Many a social night supported by the internet has been spoiled by not finding the song that needs to be played next anywhere online.
I’ve tried twice to heartily embrace the Kindle, but the experience leaves me unfulfilled in a weird way.
I get odd satisfaction out of physically holding a book, out of seeing my stack of ready-to-reads on the floor (currently about 2 feet high), and out of eyeballing the progression of the bookmark through the pages as I work my way through a book.
mmm
Here are some relevant excerpts from what I wrote in the Giant House thread:
My wife and I have been through quite range of houses in our 12-year relationship. (FYI, I’m 66, she’s 61. We married in 2011.) I moved out of my 1,500-square-foot (460-square-meter) three-bedroom condo to live in her three-story, four-bedroom, 2,900-square-foot (885-square-meter) house in Baltimore.
Our next house was 4,640-square-feet (430-square-meters), followed by one that…
had about 2,600 square feet (800 square meters) before we finished the basement, which added about 1,000 square feet (300 square meters). That space became the TV room, library, and open play space for grandkids.
Needless to say, all these homes (even my condo, when I was single) had plenty of room for our books. But…
Earlier this year, we moved in with my mother-in-law in her seaside cottage on the North Shore of Boston that has been in my wife’s family since 1960. It has about 1,500 square feet (460 square meters) and when we arrived was already full of MIL’s furniture, books, etc. So before leaving Atlanta, we sold, donated, or threw out almost all of our furniture, and lots of dishes, clothes, and other assorted stuff, including about half of our 2,200-book library.
[Emphases added]
Like many Dopers, I was a book lover for most of my life, but having lived in six homes in 12 years and moved 50+ boxes of books several times (always with professional movers doing the heavy lifting, but packing and unpacking them myself) I no longer feel the need to be surrounded by “real” books. If you know you’re going to stay in your house indefinitely, and you have the space, having lots of books is nice. But having given away about a quarter of my collection when I first got married, and half of our joint library in the past six months, I no longer have the strong attachment to them I once had. I’m just fine with reading books on my tablet. I haven’t read a paper book in years, and don’t expect to buy one for the rest of my life. And I hope no one gives me one. I just don’t need any more stuff. Of any kind.
I’ve had problems with two of my e-readers so far – and I’ve only owned two. One stopped working altogether. The other started having glitches which made entire books inaccessible or made the reader itself spontaneously decide not to work for a while.
I’ve never had that problem with my “dead tree” books. And I never have to worry about losing my entire library if the reader develops a terminal issue, or is dropped in water, or the company decides to retroactively withdraw books from circulation.
As a button I saw at a convention put it, “They got the Library at Alexandria. They’re not going to get mine.”
And spurs outsold buggy whips. Look out, GM!
Wait—if you’re trying to argue for the security of “dead tree” books over electronic, the Library of Alexandria is not a point in your favor.
That may be, but I am continually amazed at all that has been digitized. About 15 years ago, a colleague was telling me about a paper that had been published in a French journal around 1840.* I did a search and found, downloaded, and printed for my colleague, the entire paper (it was close to 100 pages, IIRC). I was astonished.
It was Olinde Rodrigues’s paper giving the first–and for a long time only correct*–description of the rotation group of the sphere.
**Hamilton’s description, several years later, using quaternions, was not correct, giving something like half the rotation instead. I no longer remember the details. Eventually, Hamilton got it right and his formulas are much easier to use.
I don’t have to worry about that.
I put my entire library on my computer. I actually have four times as many books on my computer as on my e-reader. If my e-reader died today (most likely due to the age of the battery), I would go to the bookstore, buy a new one, and transfer books from my computer to my e-reader.
The books on my computer don’t have DRM (either DRM-free or it was removed) so if Amazon goes out of business or turns on the screws it will not affect me.
Amazon wants me to go through a captcha in order to see what that is. Ain’t gonna.
– You can own a hardcopy book in a way in which you generally don’t own an electronic version. It’s there. It works if Amazon’s down. It works if the internet’s down, or if your access to it is down. It works if the power’s off and your battery’s empty. It can’t be altered or destroyed except through physical access to the specific copy.
