Does the health of the big box bookstore have anything to do with the health of the printed book?

Cafe Society
41

I have mixed feelings about all this.

I love my Kindle e-reader. All the reasons already given - bunches of books in a small device, word look up, remembering the last place I was, etc. And I acknowledge the downsides, like battery life and expense and so on.

I love my tree-books. I have thousands. I love the experience of holding and reading what, to me, will always be a “real” book. The oldest in my collection is an heirloom from 1865, I have great works of literature and complete craptastic books I keep mainly to laugh at (and as emergency toilet paper/kindling in event of apocalypse). The 1865 book is in fantastic condition… some of the newer ones are crumbling.

I shop for books on line, and like it for some of the reasons give, like shopping at 2 am. Oh, and the “b-list” books, the not-quite-good-enough-for-top-shelf often quirky and less than perfect books are available again, a category I long enjoyed and missed the last few decades where the only ones that got shelf space were the Big Sellers. But I also miss just wandering the stacks and grabbing at random.

I think it’s like a lot of old things - tree books aren’t ever going to go away entirely, not in several generations. For one thing, there are so damn many of them already out there. For another, they serve a purpose. Just like you still buy vinyl phonograph records and treadle sewing machines, they’re going to be around for awhile for one reason or another, from collectors to Luddites to whatever.

42

I could explain what those years looked like from the inside, but I’ll warn you, I start ranting whenever I talk about it.

43

I think you, of all the Dopers I’ve come to have some feel for, would understand my point. I am not saying Google is or will become the sole repository of information. I’m trying to communicate a fairly subtle and difficult point about the nature of information and even here space is constricted.

I just wrote a fairly long post but I am too tired to make it coherent; I’ll reduce it to this one paragraph:

To those who are blithely waving their hands and saying that because at this time, a naked picture of Christina Aguilera can’t be erased from the internet, that somehow implies that all public data is permanent in the world of flying electrons - your historical perspective is lacking. The keepers of the Library of Alexandria probably slept well, knowing they had collected all the world’s knowledge; I don’t know if there’s even a good hazy guess of how much it might have held that was lost forever. And that was more or less by accident, not by someone deciding that no one really needed this scroll or that one.

All of the wonders of online knowledge - and they are many - are eclipsed by the fact that that knowledge is far more fragile and far more subject to interference than printed works will ever be. We already have libraries that are nearly book-free because everything can be had via terminals; may whoever manages what those terminals can find truly remain “not doing evil.”

I snark at the under-25, but in all sincerity I’ve yet to meet anyone much under 30 who doesn’t assume the internet is somehow a permanent fixture. Anyone over that remember when Alta Vista couldn’t be assumed to find everything there was on a topic? The “if it’s not on the internet it doesn’t exist” trope? What happens when something we assume is there… just isn’t any more, and there’s no good way to prove it ever was?

44

The problem with decrying a future of lost information is twofold.

One, you need to have a worldwide catastrophe or man-made disaster or religious dystopia or something apocalyptic or look into some hazy future centuries away just to approach a possible world in which to even discuss such a scenario. There are so many suppositions and assumptions that no rational argument can be made. You’re hand-waving a “what if” that can’t be countered because it has no substance.

Second, half the population of earth seems to be scared by even this remotest of possibilities and are doing all they can to ensure the survival of all this information in the widest possible range of permanent formats. If you ask what is permanent then you’ve lost the argument because books themselves sure aren’t and you have no reason to suspect that the sum total of future efforts designed with permanence in mind will be more fragile than books.

Some information is lost all the time. If I were to become famous and dead tomorrow I’d pity the poor biographer who tries to reconstruct my life. (Photos? I don’t even have a reflection.) But I have zero concern that human knowledge will be entirely lost as long as there is a human civilization to care. Too many people are using too many means and care too much about the problem. If all of them fail simultaneously then humanity is already doomed and doesn’t care. Yes, I care passionately about information. But we have better access to vastly more current and historical information than ever before in history. Vastly. Any reversal of that is literally unforeseeable, and that make paranoia moot.

