This chap thinks so. And he has some interesting points.
demise of books
Mostly his argument hinges on the developing world.
So you advance literacy in Africa and Asia. You need books. You need a lot of books. A lot of trees…
When phones came to Asia, they didn’t start with miles of copper wire. They used cell towers…
When electrical power comes to remove villages, it doesn’t come so much with power lines, but solar panels.
Personally, I think the market IS shifting faster than anybody had predicted. I don’t think it’ll go quite that fast, because book lovers are sentimental about books—BUT—if you’re sitting in a village in Africa, a laptop with 10,000 books installed is a library. And the classics, textbooks, and reference books will probably be the mass of books that does go that direction. The outlay school districts make in books is huge.
So what happens when that money goes, not to, say, venerable old Putnam or MacMillan, but to Microsoft, and the makers of e-readers? Personally, my money is on the Very Cheap Laptop for that job, because it doubles as a math-science-internet machine. And the cost is about equal.
But what happens to Putnam and MacMillan?
What happens when Johnny’s dog eats not just his homework, but his entire laptop? I’m sorry, Miss Jones, my computer crashed?
Not, Report to the principal’s office, but Report to IT.
It’s an interesting new world out there. Again, my bet is a long, long period when we’ll see Original print books, and then people hawking copies of Original Print, etc.
Heaven help us if we have a major Coronal Mass Ejection equalling the one in the 1800’s and a few months (or years) off the grid.
Of course by week 1, half the country would be gibbering lunatics.
Just looked up CME on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
If it could kill telegraph systems, it would be pretty spectacular with today’s communications systems! I am moving to eBooks as rapidly as I can, but things I HAVE to have (manuals, reference books) will stay on paper for as long as I can get them!
Printing out books is a very important option, and I’m doubly glad to offer that in our e-books. Remember that little “how to bind a book” thing we have up above in the links. If there is any e-book you particularly treasure, having it in printout could be a good thing.
Hmmm…Four years ago we had a power outage due to some unusually nasty weather. After four days without electricity I was more than ready to go back to “normal.” Even though I’m planning to buy an e-reader, I have to admit that printed words aren’t real to me if they don’t exist somewhere on paper!
I have a friend and a relative in separate areas of the printing industry, and they are afraid the what happened to photo developing is happening to printing. It is now next to impossible to get slide projection equipment repaired and the photo developing industry is pretty marginalized nowadays.
Books will never completely go away, but the industry is downsizing and consolidating to stay afloat.
What troubles me in the how the written and spoken word is degrading. Cursive is quickly becoming a thing of the past. And students are starting to turn in assignments with text message abbreviations and lingo in them because that is the only way they know how to express themselves in print.
Conversation and debate are rapidly becoming lost arts too. It’s not how well you can express yourself, but how many times you can scream your point or opinion before they shut off your mike. Gone are the days of public forums and civilized debate like something William F. Buckley would moderate.
Hate to be pessimistic, but I feel we are on the verge of a new form of social dark age.
We are certainly in an era of change. I can say that the dark age of education is not global. But it does mean that there is the chance of a major event scaring the daylights out of a generation of young Americans that do not understand the universe as well as they hope they do. There’s great good-heartedness in kids…it’s human nature that they won’t work harder than they think they need to—who would? but some teachers need to tell them how certain things are useful and why they need to know certain things the use of which may not be obvious. In my years in the classroom I found no dearth of interest if you can just explain what (in a very full list of things they try to learn) they have to make room for another.
The One Laptop Per Child project has done well. While many people may have laughed at their sales numbers, I didn’t. They provided millions of kids, with usable, virus proof computers. They may never have got the numbers to bring their price down to $100.00 US per machine, but they changed the computer market. Every netbook in existence is a bastard grandchild of the OLPC project.
So yes, I can see the developing world going electronic. Fast.
But me? Well, I love my hardcovers. I have quite a collection of them, including some of yours 🙂
Wayne
I am one of those who will never give up her printed books, though I also own a Kindle and use the library voraciously. One issue with the developing world and electronic books is power supply. It’s just NOT that reliable even judging by the experience of my West African brother-in-law. His family are all in major cities throughout W. Africa and power cuts are just a part of life. Infrastructure to distribute power, even if generated through solar panels, is sketchy and the whole system bogs down from the rampant corruption. I DO hope these problems are fixed and I DO support electronic books as one tool in solving the issues facing education and dissemination of all types of information, but for the time being I just don’t see how they can replace the power of a well-worn, well-loved book passed from hand to hand and generation to generation.
Constancy of a power supply is a big hurdle for any developing system. Spreading grassroots technical know-how is another one. The world, particularly the western world, has gotten to expect big-box solutions, that perhaps we should build monster windmills—when more modest ones would do for some applications.
