Will Books ever be "a thing of the past"?

[Sampiro]

I'm a librarian (and gay*) and this question comes up a good bit at conferences, came up frequently in grad school, gets addressed in article after article, and the prevailing sentiment tends to be "Absolutely not... books will always be here". I'm not so sure- in fact if I had to bet the retirement fund and the dog on it, I'd go with "they'll be virtually extinct by the time I'm an old man" (I'm 38 now [not one word, thou under-25 Dopers]).

I love the tactile of a book. When doing in-depth research I love the serendipity factor of books: more often than not I'd start out researching topic A, change it to A.1 due to something I read in passing while researching the original topic, move it to B while reading through a section of the book that had nothing to do with the exact topic I was researching (e.g. I'm researching the building of the Hagia Sophia but happen to come across a section on the Fourth Crusade in the same book, which leads me to a book on Venice which leads me to Thomas Mann, etc.) and end up writing a paper on topic K.7. Tactile and serendipity just don't really work so well with electronic sources.

BUT, I also grew up without electronic resources. I was in my 20s before I ever used a database, 30 before I ever used the Internet, etc.. The generation that is now in college (not to get all Beloit (http://www.beloit.edu/%7Epubaff/mindset/2007.htm) here) have been using computers since elementary school, most of them grew up with 100 channels vying for their attention span, have been loading CD ROMs and surfing the net for longer than I've had cable, etc.. For most of them it takes an act of Congress and a cocked Luger to get them to pick up a book in the library when the full-text databases are so convenient and current (and they can access them immediately and from home- they don't have to go upstairs to the stacks or, God forbid, order them through Interlibrary Loan) and when they do use a hard copy they often as not tend to go to exact articles or index entries and ignore the rest. (Admittedly I don't work at Harvard but at a large state school where the kids range from brilliant to slightly-dummer-than-a-snail with most being in-betwen, but it's been true at all the colleges where I've worked.) I've heard young 20 somethings admit "I graduted college with a B average and never checked out a book until my last semester" or other horrifying confessions.

I am specifically a GovDocs librarian and the Federal Government has already massively reduced the amount of print information it distributes. They have announced that they will distribute the vast majority of their publications in electronic format only by October 2005 ("October 2005" admittedly being the Federalese term for "November 2012", but still...). I can easily see non Federal core titles going the same way. (Hell, I would much rather use the online versions of Britannica or Books-in-Print or other core reference titles than the print version anyday, and I'll use google rather than a print index anyday of the week to find "blip" information.)

One bright hope for print: every college I've worked at had access to 10,000s of full-text electronic books but invariably students avoided them like they were fat-free mayonaisse, opting for the hard-copy whenever it was available (I even convinced a few to wait for the ILL when it wasn't), but I think this will change when it becomes a lot cheaper and easier to load onto a PDA.

My belief: in a few years when PDAs are a lot cheaper (so cheap that if lost or stolen it's not a really major financial loss) and inexpensive technology is available that prevents copyrighted books from being electronically reproduced cheaper than buying the download rights (basically, when The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy™ or something like it exists), and generations younger than the Internet begin to enter colleges and the job market, print will begin to hemmorhage. By the time I'm what's now retirement age I doubt there will be anything like a Barnes & Noble megastore for print.

But there are those who would argue with me that books may decrease but will always be a major presence in information dissemination. I'm eager to read other Dopers' thoughts: if we live to be nonagenarians, do you think we'll see a world without print? (If you're college age or under, please say so as it may make a difference in your viewpoint.)



*That part's not really relevant, but I don't seem to have ever posted in a thread where it didn't come up somewhere so I figured I'd go ahead and get it out of the way.

[Campion]

I think books will still be around when we're old and grey. (Or older and greyer.) For the record, I'm 34 and a lawyer, so books and electronic information are critical to me. I went to college at a time when the internet was a "fad," according to some, and personal computers were somewhat exotic. In the years since then, there's been a sea change.

When I started in law school, we were "forbidden" to research using online resources (Lexis and Westlaw, essentially) for our first semester. There were good reasons for this; researching solely in the books can take far longer than it should, while researching solely online can lead one to miss things. We needed to know how to use both methods, so that we could decide on a case-by-case basis which method to use.

