I don't know, so that when the lights go out, they have access to the information in a form that doesn't require fancy technology or any form of energy to view it? Computers, e-readers, Kindles, they have very limited redundancies. Right now I can't do mapping because my computer is suffering serious BSOD issues, even in Photoshop - makes fancy Adobe and graphics tablets somewhat pointless in the grand scheme of things when I can always whip out a piece of paper and pen or pencil and get cracking any day of the week, but my computer has to be working for me to do anything constructive. Also, he definitely speaks for me (I'm only 26). I won't have anything to do with Kindles or anything else of that nature. I prefer the real deal, something tangible. Book cases can look amazing with all those titles arranged neatly. A collection built up over years, something to be proud of.
Digital is the perfect platform to replace paperback books, especially those cheap romantic novels at the airport. However, anything other than mainstream paperbacks is simply more beautiful in its physical form. Can you replace photo books or limitied editions with digitial versions? Technically it's possible, but they can never reproduce the wonderful tangible experience. Convenience is certainly a valid point, but the dimishment of its cultural and artistic value is, in my opinion, a high price to pay. Would you want replace the Mona Lisa with a digital reproduction? The same goes for certain books. A touchscreen or an ebook reader is simply not a beatiful thing.
Originally Posted by jannert Not easy to wrap your fish supper or keep the cat litter off the floor with a Kindle... but I suppose our household robot will do all that. I do hope the robot appears before the newspaper dies, though. I was actually joking here...
The real deal?... It's completely backward minded to think that digital content does not actually exist. It is this subconscious mindset that people in two or three generations simply won't have. I own about 80 books, most non-fiction, probably fifteen or twenty novels. I use my local library when I want a new novel and even before my ipad broke I didn't use it read books. I much prefer reading a print-novel than I do using a e-reader, but that doesn't mean I'm going stick my head in the sand and claim they're going to last. I'm twenty five and I prefer the real real deal, so I only consume literature if it's been hand written by 8th century monks.
Here's a couple of relevant links... (They're from 2011 and growth in downloads has slowed since then, but this is just from a very quick search. There's some interesting numbers...) http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/15/e-book-sales-triple-year-over-year-paper-books-decline-in-every/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/19/amazon-waterstones-ebook-sales
I don't think digital content doesn't exist, but I do think it's extremely naive to assume the printed form isn't going to last. I'm not putting my head into the sand at all. E-readers and Kindles simply lack the redundancies that the printed form has, and that is a hard fact. They are not as versatile because they rely on being in working order to an extreme degree to be of any use, and they require being juiced up. You don't need to plug a book in to read it, and there isn't any chip or wire to go to ruin your whole weekend (or week) of reading because you won't be able to get it repaired or replaced. It may be my current (and lasting) woes with computers making me somewhat touchy on that subject, but it has completely stalled my cartography work for over a week now...when something digital breaks, it really does break! There's also the issue of Steam when it comes to games, and how games going completely digital without any disc and relying on an internet connection to activate has caused a great deal of resentment. It's not as simple as digital = better. I just hope society isn't going to an either/or mindset on the issue of printed and digital books, and it is up to people with common sense to stop it from going to such an extreme. I volunteer at an archives, and there are all sorts of redundancies in the catalogue system and the actual items held. Transcriptions of parish registers (both on computer and printed out), microfilm copies of them and the actual registers - this is vital. If no one can access the computer-based cataloguing system, we have printed catalogues so we know which item is which, and for the photographs I have been working on we now know what each particular photo is about without having to access the computers. Redundancies are vital, and it'd be completely silly to have every copy of some of the most famous books as digital copies - once the electricity goes out, that's the end of that! You do need to use acid-free paper, though, for this purpose. There will always have to be physical copies to some degree, and given the sentimentality attached to certain items, including favourite books, there will always be a demand. Maybe it'll be largely print-on-demand, and bookstores will have display copies where you then order either a digital version or the real thing (let's hope patience exists in the future), but there will always be a need for them. What does tend to annoy me a lot is how some people (not you specifically) think digital books will take over very quickly. This is a self-centered mindset most likely to come from people living in first world countries, or in very priviledged areas. There are billions of people out there who will remain reliant on the printed form for some time to come, there is a world outside of Europe and the USA.