Sometimes too, with our own kids, being told that u equals you and r is good enough, with no cursive instruction…sheesh! A teacher with the right attitude can easily convince youngsters to learn things that semi-duplicate what they think they know. They just have to present it reasonably, require it, and reward it. I never had any problem getting a class to do something: sometimes their zeal exceeded design limits—and my own energy. But they had plenty of ‘try’ in them. Lord, they had energy.
I’m sure as a planet we’ll get through this rapid-transit-through-change with amazingly much intact, and if I’m absolutely sure of one thing, it’s that we’ll be surprised by the answers clever people come up with.
The question is, what will people 4000 years in the future know about us, and our books and movies?
Under optimum conditions DVDs have a maximum life of 100-200 years, hard disks and other kinds of memory typically a lot less. Books not printed on acid-free paper may have a life of less than a century. Books printed on the best acid-free paper may have a life of 1000 years.
Let’s hope that someone invents a method of preserving digital data for long periods of time, and also equipment for reading it. Otherwise, if there is any future period when data is not refreshed onto new media for a few generations, practically all knowledge of our civilization will be lost.
I think it will go something like this >> http://xkcd.com/771/
😆
I was thinking of the very fast transition from vinyl to CDs; though vinyl is having a bit of a resurgence, the price is considerably higher. The transition from VHS to DVD was also very fast. While the film to digital images analogy seems much closer, the critical difference is that photographs are end-user created, not published. Although five years may seem fast, Baen has been putting out ebooks for nearly a decade, so we’re well into the transition period. One possibility is that an industry group will form to create a DRM medium for books, like a DRM flash card; it may be to late for that.
I’m not sure how vulnerable the electric and data grids are to solar events. The electrical grid is much more sophisticated and higher-powered than the old batteries and baling wire telegraph system; sophisticated enough, I don’t know, but I did read a recent article saying that since the system grew by accretion, no single critical junction exists in the US. I’m pretty confident about the over all data network, as much of it is optical. I would tend toward flash memory for convenient, resilient storage; however, optical devices like DVDs have their points.
A serious problem is ever-upgrading standards. In the same five years, CDs could give way to mp3s, and DVDs are starting to be replaced by Blu-ray. Planned obsolescence. Disney doesn’t (to me) seem to be worrying as much about cycling their library since they can be assured that VHS will be replaced by DVD, and it by Blu-ray, and Blu-ray by something else–back to flash-like, terabyte ROMs, perhaps. You can bet that once everyone gets an HDTV, the electronics manufacturers will start pushing double HDTV. It’s a very profitable game for them, as they discovered when they launched CDs.
I hadn’t heard of that coronal mass ejection – it would make my business very difficult to revert to analogue processes … and I have to admit that although I have auto back-up weekly onto a cassette type thing, I am not really very careful about saving my work as I write/design it ….
the book business – yes, my daughter and her husband were sustained post graduation by Waterstones (once a wonderful book-store chain, staffed by graduates, lots of interesting part time staff too), which used to be a much nicer place to work. my son in law still works there, but it is pretty corporate now, with a supermarket attitude. no book shops! what an awful thought …
You might find John Scalzi’s blog post of interest, when thinking of whether the print book will go out of print.
Also, in my department we worry a lot about preservation, both analog and digital. The common assumption is that “print lasts longer” … but there is some evidence that, at least with today’s cheap paper & printing, it’s not the case: the pace of technological change isn’t actually as rapid as the degeneration of the physical medium of paper, at least not across the board.
What will be available in 4,000 years? Well, that’s why the Library of Congress is actively preserving stuff, in some cases written out to metallic disks which are expected to last for thousands of years.
Archiving for the future can be tricky… see http://x.ansys.net/posting/18523?cf03800516=7F99AFBB!MjA0MDIyMjEyOmNvcnByYWRpdXNzc286TjPKdqaAgwT607wDp70VOw== for one experience (Yes, CJ, it’s a long gibberish link – I promise it’s legit) which speaks in that case to backing up a binary vs ASCII text format for scientific modeling. In my own experience, One of my co-workers at NASA was able to recover software used back in the Mercury/Apollo days for re-use in modern programs (orbital control simulation software, I think…), because one of the ‘old guys’ had several boxes of punchcards in his garage. Hardest part was writing a device driver for a punchcard reader, but we had just retired the last one of those a few years earlier, so we could get our hands on the hardware at least. People don’t seem to understand how much simpler is better if you want to be able to resurrect things years later…
OK, try this link…
If they got that NASA stuff off punchcards, I am very glad. Last time I was down there with someone who worked with data, the stuff was in pretty bad condition and going fast. That was in the ’80’s, I think. Mouse-eaten, moldy punch cards at least have info for, say, an optical scanner. But some of the tape stuff…if gone rotten…I’m not so sure.
just bought 2 4 GB memory sticks; one to save all current project work onto, and one to save all business stuff to .. most seasons’ total – pictures, patterns, worksheets, etc – comes to about 2 GB …
@purplejulian: it’d be best not to rely on a USB stick for storage, because they have a limited number of reads / writes, they’re fragile, they’re susceptible to being lost, etc. If you’re looking to preserve digital information, it’s going to be an ongoing chore.