For example, one thing we need to be able to do as lawyers is to tell if a case is still good law. This requires one to, basically, look at every case that cites your case to see if that point of law has been overruled. In books, that can take forever (and since cases are decided daily while the books are only updated once a month, you can still miss things). Online, I click one button, and it lists all cases that cite my case. I click on a citation, and it takes me directly to the page and line where my case is cited. I can therefore shepardize (or keycite, depending on whose brand we're talking about) a case in a fraction of the time online that it would take in the books.

By contrast, research in a practice guide is more fluid. I may not know precisely what I'm looking for, so I'll page through the guide looking for something to catch my eye. You simply can't do that online. And if your online search uses the wrong phrase (you search for "motion" instead of "application," for example), you could miss the relevant law.

But cost is an issue. Maintaining a library of books, some of which may be used once a year or even less frequently, is more expensive than permitting access to an online source. So I think you'll find that law firms, which used to have massive on-site libraries, will be scaling down the number of books that they have in favor of online research. But there will always be a core set of book that they'll keep.

So, for my profession, I don't think books will go away any time soon. And, personally, I agree that the tactile sensation of a book in my hands, the smell and feel of the paper, can't be replaced.

[Sampiro]

Hijacking my own thread a bit, but do you mind if I ask how much you're charged for online legal database services?

At one time (this was years ago) a friend who was then a lawyer was telling me about the gouge&screw prices of legal databases; the same database provided free of charge to a law student was some just absolutely ungodly amount to a lawyer (something like several dollars per minute, which for an in-depth search adds up very quickly). I was wondering if that's receded any. (There was a bit of a scandal in Montgomery AL at that time of law-firms [especially mom & pop & Jr. type operations or those that dealt with small cases in strip mall offices] hiring law students to "intern" for $10 per hour and having them do research on the databases they had free access to [which offset the cost of paying the student by several times]).

[Si Amigo]

I'm a middle aged male, not gay, but tolerate (just thought I'd throw that in there :) ) And no, can't imagine not taking a book to the beach, in bed, on the bus/train or where ever . . . Books are cool, private and don't require power to operate . . . just the thing you want in your hammock near the beach, next to your SO, or any place you want to get away from it all. Books are cool. ;) And I'd kick any bodies arsh who . . . welll, you get my point. :D

[rjung]

Pencils and pens are still around, despite the availability of high-tech alternatives. No reason books can't occupy a similar niche.

Advantages of a book over a PDA/eBook/whatever:

Never needs battery/charging/to be plugged in
Reader can (nearly) instantly jump to an arbitrary place in the book
Works under any lighting conditions, short of total darkness
More durable than an electronic gadget
Requires no investment in hardware/software to read

[Izzardesque]

I can only say that I sincerely hope not.
I am a true bibliophile. ALthough for work, I probably use the internet a lot for research rather than books, I own a HUGE collection of print books both fiction and non-fiction. They are practically taking over my house. But I wouldn't have it any other way. There is just something so much more there about real books!

[Sage Rat]

I've been using computers since I was three or four (I am now 26) as my family was in the industry.

So, for instance, I never could get the hang of paper mail, checks, bills, and such--striking me as horribly cumbersome and pointless. However, books are good.

The only way I see anything overtaking a book is if someone invents a portable electronic reader that:

1) Is rubbery in texture (like a rubber mat) and quite indestructible
2) Can be written on with a stylus
3) Waterproof
4) Very extreme pixel count and zero flicker
5) Of course, full color
6) There are central hard drives by the publisher that you are registered with, as are the books you own. With your book-viewers you can select which book of those you own you wish to see and it will download and appear
7) Similarly, there would be an electronic library hard drive with free books

I imagine books would still be sold. But for work, you would just have three or four viewers that you could bring up your various reference material on and lay on your lap.

[Khadaji]

IMO no. In 2000 I worked for a startup called Everybook that was trying to make a 2-screened eBook. I am a geek and a reader - you would think the target market - and I just wasn't interested. I enjoy my books. As you might have guessed, the company failed.

