page book even without using an index in less time than it takes to type in a search query into Kindle's searchbox (especially since I switched from the old keyboard Kindle to touch-only Paperwhite). If there's a well-curated index at the end of the book, it's only that much better.
I think software could get somewhat closer to paper experience, but it needs to be faster. As long as random page access takes more than ~100 ms from selecting the page to full render (and in my experience, it's often close to 300-500 ms), you cannot really flip through an e-book the way you would through a paper book.
(Tangent: it's another of many cases where performance actually matters, because the difference between lighting fast and fast enough to tick boxes on your sprint plan is entire family of use cases.)
My split is reference/search (ebook), entertainment/immersion (ebook) and education/assimilation (paper). Ebooks are still too undifferentiated and featureless for effective learning. For example I can often remember that a definition or philosophy is in a large green book with an illustrated cover, 3/4 of the way into the book, on the bottom of the left hand page, author's notes in the left margin, citation reference in the bottom margin, smell of the page, paper color, font, initial cap size on the paragraph. That hooks into my recall and keeps the book interesting while I memorize it. Ebook formats lose a lot of information.
Agreed. As for reference materials, you missed the key point that they tend to go out of date. An outdated reference book is largely useless, in contrast to a good novel.
weird but the back and forth here made me realize something about ebooks. they provide some kind of privacy and confidentiality.
printed books on the other hand give away what you are reading -- unless you put them in those fancy covers. and that is if you can even find the right size.
you don't get the eyes and no one will ask you what you are reading on your phone. never thought about it that way before...
I don't OCR, I buy the books in electronic form. I convert them to both text and PDF files. I grep to find the book(s) that have what I'm looking for, and search individual books using the PDF reader.
If you don't mind my asking, how do you best search through your library of digital technical books? I've got over a couple hundred in my phone and many more in another device and keeping track of bookmarked sections is a hassle sometimes. Also, any particular reading app you recommend?
> I carry a small one in my pocket that bothers me constantly through the day
Personally, I don't get why people put up with that, and then feel forced to escape their devices. I put up with Slack on my work machine, but on my personal laptop nothing can interrupt me, and even on my phone only calls (which I rarely get) and alarms can do so, everything is on the drawer for when I get to them. I know the defaults are often terrible, but it generally only takes a few minutes once to change them.
The annoyances of paper books, on the other hand, can't be configured or scripted away :)
As a fellow curmudgeon who really loves dead-tree books, I still sometimes smile thinking about an appearance Maurice Sendak made on a variety show shortly before he died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPEZj21NmE
I have a few reasons to prefer paper books:
- They don't have to be charged.
- First sale doctrine applies. No 50 page TOS explaining what I can or cannot do with my own books.
- I can lend my books to friends and family
- After reading a book, I can easily give it or sell it to someone else
- Notifications don't pop up when I'm reading.
But like Sendak, I think I mostly just have an innate aversion to ebooks. I just don't like them. To me, an ebook feels like one of those electric wine bottle openers: efficient, but charmless.
My reader lasts weeks without recharging, that's enough for me not to matter.
> Notifications don't pop up when I'm reading.
I've never heard of notification pop-ups on an ebook reader. I hope you don't seriously compare reading on a normal tablet with paper books.
I agree that old-school books are definitely more flexible and customer-friendly when it comes to lending etc. But I prefer carrying a light, thin device instead of a whole bag of books on journeys.
I'm the opposite, nothing beats the convenience of every book in the world in my pocket. I like my back lit ereader, I can read in bed in the dark and not bother my wife. If I don't have my ereader I can just use my phone. E readers and phones are all much lighter than books.
I agree with so much of what you said, plus I have to say I love post-it notes for keeping track of notes etc, nothing is better and more convenient then flipping the page open and immediately having the content at your fingertips.
No slow crappy UI or micro keyboard to deal with, just what I wanted, the information.
Yes there are downsides, but it's what I find most enjoyable and efficient.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 with the adaptive display on is just better than any book IMO. The lighting is always perfect, the text is clearer than paper.
I will be heart broke then I eventually have to replace it.
To do anything but read on it is a sin.
Reading on paper, I am just slower than reading on the S 8.4.
2560x1600 on such a small screen is what is needed to beat paper.
It's amusing to note the short time frame the "books won't die" idea is working with. The original Kindle came out in 2007, just over ten years ago. That's a tiny blip in the passage of history.
I don't know what the long-term fate of books will be. What will things be like in 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? I do know that if you expected books to be gone barely ten years after the first mainstream ebook reader your perspective is severely limited. I was resistant to ebooks for a long time; I'm relatively recent adopter; I'm surprised at how much headway ebooks have made in such a short time.
Several years ago I got rid of several thousands of pounds of my books. They were like a dead anchor in my life, a huge pain in the ass to move every few years. I love having a library of ebooks that are weightless, spaceless, and can be easily copied among different devices. I have de-DRM'd most of them and can have them in whatever format I want. It's a feeling of freedom. I think long and hard before I buy a paper-book now, and rarely do.