The easiest (fairly safe) way to store this information is out to something like a disk array (I use a ReadyNAS). That way, if one disk fails, you can swap in a new disk and not have lost anything. True, you’re vulnerable to catastrophic loss (e.g., a fire), but you’re not relying on a very fragile device upon which to keep your valuables!
CD’s, unless stored properly, delaminate within a few years. Hard-drives fail just sitting on the shelf. Networked storage providers may not be around after a few years. Digital tapes become brittle. The list of horrors goes on.
Please see the Library of Congress’ site, DigitalPreservation.gov/you for further information on what the archival experts say about how to accomplish this.
Thank you, David. The LoC site is very good, though in places, years old. I have to disagree a little with your advice on the use of USB flash for storage. Flash is approaching hard disk reliability. Its main weakness was the number of times it could be rewritten, but that is now around one million times. It can be read any number of times. However, like magnetic media, the storage deteriorates over years. Rewriting the storage yearly is a good solution, kind of an annual physical for your data.
A very significant advantage of a USB flash drive is that the serial interface (Universal Serial Bus) is a relative of RS-232, dating to 1969. Historically, serial interfaces change more slowly and maintain a higher degree of backwards compatibility than disk interfaces. While the interface of an external hard disk may be USB, the internal interface is something different, and continuation of manufacture of a compatible drive for a RAID array is dubious, long term. This is an especially dangerous period, with sector sizes changing from 512 to 4096 bytes; once the standard changes, it’s easier to keep it changing; and the modest 8x storage increase will not suffice for long.
Additionally, for personal use, the small size and ruggedness of a good flash drive is a distinct advantage for offsite storage. If you keep a copy or two well outside your home or office, a copy is likely to survive almost any disaster. Keeping a copy on your person is possible; if it’s destroyed, you may not be around to care.
@Walt: I’m sure that we could go back and forth on this. It’s certainly not my area of direct study, although Digital Preservation it is one of the areas of expertise within my department. Yes, the LOC site is old … I was merely searching for something which would be of use, when considering the issues. So many jump into things for digital preservation without thinking it all the way through, and end up with a broken USB drive, or CD’s which are useless, etc.
oooh, that’s expensive!
I’m really talking about a temporary storage, just so that I don’t lose stuff on a day to day basis. memory sticks which don’t leave my desk are safe enough … I have a mobile disc which comes out if I go away, and the weekly back-up goes onto that … and a mirror copy on a spare hard drive ..
Yeah – maintaining secure, reliable storage is expensive (see this article for the type of storage recommended by the legal profession).
The storage isn’t just the issue, though: having the software to read the documents, long-term, is the real kicker. I mean, think about all of the documents you can’t really read any longer, because you don’t have WordStar or whatever software which simply doesn’t exist. And, even if you can read it, it’s often mangled because of conversion issues.
Five years ago six boxes of books brought $300 at the used bookstore. Today they bring $30. It’s so not worth my while that I don’t take books to the used bookstore anymore. I take them to the library and write them off my taxes for $1 each. This suggests to me that the used book market is overloaded. People are dumping far more paper books than they’re buying.
I am a fan of ebooks. I can carry loads of them in my laptop when I travel, and it weighs just the same as no books. The catch? DRM drives me nuts. A few years back I bought a library of Embiid books. I loved it. And then I moved to Mac, and could no longer access my library. Hundreds of dollars down the drain. Do I want to repeat the experience? Not one bit. So I buy eBooks, but I shop around. I’m far more likely to buy off Closed Circle or Book View Cafe or Smashswords than Amazon. Also, I resent the huge prices publishers are putting on multi-year-old-available-in-paperback eBooks. None of this is helping the big six publishers. I won’t be surprised if the biggest “publishers” 10 years down the road are Amazon and Apple.
One of the worst problems with Amazon and Apple is the lack of professional editing. Good editing is invisible to the consumer, but the absence of it is really readily visible, not just in typos, but in whole stretches of text that are redundant, or lack focus, or that contain ‘word salad’, ie, sentences that don’t make sense. And even Homer could have used an editor here and there. I’m waiting for the day when one of the honest-to-God editors establishes an on-line ‘house’ to help some of these young writers, who right now aren’t getting the kind of final polish and training they need. Editors don’t get no respect from the readers—but I fear they’re about to be missed, badly.
