The End of Paper Books 669
Hugh Pickens writes "Books are on their way to extinction, writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. 'It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing an actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.' But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That way, if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. 'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization,' writes Kelly. 'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"
It'll be a sad day (Score:1, Interesting)
I've got books that are over a 100 years old and some have books hundreds of years old. Most of my files over ten years old are hard to access. Text files that are over 20 years old are very hard to read. Most of them are microsoft files and even Word can't read them. What are the odds of a file created toady being readable in a 100 years? There's this fantasy that the internet itself is perpetual but it may not exist in a hundred years. Files are easily lost, much easier than a book. One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books. If no one maintains a given book file it will cease to exist and no one will find it in a box in some one's attic 200 years from now. People will say maybe some one will burn a CD or DVD but few seem to realize those have a limited life. Few if any will be readable in a 100 years. Hard drives? I'm thrilled when they last 3 years let alone a 100. For digital books to survive they have to constantly have their files not only constantly backed up but the format updated. If eBooks take over and dead tree books vanish most of the books you know today will cease to exist. Like most things people will keep what is new and trendy and a frightening amount of human knowledge will pass. The end of paper books may be a bigger disaster than the loss of the library of Alexandria.
Re:digital book needs to be screen reader open (Score:4, Interesting)
The Right to Read (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
Richard Stallman's famous parable about the Right to Read, and what will happen if intellectual monopoly laws continue to grow:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org]
You can actually own paper books (Score:5, Interesting)
When you buy a book you own it and can re-read it as many times as you want. You can let your friends and family borrow it to read, or can even give it to someone else as a gift.
I hate to see books follow down the path that is being pushed for other media where you don't actually own a copy of the media but you simply rent or license it.
If a paper book ends up on some ban list it doesn't get revoked. Who needs the firemen from Fahrenheit 451 when you can simple push a button and automatically remove a copy of an e-book off of all digital reader devices.
Re:It'll be a sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
. One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books.
One fire can wipe out all your books. And they provide pretty good fuel for the fire too.
A little harder to catch that USB drive on fire.
Can you fit those 100's of books into one firesafe?
Why would you have a flammable object not protected by a firesafe?
That's almost like having $500,000 in BC laying around in a file on your computer.
Wait... what?
-AI
Re:Uhm... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is mostly the case now. Every modern physical ebook reader (Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc) supports EPUB with the sole exception of Kindle. Either Amazon will eventually bow to standards, or the Kindle will ultimately become irrelevant. Format changes have happened before. Barnes & Noble successfully switch from PDB to EPUB. Amazon could do it, if they wanted to. Right now they're in a market position where they don't need to. Of course they're also very, very careful about always referring to their offering as "Kindle books" and never "ebooks". These are not intended to be generic ebooks readable on any reader. They're Kindle books, only readable on devices with Kindle software.
PDF is evil and needs to die as an ebook format. That's already happening, especially for narrative literature. The remaining hold-outs are technical books and designers stuck in a paper mindset. The former will change as the epub standard evolves. The latter will change simply with time, as the old guard retires or dies and are replaced with people who understand how to layout books digitally (if you want a corollary for this, look at the web -- it's been a very long time since professional web sites have had "Best viewed at 1024x768 in Internet Explorer" recommendations, because the old paper-based designers who wanted pixel-perfect control have retired or died, or finally evovled).
Custom apps are simply money grabs, and will die as generic readers become more widespread.
There's plenty of movement on this front. All of the major stores allow publishers to sell their books without DRM. The old-guard publishers are the ones requiring DRM now, and they will eventually be forced to follow the example of the music industry. It's just a matter of time at thi point.
This is probably the biggest hurdle. The Gutenberg project produces high-quality epubs, but they can only handle copyright-free works. So long as there are luddite authors like J.K. Rowling who refuse to make their works available in ebook format, you will never be able to hit 100% coverage. But of course like all things, time will solve this one. In a generation or less, any author will find it unthinkable not to offer ebooks. Assuming they're even able to do so if they wanted.
Compared to what? But there are two ways to look at this one:
I agree, yet disagree. Ebooks still require editing, cover art, layout, marketing, etc. All you really get to save in the production area i
Re:New Books Maybe Old Books Never (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when I was 18 I dated this girl who read nothing but trashy romance novels. She read them by the box full.