45

Are we really comparing the survivability of dead-paper books to digital copies after an apocalypse, or even a long period of time? Truly, digital copies win hands-down in both scenarios. They’re not as readily accessible, but the archeologists of the year 5013 are going to have a field day looking at our records compared to what we’re dealing with for the stuff recorded in 1013 BC. Given how much more durable digital media is than paper, how much easier it is to make copies of things, and all the various errata in the form of archived HTTP packets, digital archives, and just crap people burn to various bits of media, we’re gonna be WAY more accessible than any other generation before us.

46

I can keep more information on my external hard drive than was contained in the Library of Alexandria.* Pretty much everybody has that amount of storage space, or could get hold of it at will - last time I checked a 2tb drive was under £100.

I agree that it would be stupid to rely solely on the government or large corporations to store data, but that’s not what’s happening. Every person can now have a library as large as they want, of books, film, music, or anything else they desire, and they can store it on or offline (or, most sensibly, both), with a level of oversight from governments and corporations that, again, they choose.

That’s not to say that questioning this is wrong - your doubts about it are valid. What isn’t valid is to infer from those doubts that progress is necessarily bad, that these problems can’t be solved, and that we should rely solely on ancient technology.

*If this isn’t technically true, it will be soon, and it works for the purpose of argument.

P.S. I’m well over 25.

47

I’m curious though what formats a bestseller in 2030 or 2040 will be sold in. I can imagine a long term “printed book fetish” long after ebooks have become the mainstay of the industry. Books, like vinyl records, have a cachet that a lot of people I’m sure won’t be willing to give up even if the lion’s share of their media consumption is electronic and they also function as decoration or even furniture in a way a tablet/e-reader/brain implant/lap top/notebook/desktop don’t. I suppose the bestseller in 2040 will have some small prestige print run for the 10,000 fogies or hipsters or what not who actually want books.

This whole debate brings to mind Asimov’s The Fun They Had which was in one of my elementary school textbooks as a kid. :slight_smile:

48

I have never forgotten that story, and every time I think of the Kindle I am reminded of this line:
[QUOTE=The Fun They Had]
And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had when they read it the first time.
[/QUOTE]
Quite prophetic.

49

If I was going to be paranoid about loss of information, that paranoia would not be centered around how the content is stored, but much more around the ever-consolidating entities providing the content itself. In other words, censorship before, rather than after, the fact of distribution.

As for storage, it’s been pointed out that individuals have the available tech to host their own libraries, and as large as Google and Amazon may become, there will always be options as to where and how things are stored. It’s not easy to just prune away recorded information, and it may be actually be impossible without taking a scorched earth approach which destroys far more than desired. If you sign up for enterprise Google cloud services now, they can guarantee that your data will not leave US servers if that’s a requirement. What they can’t guarantee is complete deletion or destruction of your data. This is because information is moved from disk array to disk array as housekeeping is done for efficiency, leaving behind traces. The way you protect against this to encrypt your data and don’t give the keys to anyone, including Google, etc. In practice, this pre-destroys your data for anyone without access to the key. They can destroy it, but they won’t know what it is that’s being destroyed. They can prevent you from accessing it, but in the case of published or distributed works, they can’t prevent all from accessing it without shutting off access to lots of other info.

Once revealed, information is pernicious in its ability to spread and remain revealed. Being distributed digitally only makes that more true.

50

What ever-consolidating entities? You can’t swing a dead cat on the Internet without hitting ten companies that will publish your writing for you (including Amazon and B&N). Content is coming from more creators than ever, the only consolidation is from the number of companies providing so-called “mainstream” content.

51

True, but mainstream content is the lion’s share of content.

52

Well put. I don’t in any way mean that we shouldn’t move forward; Google Books is of absolutely irreplaceable value to me by bringing very rare and very difficult to locate (or use) books to my desktop.