Of course, if you’ve got a book in the cloud and your house burns down, probably you’ve still got that book. Anything it’s really crucial to keep should be stored both ways.
Avid reader here, as is mrAru [we joke we would read in our sleep if we could keep our eyes open] We also do audio books when on longer road trips.
We are almost entirely shifted to ebooks - and are gradually scanning in our collection of roughly 5000 books [mainly SF and fantasy, and assorted other categories, the vast majority of which are out of print and will never end up as ebooks] for one main reason.
We are OLD - not as old as some here, I am 60 and mrAru is 56. We fully recognize we will be in managed care before we drop dead. They will [hopefully] put us into a lovely double room, hopefully with a private bathroom, and we are looking at owning a laptop with disc player [we own around 3500 DVDs which we can trim down to a couple of those 240 disc folios] and a backup hard drive for our mp3 files [as of a few weeks ago, roughly 35000 files] and ebooks [currently around 2000, more added as we scan and correct the files] a pair of tablets to read ebooks upon and perhaps a pair of phones for communication. We would be able to watch movies on the laptop [we tend to keep getting rather nice 17 inch screen ones]
I am also going to be a para thanks to the spinal stenosis, and adding an urostomy to go along with my colostomy so I don’t have to sit around in a dirty diaper getting URIs waiting for an aide to wipe my arse. Being a realist lets one be proactive when organizing what future can be worked with.
You can lose an individual book if you drop it in water. You can lose your entire library if the house floods (or there’s a fire, or other disaster). With an ebook library, you can back it up offsite somewhere - or, presuming the provider is still in business, restore from their servers.
I’ve never had an e-reader fail - and I’ve owned a total of 4.
- Nook Color. Stolen, presumably by someone at the waterpark who saw me reading it and thought he was scoring a free iPad.
- Kindle Paperwhite: Gave away when I upgraded to a newer model
- Newer KP: Misplaced around the house somewhere - seems to have evaporated. It had a beautiful Oberon Designs cover, which I regret losing (so did the Nook - and I was more peeved about that than about the device)
- its replacement. Occasionally a bit slow to open up, but otherwise works fine.
As far as losing your library: not something to be ignored. - at least that customer finally got satisfaction, after making it very public. In general, if a manufacturer discontinues support for a tool, that tool can become nearly worthless. Several smart lightbulbs have been bitten by this. I imagine Nook content is at risk of this at some point. Amazon too, in theory, though I’d worry less about them.
At least with ebooks, there are ways to ensure continued access (and access across a variety of devices e.g. read your Nook content on your Kindle). @Kimera757 is obviously aware of these 
And you can back them up to whatever media you like (spare hard drive, DVD-ROM, etc.)
19 years ago - before ereaders were really a thing, though I read stuff on my Palm Pilot - we were decluttering to prepare to move to our new house. We got rid of a LOT of dead tree books - as, really, how many of them do you read more than once, and we needed to have the place look a bit less like a book hoarder’s dream house. Those books are now gone. With most new books now on my Kindle, I can always go back to them if I wish.
Anyway - all in all, there’s a great deal more joy to be had in thumbing through real books - but for me, ereaders are so much more useful, that I almost never buy real books anymore. Except for visits to Northshire etc.
I’ve stuck with the Kindle 5th gen, to the point of buying a couple used ones to swot in as the batteries wear out. I like ‘em because there’s no light at all so the battery lasts a long time – allegedly 15 hours which may be a stretch but it’s certainly good for a couple days’ intensive use.
Yes, the lack of a back (or front) light means I have to have an exterior light source just like (gasp) a paper book. The only time it’s commonly needed is when I’m at the theater waiting for the movie to start. I have to make sure I’m under one of the pools of light from the overhead floods.
You can turn the light completely off on the ones that have it, and presumably it wouldn’t use up any battery in that state.
Will the great library collections of the world migrate to some agreed electronically stored format?