[CalMeacham]

I think books will still be around. On the other hand, I think most, if not all, professional journals will be electronic, and you'll need to get yourself associated with a good library if you want to do research in the future. I find that sad -- it's starting to cost money for what you could do a few years ago for free.

But it's mostly done now -- try and find recent copies of things like the Science Citation Index or Physics Abstracts. In a lot of libraries these have gone elerctronic (which makes it not only cheaper and less space-occupying, but a hell of a lot easier to search). These electronic indices are connected to journals that are increasingly only electronic (again, with the staggering increase in the number of journals -- JOSA split into JOSA A and JOSA B, for instance, each of which has become much thicker since they started). A lot ofhjournals became electronic in order to provide a rapid conduit for results. "Letters" journals used to serve this function, but now, for instancee, "Optics Letters" has bexcome snail-slow relatuive to the electronics Optics Express.



But as long as people like the feel of books, and the low-tech ability to take them to the beach without worrying about getting sand in the works, or getting the Reader stepped on, or lost, or running out of battery power, I think we're still gonna have low-tech printed books.

Heck, the Status of having a printed work alone will keep it afloat -- anyone can get a book or article printed online or electronically. But to have a company actually print your work in hardcover stock means that it made it past the battery of reviewing processes, and that someone in the publishing hierarchy thought it good enough or important enough to rate the effort in time and materials to get it printed.

[chrisk]

This reminds me of a funny Asimov story where two scientists get the Nobel prize for re-inventing the 'book' after it had been lost so long that no-one even remembered it had been around before. (It also included someone re-inventing the 'match' similarly after self-igniting cigarettes had been the norm for a long time. "This way, there's no risk of putting the ignition tip to your mouth and burning your lips!!")

Personally, I found it very unlikely that the 'film reader' technology he described in that story would ever catch on sufficiently to be universal... you had to put your face into the projector assembly to read anything, for gosh sakes!!

[CalMeacham]

Incidentally, bringing science fiction into it, several authors were writing about very internet-like things well in advance of the internet. H.G. Wells was the first, apparently. (I don't recall the story, but Martion Gardner mentions it in one of his columns), where people could call into a central information bank.

M<ore famously, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe is eerily prescient about the Internet. Every household has a "logic", whi has a keyboard and screen, and you can use it to look stuff up and buy tickets and so on. They're all artificially intelligent, and the problem starts when one "wakes up" and overdes its "censorship circuits" (I love that he considered these an essential part of the device. This story was written in the mid-1940s, although not published until 1948 or so) People start getting recipes for poison and building plans for banks and kids start downloading porn -- exactly the ills of our current, censorship-less system.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote some stories involving an internet-like entity, but I think by then DARPANET already existed, so it's not that impressive an accomplishment.

[kingpengvin]

No electronic form of book will ever substitute when it comes to reading to my boys at night. Those big old hard spinned kids books are usually large enough for me to hold both ends and have my arms around the little guys at the same time.

'nuff said.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime, but I do expect it to happen eventually. Books will go the ways of scrolls; pens will go the ways of quills. But it'll require tremendous leaps in technology (most importantly, screens will need to become easier on the eyes than they currently are) and big cultural shifts (fiction books now have strong cultural value among the crowd that uses them, with the objects themselves being a major draw).

Daniel

[IAMBIC]

There are three main factors that are preventing the wide-scale acceptance of e-books:
1) Technological
e-books are either too heavy, or too small. (BTW, the screen resolution on some PDA's and Tablet PC's is practically indistinguishable from printed text.)
2) Financial
Most people have already purchased paper-based books and don't want to spend money buying the electronic version.
3) Emotional
People want a book to "look and feel" like a paper-based book.

And it seems that many people cannot imagine an e-book that is so much better than a paper book that you just won't want to go back to the "primitive" alternative. To have the ability to search and annotate; to have sound and video embedded in the text; to hyperlink to countless other books and reference sources; to be able to walk around with literally thousands of books in your pocket.

If someone says that current e-book technology is limited, fine. But only those with limited imagination will say that our first choice for written material will always be paper-based books.

[Campion]

Hijacking my own thread a bit, but do you mind if I ask how much you're charged for online legal database services?

