Will the e-Reader replace paper books?

There is no way e-books will outplace or replace physical books. I'll die a happy man if that never happens.

 

I disagree eyexforyou. See though the medium is a little more expensive in general right now it is easier in some regards and once made would cut down cost by a lot.

So lets follow the process here, Plastics are made form soy, which is a crop that can be grown over and over again. One e-reader may last between 3-5 years, however it can contain up to as many if not more then a 1,000 books in it. Now those thousand books never get paper printed per person, that saves 1,000 books to be made per person who uses the E-reader. That saves trees, slows deforestation and in general is not a bad thing.

Now books (Remember I like books and don't want to see them go.) The process of creating a book itself starts with chopping down several trees, that are then milled using fossil fuel and water into paper. The paper is then cut and shapped into the right shape. Then the publisher applies ink, which itself is a different process. The ink sets, then the book is bound using different types of material but lets assume it cardstock or cardboard. More trees yet again. Then there is a limited run of this book made, 10,000 copies lets say. These books will only last 3-5 years if read frequently. However this is only one book not thousands.

SO I do know that eletricty does currently use fossil fuel but there alternatives to this and so the same can be said for the book publishing process.

Now imaging this you go to a library who has purchased a limited amount of books and you have to wait for weeks to be able to read it as someone else has already checked it out. Now we come in with our e-reader and we are allowed access to the server, the books are designed with software that makes you have to renew the books or remove/return them when you are finished. This allows an unlimted amount of books to be stored on a library server and more people to read. Allow for harder to come by hardbound books and reference material that requires a longer or more drawn approach to studying to be kept in the library itself, more physical actives and such at the library. Personal i think that wont happen for a long time but it would be cool.

I hope that books can co-exist but I think that paper-back are for sure doomed.

 

WickedStorm, you're thinking in terms of buyers and demand. If you think in terms of supply, do you honestly think publishers wants bookstores to disappear and readers to download e-books in cyberspace. They need physical commodity to make money. E-books will never replace traditional paperback cause it's just not wise investment sense.

 

I think e-book readers will continue to gain popularity, but not for the next 10-15 years. Paper books will continue to co-exist alongside e-book readers, at the same level of popularity as CD’s and records co-exist with mp3’s and digital music and DVD’s co-exist with digital downloads and Blu-Ray. My reasons for thinking this:

• People are fond of the analogy paper book:e-book::CD:mp3, but this doesn’t quite hold up as a proper analogy. It wasn’t the mp3 or digital music that revolutionized music, it was the iTunes store, and it was for one reason: you didn’t have to buy your own music again. It was easy to digitize what you already owned, and seamlessly go from buying music in a physical store to a digital one, without any major change to how you listened to music. At this point in time, there’s no service that would allow me to digitize my impressive book collection; I’d have to re-purchase all of those books to read them on an e-reader, and that’s not taking into consideration that some of those books may not have digital copies of them. The e-book reader and e-book market is literally built for the next generation of readers; they serve little to no purpose for people with a lot of physical books that they enjoy reading.
  
• It’s an underappreciated thought (especially considering that it does absolutely nothing for the market and everything for the consumer), but there’s no way to sell a “used” e-book and buy “used” e-books at a cheaper price; this is one of the major sells to paper books: if you don’t want to buy a fresh copy, you can get a used copy for a cheaper price at the cost of the quality of the book itself. A lot of used bookstores are still around, and while not as popular as bigger bookstore chains, still hold a lot of market weight. The books are already cheap enough, and if one of these used bookstores goes out of business and must sell everything, it’s an easy task for them, and there’s also no way to digitize these books.
  
• There’s currently no way to “buy both”. When buying a paper book, you get the paper book only. When buying an e-book, you get the e-book only. This doesn’t seem like an important point, but when new record players can record the sound of the record into an mp3 format, and most if not all new DVD’s come with digital downloads as standard, it makes for a pretty lousy selling point for a company to tell its audience of consumers that there’s no interchangeability in what it produces in an age when interchangeability and always having access to your information is nearly mandatory by consumers.
  