On the other hand, a girl who read books on linear algebra wouldn't even notice your existence.
If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
Books are quite different from video. If you go watch a movie, what you see is what it is, literally. Not a bit more, not a bit less. You are fed the whole story; there is no gaps for your own imagination to fill. You consume, then the movie is over and it's out of your memory before you leave the theater.
On the other hand, a book may tell you that the forest was dark and spooky, but you have to use your own imagination, your own memories and your own fears to "color" that picture. One book can tell as many stories as many readers it has. The book doesn't walk you, like an infant, through every bit of the story.
There are other differences too. How many people watch a DVD in 10-15 minute increments? I think not many. But a book can be read this way; most fiction books are read like that.
Re:Libraries? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the public-good-costs-too-much tea partiers / fiscal conservatives will eventually shut down all the public libraries without Amazon or Apple's help.
They'll say, "Why should taxpayers who never use the library pay for it? If you want to read a book go to the local Barnes and Noble; they have a reading section. If anything the 'public' library is hurting this private business." Then later when all the Barnes and Noble stores close, they'll just point out that "if we needed access to paper books, the free-market would have kept B&N open."
And I think the Library of Congress falls into the "go to the zoo to see a lion" analogy for a physical book. Sure, they aren't going to close. But they no longer take a copy of every printed book. Their funding will be cut, too, and their outdated collections will simply become a research library. And it's not like important libraries have ever been accidentally burnt down [wikipedia.org].
Re:I'm okay with this (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a full standard (like Microsoft's .NET, only a subset of PDF is standardized). Flowable text requires manual intervention (tagging) that most PDF authors don't do, assuming they even put text in the PDF rather than just use images of text (the latter is all too common). Even when you do have proper flowable text, other elements don't flow nearly as well. You can't change font faces on the fly, or margins, or other layout functionality that should be user-controllable.
Epub, on the other hand, is a complete open standard, essentially being a subset of HTML and CSS in a ZIP container. It has its own flaws, such as lack of MathML support (complex equations will generally be represented by images), but for 99.999% of books it's a better solution.
More importantly, PDF vs. EPUB is more about doing layout the "old way" vs. the "new way". The old way is paper-centric, where designers have pixel-perfect control of every piece of the layout, down to kerning of the fonts if they wish. This is great when you know exactly how your content is going to be viewed (for example, it will always be printed on A4 paper). PDF represents magazines, paper flyers, paper books, desktop publishing, etc, or essentially the print world. EPUB, on the other hand, is built from web standards. It's designed on top of markup that was initially created to empower the end user. You get all the standard buzzwords, like separation of content and display, that you would if you were building a web page. For narrative books, it's pretty straightforward to make the swich from PDF (paper) to EPUB (digital). Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.
To look at it another way, back in the 90s when everybody was just starting to write web pages, a favorite method for graphic designers was to composite a layout in photoshop and then chop that up into multiple images laid out in a table (or worse, use image maps!), just as they would do if they were creating a magazine or flyer layout. Those sites were horrible. They wouldn't scale if you needed to change font sizes to make them readable, they wouldn't flow with the size of your browser ("Best viewed at 1024x768" my ass!), and they eventually broke once the box model was standardized and it turned out that Internet Explorer got it wrong (oops!). You don't see those kinds of sites today, web pages that attempt to replicate the exact look of a paper product, and the reason is obvious -- the web is not paper, and trying to force it into a paper design is painful for everybody. Ebooks are the way, and designers will learn sooner or later that they can't shoehorn their paper designs into an ebook and have it work.
Or a Publishers nightmare (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:New Books Maybe Old Books Never (Score:4, Interesting)
This trend (and the trend of observing it) is older than 20 years. There was a book published in 1963 by Richard Hofstadter entitled, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." He traces anti-intellectualism back to before the revolutionary war. He argues that the Evangelical movement rebelled against the more scholarly traditions of the Puritans and the Catholics, resulting in a faith-based preference for feeling and intuition over scholarship. Politics have emphasized this divide, promoting tension between populism and intellectualism.