At one time (this was years ago) a friend who was then a lawyer was telling me about the gouge&screw prices of legal databases; the same database provided free of charge to a law student was some just absolutely ungodly amount to a lawyer (something like several dollars per minute, which for an in-depth search adds up very quickly). I was wondering if that's receded any. (There was a bit of a scandal in Montgomery AL at that time of law-firms [especially mom & pop & Jr. type operations or those that dealt with small cases in strip mall offices] hiring law students to "intern" for $10 per hour and having them do research on the databases they had free access to [which offset the cost of paying the student by several times]).I don't know how much we're charged, but a few dollars (two or three) a minute is likely about right. The databases are very expensive, but so am I. So from a client's perspective, they'd rather pay for a database search that takes me five minutes (five minutes of database plus five minutes of me), than pay for me to do a longer search in the books (ten minutes of me).

It would not surprise me to hear that small firms would do something like try to get law students to use their free password. If your clients don't have a lot of money, a few searches (just to make sure you're still citing good law, let alone to find good law) can run a couple hundred dollars and that adds up. I know that's one of the advantages the large firms have when it comes to low-income clients. We get free passwords from the databases that we can use for our pro bono clients, so that the people who are least likely to be able to afford us actually have access to some of the best legal work in the country. If you were to add up the legal fees donated annually by any of the "top" firms, you'd see numbers easily in the millions, but that's only possible because we get some or all of the ancillary services donated as well (like messenger fees and database fees).

The databases give law students a free password in school so that the student learns to prefer one database over another. Then, when the student begins working, the now-lawyer will retain the preference and use one database over the other. You see that play out -- the more senior lawyers seem to be Lexis lawyers, while the more junior people are Westlaw people (although I've seen a recent upswing in Lexis lawyers). As far as I know, though, we're charged the same amount for either service. At other places, though, I understand that the firm would negotiate a better deal with one database than with the other, so it tells its lawyers that they should try to use X over Y.

[CalMeacham]

If someone says that current e-book technology is limited, fine. But only those with limited imagination will say that our first choice for written material will always be paper-based books.


Considering what you say about the ability for hypetrtexting, use of embedded other media, etc., it seems to me that once such e-books become available they will quickly morph into wht will effectively be a new medium -- e-texts with all the bells and whistles, with all the capabilities and differences that will imply (just as e-journals now incorporate animated demos and the like). I suspect that in popular works, such things will be expected, and maybe most readers will come to prefer such e-texts to botring non-interactive print (which can have, at best, only color pictures).

In other words, I suspect e-texts will rapidly evolve into something wholly different, and we printed-book readers will be left with traditional books.

[rjung]

Books will go the ways of scrolls; pens will go the ways of quills.
Why don't you consider notepads and ball-point pens as successors to scrolls and quills?

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Why don't you consider notepads and ball-point pens as successors to scrolls and quills?
I do, just like I consider e-books to be successors to paper books, and papyrus to be a successor to clay tablets.

Daniel

[Joools]

Let's assume nobody ever successfully creates a 'virtual book' that would adequately replace the experience of reading long works on paper. I could still see plenty of scenarios in which books become all but a 'thing of the past' due to the march of technology.

Already, there are plenty of examples. People have already mentioned things like research resources and professional journals. But also... Remember encyclopedias? Remember Straight Dope books? Remember when every piece of software came with a thousand-page manual? I could easily envision a world where books that are compilations of short articles or data move to digital or online form. So I could see a world without paper dictionaries, cookbooks, travel books -- pretty much without reference books at all.

Other forms of portable entertainment could also start to edge in on books. Thanks to Audible.com I've "read" more Terry Pratchett on my iPod than I have on paper. Portable movie and audiobook players might someday replace a lot of the casual reading that people do today. I think we're going to see a huge surge in portable digital entertainment in the next few years, which will certainly reduce the market for books (which often serve exactly that purpose for people.)

Who knows if the combination of these things is going to be enough to make books 'obsolete' (or at least, a rare, niche hobby). I guess my point, though, is that technology making books obsolete probably won't happen because somebody figures out a single device that does everything paper books do but better. Instead, it'll probably happen because lots of different devices do a superior job at one or two of those functions.

