I've needed a few references on things recently and went to the library.
Imagine a magical world where all the search results are relevant and neatly grouped, and, wait for it, written by professionals that don't care about SEO.
It made me realize how far the internet has slid (and also how handy it is to have a phone camera to "photocopy" the 3-4 pages I actually needed out of a few books).
What saddens me is the amount of things that are moving so "fast" that they never get any good in-depth books written about them; to stay up to date or learn what's going on you really have to dedicate yourself to keeping up with current development.
Whereas if you want to learn TeX or C you can find amazing books that go into more detail then you'd ever practically want.
I'm fine with it, because the stuff that moves fast is not really designed to be deeply understood by anyone but the devs. It's going to be different in a year, I'm not going to study how some toolchain works.
It's meant to be learned and used as black boxes, and it's all too big to actually study completely, everyone only learns the part that they work on.
I do kind of wish the "moving fast" didn't come with so much "breaking things" though.
> I suspect that in a generation or two, to walk into a home with bookshelves filled with books will be akin to walking into a home with original art on the walls. Both will be rare occurrences — even if the art is not by an old master or even if the books are not first editions or even classics. Their material presence on the shelves will provide aura enough
This is already the case today, at least for me. So many homes and apartments without books, or just a few decorative ones on a coffee table. Anytime I end up in an apartment with a decent bookshelf I get excited and immediately run over to judge their taste and see where it intersects with my own.
This has been America since it started. Bookishness is a class thing and not necessarily a, "social progress" thing historically despite what everyone thinks.
I am skeptical myself. Even if people do not maintain large collections, there is clearly still a gigantic appetite for printed books. The author's experience may be colored by his focus on fine books. Cheap paperbacks still sell very well and make up most people's intake of books. I don't see how offset printing could have an aura while digital distribution does not.
Having lived in Colombia and Brazil for a number of years, except for the very rich, after visiting hundreds of peoples homes, I have never seen more than the bible in anyones house. Perhaps if I visit a guy in his mid 20s/early 30s he may have some kind of marvel graphic novel/manga. I think lower middleclass/middle class people in europe and USA have at least a small library or collection of novels or cookbooks or coffeetable books. I also noticed people in Mexico had more as well.. I feel like South America(at least CO + BR) has almost no culture of enjoying books since television/Cellphones came around..
I read over this article several times, trying to understand its point. I'm still not entirely sure about it.
> Curiosities aside, what makes the Fair so special is that it is about books. Books with covers and pages have, in a society dominated by social media and other sorts of online detritus, become functionally obsolete.
This is followed by several paragraphs about expensive, cultured books, and then about her own experience with a Kindle.
Most books are not the unique artifacts she talks about, or the works of Geoffrey Hartman. They're usually paperback, usually won't get a second edition, and really are about as disposable as e-books. You can see this in a microcosm with the books that this site is interested in: go to a library's programming section and the timeless books are dwarfed by a depressingly large section of reference manuals on old versions of Java and Visual Basic.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing! The heartless, disposable nature of the industry keeps the books I do want to read affordable. The author with her large collection of e-books actually is an outlier, with e-books only making up 20-30% of book publishing in the US. This share has been static over the past few years. Books only are a relic of a past age in her own mind.
On top of which I don't see books going the way of the dodo, ever.
Digital processes are not a 1:1 substitution for the physical world (a forum isn't a café, period), but industry-wise they let us enhance the latter. Tech isn't about selling just tech, it's about making all the things better and/or cheaper, faster, etc. It's an industrial step up, way beyond its inherent end-use. For instance, go to any hardware store, and compare offer and price with 20-30 years ago (inflation aside), then tell me our days aren't a child's dream by comparison (include 'features' such as precise cuts, delivery, and other services). Or in the world of audio/video (wherein DigitalAnalog conversion happens, and perfection isn't attainable, only "good enough"), the kind of sound experience you can get today for a few hundred bucks dances around multi-grand systems from the 1990's.
As I see it, years from now, you'll be able to buy books made in some fancy paper-like material for the equivalent of a few cents. Just like today IKEA manages to sell stuff for 10x less than 30-40 years ago.
I can now read and exercise thanks to ebooks. Whaa? Typically in the evening/night I walk quickly while reading from my ebook screen, then sprint until I'm about to burst or collapse, resume reading and walking fast until I'm ready to sprint again, then read&walk again, repeating this for 30 minutes to over an hour. It's great! No way I could do it with a regular paperback.
Might be due to the fact that I'm lifting weights but I can't stand audio books while doing that. Need some Metal/EDM/whatever to keep me going, E-Books totally ruin it for me.
They say that "books and exercise" are the foundations of a good living. I find it amazing that one helps you do the other, though. Especially with audiobooks: read as you train, train as you read.
The first few times I read my ebook while on a treadmill I had serious sea legs when I dismounted. Finally I adjusted, but man that was something else.
You might be interested to try generating an audio stream from the eBook you're reading. Instead of bying a specialized "audiobook" format, you can just use the built-in text to speech too for your OS:
I'd take the author's "final bet" on "Lindy" principles alone, but I also have what I think are good additional reasons to think that physical books are going nowhere.
Perhaps the biggest "negative" one for is, big picture, how utterly silly the ebook experience generally is. I say this thinking about how many of our collective sci-fi dreams are easily achievable today and we still don't do them. As in, I'm old enough to remember fantasizing about the possibility of the Library of Alexandria in your pocket -- and perhaps more importantly -- the excitement of the possibility.
That second thing doesn't much seem to exist. Replaced by utter silliness like *lending* ebooks from the library" which, sure, I get why it happened -- but if you step back it's just absurd.
I find peculiar that publishers don't try to make physical books more durable and beautiful: if they're going to be art objects, using the cheapest possible paper and bindings seems counterproductive.
I love the idea of physical books. But... they're still material objects with size and weight. Something is definitely lost in going all-kindle(Or in my case Kobo), but it's so incredibly convenient and saves so much space.
I have only bought 1 physical book so far. I bought it because it was not available on Kindle. Also I thought it was worth the effort carrying that particular book around when I change apartments.
Imagine a magical world where all the search results are relevant and neatly grouped, and, wait for it, written by professionals that don't care about SEO.
It made me realize how far the internet has slid (and also how handy it is to have a phone camera to "photocopy" the 3-4 pages I actually needed out of a few books).