You might find this amusing. As a hobby someone has put up a tumblr just for the purpose of picking apart those horribly written (and I am talking the English language…though I’d debate the plot as well) vampire books titillating the kids these days. It is all in good humor, but her editor has some explaining to do. Just because it is a YA book doesn’t mean she can just ignore all the rules of writing.
http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/
Of course, “book” hasn’t meant “codex” for 4000 years. 2000 years ago it, a book was still a scroll. Sometime in the next thousand years the codex pretty much replaced the scroll. It looks like some form of ebook will now replace the codex as the medium of choice. I have mixed feelings about this. I love the convenience of my ebook reader, but I also love the feel of a well-made codex.
Alas, not all codices are well made. I have some Gnome Press books, from the late 1950s, that I should be afraid to reread. The pages of those books are more brittle than those of some pulp magazines that are a decade or more older.
Having worked in an archive I noticed that older books held up much better than newer books. We had stuff from the 1700s that looks almost new while stuff from the 1930s were pretty much turning to dust already. I know the whole acid free paper thing has solved some of those problems, but mass production means the majority of books now don’t have bindings to last the ages like the books of old and the paper still doesn’t compare. Not sure today’s books will be as good as preserving the material as we’ve come to expect out of old books. They just aren’t made the same. Thinking they’ll age the same and be some kind of Apocalypse proof material doesn’t seem true to my experience. Print/publishers have already failed to keep alive much of the scifi lit canon as it is and that is without a disaster related to it.
I can see paperbacks going away soon, but there will still be a lot of people nostalgic for the printed word. Perhaps book clubs and print on demand will take over the gap and produce hardback versions for those who simply must have them. Print on demand brings up the price point, but by then collecting printed books will be a hobby for eccentrics anyway so money won’t be an issue.
You aren’t kidding. Many’s the young writer who’s had his whole career ruined by a bad glue job at the printer’s. You have a book that sheds its cover on inspection, the book doesn’t sell, and Heaven help the writer whose book got that kind of treatment, because the bean counters upstairs just look at the number sold, not the number issued in damaged condition. Point out the error and they don’t give a damn. It’s just the numbers.
A good editor is a treasure. When I used to buy short story collections it was the editor’s name I followed rather than the writer because I trusted those editors to select and prepare stories I would enjoy reading
For the last several years a majority of the anthologies published in the US are through Martin H. Greenberg Assoc and their parent company. Greenberg anthologies are generaly pretty good quality,and seem to be well edited. They do not publish many new writers, as the old pulps did. The publishers believe it too hard to sell anything that is not from a known author, making it harder for new writers to enter the market. The pulps and literary magazines have pretty well dissapeared from book stores and news stands. Anthologies and now e-book/story sites, many of them by amatures, seem to be about the only market for newbies. The editing on many of these sites seem pretty minimal, if at any at all.
Of course, the ‘pulps’ are going ebook, too. Analog and most of the other stf magazines are available by subscription for your Kindle or as single, DRM-free issues from FictionWise.
Anyone else hear about Amazon Singles that will be rolling out soon? Looks interesting. My boss is writing something industry related for it, but it also could be good for short books or long stories. It would be nice if I could use it for jstor stuff since I no longer have a subscription through school and don’t have a strong enough interest to buy the actual printed journals, but would still love to read the essays on topics I follow. (adjusts nerd glasses)
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/10/amazon-aims-to-publish-shorter-content-as-kindle-singles.ars
With all of the bleeding in the publishing industry and, not coincidentally, the cluelessness of the house’s management, there must be or certainly will be highly competent editors on the street whose job opportunities are limited to say the least. I don’t see why the more well known and reputed amongst them couldn’t set up an on-line accreditation bureau/hiring hall or whatever perhaps with specialty certificates. if one assumes that the newspapers are at or above the median for grammar, there is a huge need out there just for people who can check grammar better than your average wordprocessing program. I doubt there’a anything generally available that can speak to word choice, voice, redundancy, redun…, continuity, clarity or unity; everything an author needs to know and is unlikely to perfect on his own or entirely through academia.
I somewhat feel like I’m from a developing country myself when reading this discussion: Amazon, for example, doesn’t even sell a german version of the Kindle (no Kindle store either), and there is no ebook reader at all amongst their top 100 best selling electronics products (just a lone tablet).
Although I’m an electronics geek with a corresponding circle of friends, I’ve seen just a handful of people with ebook readers until now (some more have a tablet PC which is occasionally used as reader).
Most people blame that poor proliferation on the controlled price for books (have to be sold at the price printed on the cover by the publisher, and there’s no exemption for ebooks – yet). We’ll see how the market develops when that barrier has fallen.
I have heard that the developing standard for most of Europe is e-Pub, which would make the Barnes and Noble NOOK or Sony reader the choice. I wonder what sort of thing is available. This is what Wiki turns up: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Where_to_Buy_eBook_Devices
I am reading on my iPhone, and ePub (with the Stanza software) is definitely my format of choice – – I particularly like the annotation function.