[Zoinks]

I think people here are forgetting that the majority of the world doesn't even have electricity, much less PDA's and computers. Not to mention the millions upon millions of books that already exist. I am only 23 and I expect books to be around for a large part of my life, probably even until the end. I suspect it will be like tv supplanting radio as the medium of choice. Radio still exists, but tv is more universally used.

I'm also one of those students that greatly prefer electronic databases. It's just so handy to do so much research with a mug of hot chocolate and covered in blankets while the snow and wind are blowing like crap outside. And there are so many journals you can access, too. Plus ILL goddamn takes forever to arrive, and you can't be entirely sure when it'll arrive, either. And I usually need books longer than a few weeks, especially if I'm writing a paper. But yeah, if there's a physical book already in the library, I would never even consider an electronic one, no matter how cold it is outside.

I suspect that if you checked, you'd find that it's journals and articles that are mostly being taken from e-databases, not books.

[Zoinks]

People have already mentioned things like research resources and professional journals. But also... Remember encyclopedias?

Encyclopedias are still useful, but I find it's only with more specialized ones. For example, I believe there's an Encyclopedia of Diaspora in the works, and I've already seen one article. It would be very helpful to have all those references and citations in one source. Theoretical alignments, technical terms, and important researchers would all be there, waiting to be looked up. And all that information would be too specialized to be found on the Internet and too general to be found from just reading books on different diasporas.

[asterion]

There are several things in science fiction--especially older science fiction--that I've never really bought. One of them is the idea of the complete loss of books (the rest would be a Cafe Society hijack.) I think the idea can partially be blamed on microfilm--who now uses microfilm if they can get the same thing in PDF? I hate microfilm--it costs me more money to print it, more time to spool it up and find the right section, heck, even more time to go to a library. A PDF I can just print out if I want to read it in-depth or skim through it on the screen to see if it is something useful. But I think at the time everything was getting converted to microfilm, the hard copies were getting tossed, and the idea of something like PDF wasn't even conceivable. Of course, PDF is just the new microfilm, but it is easier to deal with. You can open it up in the privacy of your own home and you don't need anything you don't already have. True, the idea was that you'd have your own large microfilm library and home reader, but I never saw how that was a good idea.

I also blame it a bit--especially the older stuff, like from the 50s--on the emergence of TV. I get this vibe that a majority of the population would become effectivelly illiterate due to the emergence of TV or one of its successors. Nobody will want to read if they can watch it. I've never really bought that idea. Personally, I don't like audiobooks--it takes far longer for me to listen to a book than it does for me to read it. I've only found them to be useful in specialized situations, not for sitting at home. And television is such a different media from books that I can't imagine replacing books entirely with TV.

Of course, the idea in the OP is basically using a PDA to store many many books. I have a lot of books, some of them really OOP and even somewhat falling apart from age (about 30 years old) because they weren't made in a very high quality. I might use a PDA, but several things have to be the case. First, it can't be like scrolling lots and lots of text. I either can't or don't like to do that, I'm not sure which it really is. Second, there can't be any eyestrain. I can read a book for several hours straight and never get eyestrain, but I can't do it with any current screen. Third, there can't be a lot of--preferably zero--DRM. Right now, I buy a book and can do just about anything I want with the physical copy. I won't accept a lot of restrictions.

[dangermom]

I don't think books will disappear in my lifetime.

Reference books are different IMO than novels and other books that people read straight through. Reference books are perfect for electronic storage; most people don't want to read them, they just want to quickly look up certain topics. For storage of huge amounts of factual information for quick retrieval in small amounts, electronic trumps book hands-down most of the time, except for some home uses. Reference books, to a large extent, were only sitting around in print waiting for computers to come along, and the same often applies to technical journals (though I agree that the fees for once-free journals are a shame).

Ordinary books, however, are used completely differently. We want to take them anywhere and read them in many different situations, be able to page back and forth easily, scribble on them, mark them up, and lend them to our friends. For reading purposes, a paper book is the simplest and most satisfactory technology that works. It's more compact and easier to handle than a scroll, and often lasts longer, so it supplanted scroll technology, but it's simpler, so far cheaper, and far more durable than a PDA, so it's not going to be supplanted anytime soon. For many uses, the simplest technology that does the job wins, and that's still a book. (The pencil is still around for the same reason, while quills and dipped pens were more complex to use and so died out when simpler ballpoints came along.)