• Most e-book readers themselves lack purpose. Most e-book readers are actually apps on smaller tablets, which have a array of features. Dedicated e-book readers, readers that do very little else than store digital books and have internet access to online book stores, still exist, but they’re few in number. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but since dedicated e-book readers have less capabilities, they’re more lightweight and easy to carry, as opposed to tablets which weigh more and may be more cumbersome to hold due to necessary hardware to make it work.
  
• Besides straight profit, e-books and e-book readers offer very little to the authors and creators of the books being read by the devices. Book tours quickly become pointless, extra material to include towards the end of the book, such as interviews with the author or related material to help reading or catch interest isn’t included (most of the time), and the author now has to worry about two formats for an editor to edit correctly. On the other hand,
  
• E-book readers offer a phenomenal opportunity for authors to create interactive material, bonus or otherwise, to go along with their books. Imagine reading the Harry Potter series again with all of the bonus content of Pottermore within it to enhance the reading experience. Sadly, this opportunity is being overlooked as of now, though this may change within the next 3-4 years as we begin to see new authors take advantage of this new creative medium.

As it stands now, e-book readers are more cumbersome than anything. They haven’t offered the opportunities and ease of transfer as other technologies have, so they’re still behind. It’s the reason why, if you ask any owner of an e-book reader, will still tell you that they’ll keep their physical books and read them over their e-book reader. They’ve yet to find a purpose for their own device, and realize that their paper books are still unique and incapable of being digitized, thus still have merit to being owned.

 

One thing I saw (either here or on another forum) was Amazon stating that ebooks were not sold, but 'rented' - and they can erase the things from a person's e-reader for a variety of reasons. Anyone else know anything about this?

 

The MP3 has all but wiped out CDs. With the popularity of the iPod and most new cars sporting jacks that support these players, there is no real need for a CD.

Yet, I know at least three people who collect vinyls. On paper, records are obsolete. In practice, they possess a special something that cannot be found in digital format.

When I was a kid, I fell down a flight of stairs. The reason? I had around 30 pounds of text books strapped to my pre-teen back. Out of each book, I needed no more than 10 pages to accomplish my homework assignment. An ebook reader would have been a more economical way to transport that information. It also would have spared me the tumble.

Ebooks represent a choice for readers. Books will always find a home because people like me love having them in the house. But, I now have a choice I didn't have before. I can load my kindle or my ipad with books to take on the road. I can buy a $4 kindle book that I likely would have passed up if the $18 paperback was the only way to go. I like that I bought four new books last week and I don't have to reshuffle my bookshelf. But I also love that I went to a penguin warehouse sale and bought thirty new books dirt cheap.

Will ebooks become even more popular? Probably. But will they completely replace books? I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.

 

I really do hope e-readers replace all the textbooks students have to carry around. However, as of right now, electronic versions of textbooks are still really expensive.

Another thing to consider is that some classes have open book exams, and a device that can access the internet or other sources stored on the device probably isn't going to be popular with professors.

 

Open book exams are effective because they test understanding as opposed to looking up facts. If you don't understand the subject matter, unlimited access to facts won't get you the answer, especially within the time limits of the test. If you do understand the subject, it's not important to memorize reams of trivial facts.

The only professors who will be unhappy are those who only know how to teach by rote memorization exercises.

 

The last open book exam I had was on Medieval Epistemology. No search feature in the world is going to help you to understand Avicenna's proof for the existence of God within the forty minute time frame.

Well, maybe it could. You just wouldn't have time to answer any of the other questions.

 

I can easily do a Google search on pretty much any question asked on an exam and find an answer. At the very least, I can find a hint or way to get started. For math, there are online calculators that show each and every step required to get the final answer. You'd be surprised how many answer keys and solution manuals are posted online and are available for free.

A quick Google search will easily give me the answer. I may have to put the answer into my own words, but it still requires very little effort on my part (and definitely doesn't take forty minutes).

There's a reason why professors will allow textbooks/notes during tests but not laptops or other electronic devices.