As far as aesthetics, yes, it's true, reading a good paper book is a nice experience. I'm not sure it's better than reading a book on the Kindle app on my iPad Pro, though. Different, but both are nice. And the paper book experience has no analog to switching to a different book in your library when you're reading but not at home. Or to carrying your library with you wherever you go. There are other important things (e.g., searching) that paper books simply have no good way to do.
cars are nice but they wont replace horses. your car ever mowed your lawn for you before? You ever hear of mowing a lawn before cars? Your car ever come when you whistle because it likes apples?
this car thing is a fad. I'm putting all my money in horses.
What I find missing with ebooks is a sense of 3D space.
With a paper book, my brain seems to tag my memories of sections and scenes with how far into the book they were and where they were on the page. If I need to refer back to some earlier section when reading, that tagging lets me find it quickly.
With an ebook I don't get that page tagging, and also depending on the format and the reader might not get position on the page tagging.
For some ebooks, the ability to search by words is enough to make up for this, but for a lot of books I can find a given previously read section much faster and easier with the paper edition. If it is a book where I am likely to have to go back frequently, I'll probably get the paper edition.
Perhaps someday they will be able to make a thin enough display that someone can make an ebook reader that has a hundred of so screens bound together like the pages of a book. That would be awesome.
I didn't think the idea that books would die to be all that widely help of an opinion. So it's a pretty easy argument to agree with. Change? sure. Adapt to new reading habits mediated by technology? Yep. Incorporate features made possible in the digital realm? That too. Die? No.
I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more available to lower income groups.
"Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go that way soon too"
In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won. Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance, but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a hurry.
I moved country and had to make decisions about which of our books were valuable. In the end our criteria came down to ‘would we read it again’, ‘is it a nice edition’ and ’does the physical book have a special memory’. That meant that we gave away probably half of the books. You can always buy or download them again in the future.
I don't. Unless you see a value of collecting them, having a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a book means nothing if you can access that content next time in any format. The only argument to that is that you like to collect that particular edition because of the artwork, paper, etc. Outside that, there I cannot find any other logical argument.
I hope if you know spanish you can read my essay about "the end of books made of paper" http://minid.net/2013/02/07/el-inevitable-fin-de-los-libros-... if you don't I think Google Translate will do a good justice. Basically, it is clear that the concept of books will be difficult to eradicate. I find it hard to believe that we lose this great cultural format; the compilation of writings with a particular objective. Reports will continue to exist, but books, as a format, they will dissapear on paper format but they will continue on digital. Because of this, it is probably that some things will change.
I have an startup right now about resuming books on audio. It's becoming increibly popular among the new generations: they don't want to read an entire book, they want the best highlights of it. Maybe in the future we will face a change in the format we write books: ultra resumed, different grammar, different format.
> herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code
Yes, PDF readers are bad.
What makes the problem worse is that the PDF itself, is sometimes a resource-intensive format as well. Finding information from a modern datasheet is a pain, finding information from a scanned 300 MiB datasheet from the 1980s is real pain. Lots of rendering.
None of the problem (other than keyword searching is not available) exists in a physical book, the human brain is a great pattern-recognizing machine. Nothing beats flipping through the pages and using fingers as markers yet...
What I mean by concurrent display code is the display of the pdf file is always up-to-date even when the renderer cannot display the data fast enough.
The trick is to abandon the current render whenever the position in the file changes, and start a new render.
I did this back in the 1970's (!) when I designed and built a 24x80 glass terminal. The 6800 microprocessor simply could not keep up with 9600 baud serial data coming in. So what I did was hook an interrupt handler to the serial port, which stored the incoming characters into a 24*80 circular buffer.
The display renderer would start at the beginning of the circular buffer, writing characters to the display buffer. If more characters entered the circular buffer which would invalidate the display, the renderer would simply start over.
Whenever the data coming in paused slightly, the display would catch up almost faster than you could see.
It worked great!
I since incorporated the same idea into the MicroEmacs text editor in the 1980s, meaning the editor display was always crisp and responsive despite running on an 8088. (Other editors would fall behind, and when you took your finger off the auto-repeat page-down key they'd eventually catch up. This behavior is what most PDF readers exhibit.)
There are a number of PDF readers around, and as an academic who spends most of the day working with references in PDF format, I can tell you that Zathura combined with a tiling window manager and a little shell scripting (for temporary bookmarks) can do most of what you say you want.
Thanks for the reference. BTW, I've now and then sent these lists to PDF reader makers. None have ever paid any attention nor acknowledged it. So I complain here :-)
Probably PDF is not the best format. EPUB can be quite good. I'm an EPUB reader and I never found any impediment. Most of the examples you mention, like "cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can)" are not really useful for reading, but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram. The rest of the points I think are improvements to ebook experience that can be achieved but has little to do with the old book format.