Also, even the worst-quality books from 30 years ago (not to mention 200 years ago, but paper wasn't so acidic then) are mostly still around, which is not the case for electronic data. Digital storage is still not as long-lasting as we need it to be; it degrades too soon and the format goes out of date too quickly--and then the information is essentially lost. You don't need the right retrieval device to read a book, but a tragic amount of valuable information has been lost because it's no longer readable by current devices.*

Anyway, my main point is that the simplest technology that does the job satisfactorily wins--and the PDA has a long way to go in many, many ways before it does the job better than a cheap paperback book does.


*For example, my grandmother made recordings of oral histories of other family members I would love to hear. Sadly, she did it on tapes that played on a particular machine. The power cord, with an odd configuration, was later lost, and another has never been found. It's not at all a unique situation, but if the stories had been written down too we'd still have them.

[ouryL]

Book repositories will be a thing of the past. Books with be printed on demand only. Token memorial libraries will be more an aesthetical construct than a practical resource.

[asterion]

Book repositories will be a thing of the past.

Then where will we go to make JFK-assassination-related jokes and references?

I still see a place for hardcopy archiving. You have to have something like the LoC holding hardcopy in case of memory loss.

[Bryan Ekers]

Then where will we go to make JFK-assassination-related jokes and references?

The C++ Class-y Gnoll?

[Shalmanese]

e-books are either too heavy, or too small. (BTW, the screen resolution on some PDA's and Tablet PC's is practically indistinguishable from printed text.)


cite? Low end printers these days easily do 300dpi, higher end ones go above 600 dpi. The biggest resolution I've seen on a PDA is 640x480 which is barely 1/3 of that figure. And resolution isn't everything, what's the contrast ratio of the best LCD compared to paper? I think it's over 100 times worse atm.

[Martin Hyde]

Well, I'll have no problem either way if you can give me an electronic gadget that is just as portable as a book, just as sturdy and just as hard to damage, and gives me an image that doesn't hurt my eyes (for example I read a lot at the SDMB but if I read a whole novel on the computer, or one chapter of a novel where I was reading line after line for several minutes nonstop I'd get serious eyestrain) then I really won't miss them *that* much.

[Larry Borgia]

Books are cheap, don't require a power source, are easier on the eyes, don't require peripheral technology, don't crash and require calls to a disinterested tech support person half-way across the world, and can be carried to sandy beaches, dirty parks, and other places you wouldn't dream of bringing your laptop.

When your computer acts up where do you look: The manual, printed in handy book form.

Magazines are still around, even though there's little love for them as artifacts. people like their convenient portable ephemeral form.

The death of the encyclopedia is an argument for why books will still be around, oddly enough. The printed encyclopedia died because it was bulky, expensive, and could not be updated. The CD-Rom and the internet do the job of the encyclopedia much better. The key here is that people want their info in the most convenient and efficient form, and don't much care whether that form is electronic or not. For many purposes the book is the most convenient form, and I can't see that changing in the near future.

If it does change, well, fine. I complained a little when vinyl records died, because I did like them as an artifact. A few years later I didn't miss them at all, noting how much less of a struggle it was to deal with CD's (even if CD's were overhyped in almost every area.) If someone is able to develop a new tech that is as easy or easier to deal with than the book, in the same way CD-Rom's and the internet are better than printed encyclopedia's, that's great. It's the content that matters, not the form.

[elfkin477]

<snip> but I think this will change when it becomes a lot cheaper and easier to load onto a PDA.

My belief: in a few years when PDAs are a lot cheaper (so cheap that if lost or stolen it's not a really major financial loss) and inexpensive technology is available that prevents copyrighted books from being electronically reproduced cheaper than buying the download rights (basically, when The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy™ or something like it exists), and generations younger than the Internet begin to enter colleges and the job market, print will begin to hemmorhage.

