I heard a story that the Eisenhower administration wanted to buy the new fangled copy machine from Xerox. They bought one machine. For the entire White House.
Rather like Thomas Watson’s alleged estimate in 1943 about there may be a need for five computers in the world.
I still treasure an ad for a top-of-the-line HP calculator from a 1976 department store catalogue. It is true it costs a thousand dollars, but that is in 1976 Canadian funds. However, it can ably handle both exponents and baaic trigonometry among sixty other functions. Presumably, early copiers were similarly priced until they became popular.
Paper books won’t completely disappear, but every year there will be less printed than the previous year and they will be more expensive as the economies of scale are diminished. The increasing cost will drive even more people over to a digital format.
I don’t think it’s been mentioned, but ebook sales have been falling for years. Their popularity is not rising and young people aren’t switching to them in droves. They are a niche that have barely moved from where they were a decade ago.
Ebook sales have dropped every year from 2013-2019, but they had a “soaring” increase in 2020 because of… well you know. So far in 2021, sales are back down to their lower 2013-2019 levels.
A hodgepodge of random statistics on reading. They might even be accurate.
This is a pet peeve of mine. When people use unnecessary specificity, but it’s the wrong specifics. Like when people say a website name and then say “backslash” as part of it. No, first, you can just say slash and people will know what you mean, no need to specify front or backslash, and also you’re wrong since web addresses practically never have backslashes.
Same deal here - you can just say it has a light. It’s a front light - it’s actually built into the rim of the kindle above the screen and shoots light at the screen from above. It’s actually a really important distinction between backlight and frontlight - backlights are screens like TVs, cell phones, and tablets where it generates the image by shooting a light through a medium into your eyes. The front lights in a kindle are different - they’re just providing reflected illumination on a surface, the same as if you used a lamp to read, or if you got one of those little bendy lights that you can attach to books to read, just more convenient because it’s built in. But it’s fundamentally different in that it’s easier to look at / less fatiguing to look at the reflections of a front light on e-ink, which is very similar to traditional reading with a lamp illuminating a book, than looking at a backlit screen like a tablet.
As the person who made this mistake, in my defense, most other electronic devices with a built-in screen do have a backlight, whereas backslashes are used for very little that normal people would encounter (escaping special characters and Windows paths are the two most common and they’re not that common). Anyway, ignorance fought.
Sales of niche things don’t grow, just sayin’. Not that I’m investing in phonograph futures.
Ain’t gonna happen.
No one is going to digitize stuff that no one is likely to read.
Please understand I appreciate digitized formats when doing research. I can see it is useful during travel and might be more considerate if reading in bed with a sleeping partner. It takes up less space and is more resilient in specific ways. It will likely become more beneficial over time. You can get the information sent and be reading in minutes. If working, you can have access to weighty tomes of use - except you have already bought them at great price and the digital version is the same price for many niche markets.
Paper books won’t completely disappear, but every year there will be less printed than the previous year and they will be more expensive as the economies of scale are diminished. The increasing cost will drive even more people over to a digital format.
But what of all the existing books? There are quite a number scattered all over the world. It cannot be economic to track them all down and scan them into some digital format. Even for public libraries with scanning projects, they can only deal with books not covered by copyright. So published before 1924…in the US. Other countries will have different copyright laws and they are complicated.
…and the publishers don’t like these scanning projects. It is taking the bread from the mouths of the hungry children of starving authors.
This suggests books are going to be around for many years to come.
In fact, it may be that more books are printed. I did see a ‘book printing on demand machine’ at one large bookshop…looks like it is a business for authors who want to reach all of their potential readers rather than simply those who prefer to read it on some digital gadget.
This thread prompted me to fire up my Kindle.
It would not fire. I think it’s now a paperweight.
(ironic)
mmm
Can I assume you tried charging it?
I have an iPad that is also a paperweight.
It won’t charge and even if it did, it is next to useless because Apple have decided the hardware is obsolete and the operating system cannot be upgraded and many apps cannot run.
This obsolescence by design seems to be the standard business model these days and a major contributor to the E-waste disposal problem.
E-books could be useful for students who are obliged to obtain large numbers of huge text books. If they can afford the subscription to which ever academic publisher controls the rights.
One step forward, one step back.
Yep, with different chargers, different cables, different outlets.
The hurdle is much higher than that. Lots of stuff that many people would read and benefit from isn’t digitized, either. From my experience, several hundred people interested in a book is often not enough for the contents to be digitized / found online. You have to hunt down existing physical copies to get to the material. Happens to me weekly, over a wide range of interests.
ETA: a hundred thousand doesn’t seem to make it, either. Tom Gaylord’s popular and busy airgun blog has 100 000 readers. Gaylord’s seminal 1995 book R1 is long out of print, not digitized, and used copies sell for 100 USD+. Just as an example.
I don’t think I’ve read a paper book in… over 5 years. Probably longer than that. It caused an issue among my friend group when it came time for Christmas presents. People would give me paper books and I… would end up not reading them. Not because I am an anti-paper book person per se, but because I found it highly inconvenient. The vast majority of my reading was on the train to and fro work. Having a lightweight small item I could use every day with tons of books on it was far better to use IMO.
Anyways my friends now know not to get me paper books and I’ll generally get an e-book gifted from Amazon (to be delivered on Christmas day usually).
You are right, but I had in mind commercial success and not a literal definition. Not familiar with your example, but possibly due to the author or estate benefitting from this and not wanting to lose control, as so often seems to happen with digitized media. (It has been many years since I have looked at, say, torrents, but I presume a lot of commercially available stuff is still available by questionable means if there is commercial demand).
I mean, obviously you’ve never had a paper book “glitch”, because that’s a problem purely of the electronic domain. But it’s not like paper books are impervious and everlasting.
A small selection of analogous problems I’ve had with my dead tree books that I’ve never had with ebooks:
- The pages get yellow and brittle over time.
- They literally fall apart after the glue and binding fail.
- A page is misprinted and smeared and hard to read.
- Sections of the book are bound in the wrong order.
Economically, it almost certainly makes sense to digitize a book that several thousand people will buy. A print copy can be scanned, OCRed, and professionally edited and proofed for costs in the $single-digit-thousands. If it’s not happening, that suggests that either the expected audience is smaller than you think (I’m not sure what the blog-readers to book-sales conversion rate is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s significantly less than 1%), or that the rights are tied up or in some complicated hard to resolve state. Once you have to bring the lawyers in, the break-even cost goes into the 10s or 100s of $thousands.