 

Why can't they co-exist? As was said in the thread about photography, just because we now have ways to condense a vast library of books into a small machine doesn't mean it's the end of paper books. It can help add to our libraries. What we can't find in the bookstores, we can find in our e-books, and vise versa.

I mean, we still use desktop computers despite now having a plethora of laptops (which are much easier to carry around.)

 

I understand the benefit of an eReader. Sure, I suppose having a portable library at your fingertips that can be updated from home is a pretty nifty idea and undoubtedly convenient. But, in my opinion an electronic device simply cannot replace the pleasure of "flipping through pages" as you stated, or having shelves filled with tangible novels. I've always wanted an in-home library, and somehow a Kindle on a pedestal in the center of the room doesn't quite have the same effect. You can't have first edition collectibles or signatured titles in eBook form, and some titles merely do not have electronic versions. On the subject of libraries, I've always found pleasure in wondering through aisles and aisles of shelves, discovering new titles...If at some point everything was converted to be e-friendly, I would no longer be able to experience that joy as I derive no pleasure from scrolling through lists online. It's just tedious.

I suppose I'm a very tactile person as I just prefer having something I can touch. Even with games I'd rather have separate consoles and actual disks/cartridges rather than downloading and playing everything on my computer. Or maybe I'm just traditional...

 

If you have electronics, you don't need to understand the material to get a good grade. You just copy. Answers that other people have written can easily be reworded. And I'm not even sure teachers/professors want to spend the extra time checking to see if an answer is plagiarized.

My friend is a physics major, and he once had a test that was open everything. He said that the questions were so unique and difficult that having access to the internet didn't help anyone at all. Most of his classes, however, did not allow electronics because the answer to a math or physics problem can easily be looked up. Like I said before, there are programs that will show all the steps required in solving a math problem, which defeats the purpose of understanding the material.

Aside from the cost, I like the idea of an e-reader replacing textbooks. But at this point, I think a lot of schools are going to be against bringing them to open-book exams.

 

From your last post, I got the impression that you were against e-readers only because of the plagiarism issue.

 

Apologies if I repeat anything already said here, as I haven't read through the entire thread.

I think the basic mass market paperback will die a death, slowly or otherwise, as it will be far more effective to have digital distribution for stories in that format. For those who still want a paperback, the larger trade formats will become the norm, but in smaller quantities and therefore more expensive. The larger format books, particularly of the coffee table variety, and graphic novels and the like, will remain as no practical e-reading device could possibly hope to cover their detail levels and format variations. The chain store bookshops will probably close unless they diversify (see what's happening to HMV in the UK for what happens when media starts to become digital). Independent book stores might survive better as they can specialize in larger format and secondhand books, which will probably always remain viable in some way (like the LP).

I believe the key factor in the death of the mass-market paperback will be the switch from the few large publishers to a direct author sale pattern. Not self-publishing necessarily, but something like it, maybe an AuthorHouse style of publishing.

Now, sit back and wait for all my 'predictions' to fail and for the future to come out completely differently!

 

The beauty of the new age is they don't have to because they'll be dead and their kids will grow up familiar with this technology.

My brother teaches high school and he says his students have no concept of buying albums. They're used to downloading the songs they want and only the songs they want. So it will be with e-readers and tablets.

 

If I recall, we were supposed to turn into a paperless society quite a while ago. Anybody else remember those predictions?

 

My coworker and I actually had this discussion the other day at work. He is quite fond of his Kindle Fire and I made the comment that I can't imagine not having my piles and piles of physical books with me. The concept of having literature on a digital device is nice but I prefer the feel and smell of a tangible book as opposed to having a tablet that will store them all for me. I'm rather old-fashioned in that respect.

I loaned a book to a coworker about a week ago and I think it was more gratifying to actually bring him a physical copy as opposed to telling him to go download an e-book copy. Besides that, it's my leatherbound copy of Gregory Maguire's "Wicked"- a beautifully bound copy indeed. I was quite proud to loan it out.