Errrgh, drop a book in a pond, or put it near extreme heat and see how readable it becomes. Also, an e-reader doesn't have to be in "extreme" working order to be usable (what is extreme working order anyway? Something either works or doesn't I would think). My ipad's screen is smashed to bits and if I really wanted to I could read on it. Shred the pages of a book and see how that goes. What exactly do you mean by lack redundancies? By my understanding of the word, lacking a redundancy doesn't really make sense, and if it did, it would be a good thing... So if a kindle lacks the redundancy of a book, it implies that books are redundant? Except there wont always be demand. Inevitably people will not have sentimentality because kids won't give a rats about how they consume a book. You seem to have forgotten that we are mortal (At the moment), and when we die, other will take our place. Others who were raised with tablets in their classrooms, tablets at home, tablets at work. They will attach less sentimentality to it than we will, and then their kids, even less. this cycle will repeat, and repeat again until books are only printed for the sake of posterity. This is a cold truth. Just look at clocks.
Except those are very deliberate actions with books. You have to go out of your way to damage them like that. Redundancy in this instance means backup. If a system has redundancies, it means it has something it can fall back on in the instance of some sort of error. Therefore, at the archives there are various redundancies (including the computer database and all other computer-based files being backed-up remotely and stored off-site) ensuring that if the worst comes the worst, it isn't all completely gone. I have scanned probably ~3,000 photos, so there are both printed and digital copies of them. If the computers go, we can still access the printed catalogues for them. If the archives burnt down, we'd still have a great deal stored in the database and various Word/Excel documents (although there's just too much to do that with). Also, we can engender an attachment to the physical form of books. That not everything has to be digital, that it's okay to have items of a physical nature. Then there's art - there's no way in anybody's eternal damnation that art will go completely digital since it can lose so much by being limited to a computer screen (although the discussion is about books). I believe future generations will have some appreciation for the physical form of art, and this will likely extend to books. They will be collector's items, possibly even actually art in their own right. The Lord of the Rings (for instance) won't be printed like it is now, it'll be all fantastic and artistic, with unique letter writing, illustrations, etc. A few books these days have amazing illustrations. Perhaps books will go largely digital for convenience (although, again, very long time away unless we want to completely shut out billions of people who aren't so priviledged), but there'll also be a market for the art of books, books that make ours pale by comparison.
Your a lucky man if you've never had a book fall out of your bag on a rainy day. Water damage in storage, house fires, etc... Art is incomparable to literature. Very few books are a work of art, while all art (no matter how stupid it is) is art. I vaguely remember someone saying in this thread that future-books will be books for the sake of being a book. So typography, formatting, cover design, paper selection, everything will be done to the point of being beautiful. Its purpose will not only be to convey a story and ideas, but be a piece of art in itself. Most books look like shit, and would lose absolutely nothing by being purely digital. If anything, they'd be easier to read.
At the current point in time, a lot of books would lose everything by being purely digital. There is a whole world out there that cannot and does not rely on technology. I live in a very priviledged part of the world, and it's very easy to forget that things as common as mobile phones really aren't all that common (and they aren't all that reliable either...plenty of times, even in my house, no signal).
Apparently 75% of the world own a mobile phone. I'm pretty surprised by that figure, but that would make them quite common. Regardless, advancement has never waited for the poor. They catch up. Cold or not, publishers don't print for the third world. Not to mention the people you are referring to probably can't afford books, and have appalling literacy. The title of the thread is will books ever go fully digital, so if your point is that developing countries will hold books back from becoming digital, it's a weak point. If it goes fully digital in the west, developing countries will follow.
Well, if books become art in their own right, then books won't ever go fully digital since there would still be books that aren't digital. Plus archives and all that. I hope writing in its physical form itself doesn't become an alien concept, but I doubt it will since a pen and pad of paper is so easy to use in the blink of an eye, any information can be put into digital form later when it is more convenient (plus it's a form of drawing, an art itself that we see epitomised in caligraphy and Kanji, etc).