I think you're giving PDAs too much credit. If I had a nickel for every person who asked me what mine was in the past year, often thinking it was something like a gameboy, well, I'd have no trouble buying a new one with all the bells and whistles. Even well-educated people (all my coworkers have college degrees and most questions have been from them) largely have no idea what PDAs are, or what they do; the majority of people who actually know what they are seem surprised that I can do more with it than keep track of dates, and I haven't met a person yet who wasn't shocked I use mine as an e-reader. And I don't just mean older people, but other people in their 20s have had the same questions. Cell phones, MP3 players, people know all about them. PDAs, not so much. Hell, until a friend convinced me last year I might get some use out of one, I didn't know anything much about them either.

Books will still be around when everyone in this thread is dead and buried.

[Bryan Ekers]

Even well-educated people (all my coworkers have college degrees and most questions have been from them) largely have no idea what PDAs are, or what they do; the majority of people who actually know what they are seem surprised that I can do more with it than keep track of dates, and I haven't met a person yet who wasn't shocked I use mine as an e-reader. And I don't just mean older people, but other people in their 20s have had the same questions.

Well, let's be fair, the gizmos have advanced hugely just in the last five years and unless you make a point of reading trade magazines (and maybe even then), you can still be surprised and impressed when you learn about the features of new device.

Or maybe you just live among the Amish. Either way.

[Squink]

"Please navigate your e-hymnals to hymn number 41, and sing along with the choir:.
Amazing Grace
How sweet the sound..."


Some clases of books will be very resistant to e-ifying.

[RaftPeople]

E-books have too many negatives and too few positives compared to paper books (w.r.t. reading for pleasure, not research, in the area of research I personally rely on electronic forms much more).

Most of the pros and cons have been listed already so I won't rehash them, but the one factor that would push e-books on us is if they could be produced for less money than a paper book, in which case the publishers would of course push the technology regardless of pros and cons.

[IAMBIC]

cite? Low end printers these days easily do 300dpi, higher end ones go above 600 dpi. The biggest resolution I've seen on a PDA is 640x480 which is barely 1/3 of that figure.It's not about "cite"; it's about "sight".

Have you seen the new PDAs, like the iPAQ hx4700 (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-64929-215381-314903-f61-420534.html)? Can you see any jagged edges in the text? The pixel density is substantially higher than that of most monitors.

[Shalmanese]

Just to chime in as someone who's almost completely replaced paper books with ebooks for reading for pleasure. It's one of those things which you can't imagine doing without doing it and can't imagine doing without once you've done it. It's really a whole lifestyle change.

First of all, you literally have your entire library in your pocket. People couldn't imagine 40gb of music when the first ipods came out, after all, thats a significant fraction of a years worth of music on one device, yet people jumped on them, not because they expect to listen to every song, but because they like having that level of control over their music choices.

Secondly, you find time to read in the 5 minute segments of the day that were previously wasted. I cannot emphasize how much more reading I get done this way, waiting for a bus, waiting for a friend, hell, even when I'm waiting for my computer to boot up. A PDA is on me every single hour of the day and I takes 1/2 a second to turn on. When I used to carry books around, they were always in my backpack and took about a minute to find where I was at.

Third, you can read in bed. I've not found a single paper book greater than 200 pages long which allowed me to read in bed comfortably. You end up having to support the weight of the book in mid-air 1/2 the time. A PDA allows me to read in a whole new number of positions which for paper books, are impossible.

Fourth, you don't have to turn the page, autoscroll is a blessing because I can be doing other stuff while reading. I usually take my PDA with me when brushing my teeth for example, autoscroll lets me brush and read at the same time.

Fifth, it allows you to read away from home base. I went on a 3 week jaunt of europe and had my entire library in my pocket at the time. I took 2, 600 page paper books as well for emergency situations and finished those on the first week there which means I would have needed to lug around about 15 paper books to be able to equal my ebook. And I would have needed to be psychic to figure out what I was in the mood for reading. As it was, I tried to keep read books in keeping with the theme of the place I was visiting.

[dangermom]

"Please navigate your e-hymnals to hymn number 41, and sing along with the choir:.
Amazing Grace
How sweet the sound..."