> but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram
Consider the aspect ratio of most monitors. It's ideal for side-by-side viewing of pages. Also, most books that have mixed illustrations, pictures, and text are designed for side-by-side viewing.
This, and all of the other shortcomings I mentioned, are technically very easy to accomplish. For example, Foxit does support side-by-side display, but if you switch it to full-screen display, that goes away. It's almost like they had to work extra hard to make side-by-side not work.
Side-by-side is also very useful for "flipping" through a book. You can do it literally twice as fast as page-by-page.
Yes, I agree, but they're just lack of features, has little to do with the nature of an ebook vs paper book. People is nostalgic biased and that quickly goes away once you give them the convinience.
Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on and at the whim of when the company will revoke your license to read it?
Nevermind you're also subject to poor application design. Has anyone tried to read books on Windows and had a decent time? I can't find a single app that keeps track of where I am in ebooks or PDFs and it's terrible.
You are right about the problems of the existing e-book systems but going back towards felling of trees isn't the right solution. It is possible to build resilience and redundancy on web, either through open source or with a distributed design, and this is something a new player will have to bear in mind while building a replacement.
> Libraries with books that are hundreds of years old.
Scrolls and tablets pre-date books by quite a bit. History would seem to actually show that properly baked clay tablets are the most durable. Books are far more vulnerable to fire, water and air.
edit: Looking towards the future, broadcasting an e-book to the stars is probably the most durable (and hardest to recover) form of storage.
There is no need to be pedantic. A scroll is clearly the same concept as a book before they figured out how to bind books...
If you want to stand the test of time there is no substance that will survive if a great destroying force is used. It doesn't further your argument when clay bricks are the source of truth. All I know is I can leave a book on a shelf for years and pick it up and read it instantly. I'd be lucky if the device turned back on and could get the latest Kindle update 5-10 years from now.
Books don't have batteries so I'm not limited to how long I want to read. Here's the other kicker, no one can revoke my access to this book or push language updates to the book. It's a preservation of the past.
Well, an digital book is the same concept as a paper bound book and is arguably more conceptually similar than a tablet.
You can't easily encrypt and hide a paper book or distribute to multiple backup points. Paper books are much easier to censor and burn.
A Kindle is an e-reader, one of many devices that can be used to read e-books. If your e-reader is destroyed, you can buy another one and restore your digital books from backups.
Nobody can revoke your access to an e-book without DRM and it is very easy to strip DRM and backup your e-books. Nobody but me can change the copies of e-books I have stored in various mediums.
Clearly the paper book and the digital book have different trade offs (I love paper books) but books are not the most durable medium in history and paper books are not categorically more durable than digital books. I would bet good money that in the far future, if humans exists, the vast majority of books we have today will have survived directly because they were digitally encoded and stored at some point in their history.
> While I agree that books tied to plastic hardware is bad, but felling trees isn't less evil either… it is only more so.
No, it isn't. Paper is leagues and bounds more renewable and most data shows the rate of deforestation is going to stabilise within a few decades. Paper decomposes cleanly (and recycles) whereas a Kindle will be the same hunk of scrap for centuries if buried.
Yeah, papyrus can burn to ash. If you burn a tablet, it just gets more permanent. In fact, a lot of cuneiform tablets that have survived are ones that were in fires.
What will the books of the future be made from? Will people living on Mars or in space stations pay dearly to ship books made from dead trees all the way from Earth?
Just a general piece of information to share here, since I think everybody in here has an interest in e-readers:
did you know that you can get a mint condition kindle 3 with 3G (free data for the device for life) on ebay for $30?
I consider the kindle 3 a nearly flawless device (save for it's lack of a frontlight). The fact that they are available, and the included 3G which just works, for $30, is a technological miracle in my mind.
In my personal case it is because there are no good e-ink devices. That gray background plus either bad size or horrible interface and horrible price are not doing it for me.
This comment kinda reeks of that "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" thing. I mean, "horrible" everything? Really? A device that lets you carry practically infinite books with you? Because the background color and all the available dimensions out there don't scratch your specific preference?
Can you elaborate on your experience with it? Is that thing really worth €820? I like the idea of a giant e-reader but that’s really quite a lot of money for such a device.
As long as children are taught to read on paper books, we will have an emotional connection to the printed page.
I've taught my children to read first using board books and then moving on to paperbacks. Printed books are uniquely suited as teaching materials for children. They are robust to dropping, food spills, and drink spills (if you're quick to react). Losing one book doesn't imply the loss of the whole library.
Most of my kids' book reading takes place at home so the portability afforded by e-readers is not a concern. Children love repetition and reading the same book over and over helps them internalize the information so being able to carry around thousands of books electronically isn't a use case for them.
Maybe some parents are teaching their kids to read on tablets or e-readers. If so, I'd love to hear your experience and the pros and cons.