Hopefully it's when and not just if...but then, that'd be a sad society that cannot appreciate the art of books (and if you take a look at, e.g. Pixar's non-fiction 'Art Of' books, you'll see what I mean by current printed books that are great art in their own right, not to mention the Animator's Survival Kit) but can somehow appreciate the Turner Prize... Art is never novelty, and those books won't be novelty either. They'll be some serious business. Just look at MP3s - they haven't replaced CDs, since you can rip a CD (referring to the legal conversion of tracks on your purchased CDs so you can listen to them on your MP3 player, etc). CDs come with special booklets, etc, and you really cannot beat those with a digital version. The smell of the booklets, the art inside... It's all of the extras you don't get on a computer screen that make it worth it. DVDs won't be replaced entirely, though possibly the physical medium itself will evolve. Games will always have collector's editions, and the amount of money people fork out for those when there are digital versions, sheesh! So too will books have collector's editions (hardbacks probably count towards that), and it won't be any novelty. I do think there's a whole can of worms to be opened on books going completely digital, since Steam opened the same can of worms on games. Will it be that one day you will require an internet connection to get any books at all? To read them? If corporations can make anything complicated and a headache, it's digital distribution! They'll love coming up with ways to make people pay extra to read, it's just the way large companies go. Did I also mention there will be printed documents for a long time because of theatre?* The programmes won't be all digital. People love something to remember a great night by, something tangible. *I did not
It may or it may not. Only time will tell, whether that may be 10 years or 30, 50 years. Personally speaking, I've never read a book on a Kindle. I see the convenience of it, I really do, it's fab that you can download lots of book onto it, but I love holding a book, the thickness, turning pages, the beautiful shiny colourful covers, some part on some covers are embossed too! Looking back at your collection through the years on that self, you feel proud how many books you have and read, still collecting too!
I may sound crazy but i think i overdo my examples quite a bit. I'm highly against technology taking over physical and another thing that Kindles and e-books cause is the strain on the eyes from staring at the screen too long- enough of that and you'll go blind. With physical books you just get sleepy
While I love physical books and do not want them to fade completely into history, it's incorrect to say that a Kindle's screen causes eyestrain. The screen is not backlit - it's a relatively new technology that allows for a reasonably high-contrast display using ambient (reflected) light. There is no flicker. It's no harder on the eyes than the page of your favorite paperback. You won't go any blinder reading a Kindle than you would reading a physical book.
To add to what minstrel said, the kindle and nook are e-ink, which is like an electronic version of an etch-a-sketch. Some people think the kindle uses an LCD screen like an iPad (well, the tablet versions like the Kindle Fire do), and these would harm your eyes like a computer screen, but the kindle and nook and other e-ink devices are, as minstrel said, just like reading a book. To confuse things, the latest generation of the kindle and nook are "backlit," but this is more like a backlight to a watch, and not an LCD screen, so I'm pretty sure it still isn't bad for you. If it is, it's not as bad as an iPad.
Digital publishing is going through an earthquake, right now. Don't make a prediction on what it is now, because it is not an evolution of the transfer of knowledge and opinion, it is a revolution.
A few stats for you, though they're UK only (and this is what I do for a living, so I can say with a great deal of confidence that these stats are reliable): In 2010, 3% of the entire UK population used an ereader. In 2012, 17% of the entire UK population used an ereader. The UK ebook market rose by 89% year on year in 1H12. I haven't even mentioned tablets here, which also double up as ereader devices. But, the general trend is for a huge uplift in "digital reading." Now I'm not in the business of making predictions, so I won't. However, there's definitely a step change occurring here. If I were to use a different market as an analogy, I'd probably point to tablet use versus desktop PC/laptop use. In short, tablets are having a massively disruptive effect on PC use -- indeed, they are beginning to be taken up as replacement devices. The reason? Tablets are cheaper and more mobile, yet they still fulfill most of the functions that your everyday average Joe would want on a daily basis. Similarly, ebooks are usually cheaper than their physical cousins and essentially are more mobile (in terms of carrying around your "library" of physical books). A parallel could be drawn, perhaps? But my personal opinion? So long as there are people around like me who like the feel, the smell, the experience of a physical book, then digital will never fully take over.
Here's my take on the issue. A Writer's View of the Future It’s Not Your Father’s Library An advantage to such predictions is that they can be neither substantially attacked except by saying, "won't happen," nor effectively defended except to say, "just wait." And they assume that the earth won't stop turning (a likely assumtion) and that no new technology will emerge to profoundly change how things are done (an unlikely assumption).
Interesting reading, Al. Certainly a good point about the cloud. One other issue that relates to piracy and user reluctance, though, is privacy/trust. How many people will be truly comfortable placing their "stuff" (including ebooks) in the cloud? For a while, at least, I suspect the number will remain quite low. After all, with many big players in the digital world regularly falling foul of privacy laws and mining data without permission, why should we have confidence in the cloud? However, I think you're right in your overall assertions; possibly just a little aggressive in your timescales
We already have confidence in the cloud. That's where your personal archives are maintained. If your e-reader takes a dive, your commercially obtained e-books are all still available. About my aggressive timeline? "Just wait."