Some clases of books will be very resistant to e-ifying.Heh. Actually, several people in our congregation--including my own dad--do this. Our church's hymnal is up for free download, along with all the scriptures and the commentaries used in classes. Me, I prefer the paper hymnal.

[IAMBIC]

Strange cross-posting, Shalmanese.

I, too, went on a trip and took along several e-books. I experienced all the same advantages you did.

However, the screen is small compared to a printed book so less text can be viewed at one time, and (obvious flaw) you can't view pages from two e-books at the same time.

Reading an e-book on a Tablet PC is much nicer, except I find the computer to be too heavy and clumsy, although, if you're going to be using your computer for other things anyway, then it's not as much of a pain.

Still not there yet. But not 50 years in the future either.

[Eureka]

And of course other churches replace frequent use of hymnals with overhead projectors, powerpoint presentations (usually involving just the words) or printing the words in the bulliten. While the e-hymnal may be unlikely, I think the likelihood exists that future editions of the United Methodist Hymnal (to pick on one) may sell fewer editions, because many churches already find that they use them too seldom to justify replacing them.

On the whole, I can't see wholesale replacement of books by electronic formats. Admittedly, people, even those better qualified than I to predict, have traditionally been bad at predicting major paradigm shifts.
E-books may well make up part of the market- and probably a larger part than I'm prepared to give them credit for, especially if someone figures out how to solve the browsing problem.

e-reference books are likely to be popular because they are often easier to use (or easier to access from home) than traditional reference books- and people assume that they are more up-to-date than print materials.

Indexes and Abstracts are much easier to access online.

e-journals are easier to store and access-though issues of copyright, ownership and access to backfiles (and price) are not going to go away.

Paper (and microfilm) are much easier to guarentee that they will be there in the future than anything electronic.

[Aeschines]

Yes, books will mostly be replaced. Some will be left because they are attractive, retro objects.

In 200 years, machines will be built into the very walls that can project any text we like into the air. Voice-recognition technology and AI will be able to adjust the text to any configuration you desire.

For example, you could just lie in bed while a 2' x 3' screen appeared a comfortable distance before your eyes presenting to you any text you desire.

[hlanelee]

Books are on media that can survive and be used with little adaptation, i.e. an aide for interpretation, and can survive many environmental extremes. I have some 8-tracks and albums with really good music on them but cannot listen to them, I don't have the technology. I have some 5.25 disks with good information on them, even a book that I started writing 20+ years ago, it is all lost to me. Books will endure because they are durable. In my minds eye I can see some anthropologist in the future, maybe even only a few hundred years from now, wondering what important facts exist on the box of 3.5's he has found.

Electronic media is convenient, fast, and easy, but its technology becomes quickly outdated and is often rendered useless. Also electronic media is easily altered. As a civil engineering student I am interested, if a survey conducted with a data collector and drawn with a CAD and the same survey done on paper with notes and a plat drawn by hand were compared which would stand up in a court of law.

Books will endure because books are durable!!!!!

[Shalmanese]

And words chiselled into stone is even more durable but how many people carry them around on a daily basis? In fact, it's been noted that the progress of technology has been steadily towards more ephemeral forms. Stone tablets -> clay tablets -> papayrus -> vellum -> acid-free paper -> acidic paper -> voilatile computer storage.

[Bryan Ekers]

I have some 5.25 disks with good information on them, even a book that I started writing 20+ years ago, it is all lost to me.

Well, that's just from lack of trying. You could, if you wanted, find a 5.25" drive in a used computer store/flea market/salvation army shop and install it on a modern personal computer. I haven't met an IBM-compatable yet that lacked the option.

But the information is likely demagnetized beyond recognition by now. Still, with a minimal financial investment and a half-hour's work, you could salvage what's left and transfer it to more modern media.

[IAMBIC]

Does anyone on this board routinely print all documents on their computer and store them in a "safe" place so that the information will always be accessible in printed format? Anybody buying digital cameras? Won't the storage technology change?

People buy and continue to use new technology (even though often it is more expensive than "traditional" methods) when it offers more usefulness and greater convenience. There's always a downside. Do the benefits outweigh it?

The ultimate fate of paper-based books will depend on how many people will continue to pay for them over e-based books because of their usability today, not because of long-term issues of storage and access.