Paper books are known quantity. The medium lasts several hundred years and can handle very high resolution graphics. The various storage mediums for digitised books have problems, especially magnetic media. The bits fade away over time.
The formats for digital media are also the subject of lots of legal constraints intended to constrain the right of use by the purchaser to the advantage of the publisher. Many digital products have digital rights management technology built in to enforce these restrictions. Even material that is supposedly in the public domain because it was created by authors publicly funded institutions is constrained. Sure you can get access to a learned journal if you are connected to the Internet…as long as you pay the required subscription to the publisher. Digital media permits predatory and monopolistic business models that restrict the sharing of knowledge. Streaming is the latest technology and it introduces the dependency on all subscribers to have a sufficiently capable internet connection. Last time I looked there were large parts of the world that simply do not have that infrastructure and this accounts of billions of people.
Governments also like to control information and the history of book censorship is well known. Digital media and streaming from a central source are easier to control and monitor. Companies do this to maximise profit and governments do it to exercise political control.
Books are far less dependent on electricity and batteries, Internet access, reliable electronics and durable storage media. Sure they are bulkier and e-readers may be convenient from reading in bed and carrying large amounts of material, but they also have limitations and the display technology does not match paper.
Kids who are addicted to consuming excessive amounts of audio visual media will find themselves ill prepared should they venture into parts of the world that do not have sufficient bandwidth or electricity. My young nephew tells me that his friends even find email intimidating. Too many words, apparently. They communicate in short bursts of text speak. I told him, he may have a period of adjustment when he enters the world of work.
Predicting future trends from observing the behaviour of kids as they devour audio visual media relentlessly is not very helpful. It is easy to come away with the impression they will spend their lives wearing a VR headset, having abandoned the real world identity in favour of their carefully crafted avatar.
But what do I know? The series Black Mirror is a good place to get some ideas about what sort of dystopian world they can expect. Not a book in sight. Nor any of those e-readers, either. But plenty of brain implants, virtual reality and curated subscription services.
Maybe the written word is on the way out.
Yes and no. I don’t think that specific old examples of books are going to be discarded, but I expect that over time, every old book that contains text and pictures people want to read will be digitized. You don’t get rid of Gutenberg’s Bible, but, also, Project Gutenberg has it in digital form!
That is true, but I don’t think anyone has been making that argument. My statistics are about people who read books and what form the read books in. The younger they are, the more they read digital books. There’s nothing in there about how many TikToks they watch (which I imagine is also much higher than old people). And for all the talk about young people not reading, more young people are reading books, both paper and digital, than old people (as a percentage of the population).
I read the majority of the books I read on my phone. Because with two small children, the book that I always have in my pocket is the book that actually get read. The paper one on my nightstand gets read, but very slowly. When I go on vacation, I usually don’t even bring a paper book any more.
It’s possible that I’ll go back to paper books when I am older and have more free time, but I don’t know. I kind of like not having piles of books around, or buying furniture to store books, or having to keep track of where I am or find where I put the book down. And the devices keep getting better.
Yes print books are the way out. We are moving towards a paperless society and soon paper will be obsolete, as will libraries.
I’ve dropped books in water. I still have them.
The whole library lost option is unlikely, too, especially from flooding.
I don’t have to use my books in airline mode and don’t have to worry about the batteries going down.
I use my e-reader – it’s convenient in bed with its own backlight , and it’s very convenient to be able to download in a moment and to obtain some books not easily available elsewhere, but with all the other issues I’ve had with the e-readers, they’ll only get my paper books when they can pull themn from my stiff dead hands.
I remember that same phrase being touted for the workplace forty years ago. Just like fusion power, it’ll be any decade now. Just like fusion power, it hasn’t happened yet.
I have that button displayed on a shelf in one of my many bookcases. There’s also a company called Out of Print that makes T-shirts (mostly, but also other paraphenalia) based on book art and book covers. I’m wearing my A Wrinkle in Time T-shirt today.
Before computers were common, paper was usually sold in packs of 100 sheets.
Now that computers and printers are common, paper’s usually sold in reams.