I think this is a “you get it or you don’t” subject. If you’re convinced that knowledge is sufficiently distributed, stored, and shared among enough entities to be safe unto the next generations, well, fine - it’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that you aren’t leaving much room for the right things to happen.

The trend is towards more and more dependence on online knowledge, which is filtered at several levels (beginning with the common assumption that “everything is available” or “everything of importance is available”) and increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer places with more and more centralized oversight.

Sure, we have storage systems that can contain unbelievable amounts of data - but most data is litter and trivia. My 4TB RAID server could probably contain a thousand Libraries of Alexandria in high-res facsimile form… but it doesn’t. Like IQ, the measurement of data capacity does not mean it’s filled with knowledge.

I can easily see Google Search/Books/Images/Drive and all like services becoming so taken for granted that no one bothers to maintain any such information locally. It’s already the case with many newer libraries; ranks of terminals replace what used to be stacks. (I am on a library board as technology adviser, ironically enough.) The younger generation already assumes that the internet has everything and is forever (because everyone has downloaded so much of it, see)… in another generation it is not unthinkable that essentially all knowledge is contained in a handful of online repositories and both school and municipal libraries are emptied out and shuttered.

And the chokepoints on information control become very small and very delicate, and one disastrous election or coup could lead to a world unimaginable with genuinely distributed information archives. That’s not inevitable, but it’s a distinct possibility, given laziness in the populace and maliciousness in the ruling tier - and it’s worth fearing properly.

53

Here’s the argument that convinces me.

You posit that somehow the entire world will forget to make a backup copy but somehow you never posit that, say, a mutant strain of bacteria will evolve to furiously eat through all the paper in the world, leaving people relieved that they had saved so much of it electronically before the catastrophe.

One is as likely as the other. Yet the catastrophes somehow always fall on the side of electronics being lost.

I do worry about the loss of information. I don’t worry about the loss of **all **information. Infinity minus infinity is still infinity.

54

Interestingly enough I listened to NPR’s Here and Now show today and they covered this very topic.
If Barnes & Noble Goes Under, Will Publishing Survive?

According to the publishing house representative interviewed, the answer was “no”, at least not in its current form, and that publishers will become increasingly unwilling to sign on and publish new authors.

55

I love printed books. I don’t have an e-reader and I doubt I’ll ever get one. Unlike an iPod, I read one book at a time so having more than one available to me at once has never been an issue.

However, I am not going to pay the list price of $25.99 for a book from Barnes N Noble when I can get the same thing from Amazon for half that plus free shipping. That’s what killed big box book stores.

56

Actually the primary reason I got an e-reader wasn’t because I read multiple books at the same time, but rather because I was going on a trip to Europe and didn’t want to lug 2-3 guidebooks and several novels to read on the planes, trains and automobiles I expected to ride to, during and from the trip.

It turned out to be a godsend- it fit in my pocket nicely, was searchable, and I could easily bookmark things to find later. It was much better than the guidebooks I’ve used prior to that, and had the advantage of also allowing me to read my novels if I got stuck on a train or in a line, etc…

Plus, (it’s a Kindle Touch, BTW) I can access my Kindle library via any browser, so if for example, I’m totally bored at work or happen to have some time on my hands somewhere with a browser, I can read whatever books I happen to be reading- without anything special that I have to lug around and take care of.

THAT is why I’m impressed with e-readers, and why I think that sort of thing is the wave of the future. Not because I have some sort of vendetta against print books; far from it- I just bought some the other day, but because they’re just in many cases and situations the electronic format is drastically more convenient.

And, as for the future viability of current data, I never claimed it was archival in the sense of you could just leave it on some CD and in 100 years, it would be as good as new. Of course not- the dyes in most writeable CDs degrade in 5-10 years. My point was that if there is an active effort to move and convert old data, it won’t lose anything, while things like photographic negatives, printed books and other physical media will eventually degrade, and shy of digitizing them or using imperfect copying methods, they’ll eventually deteriorate to the point that they’ll be unusable.

The key to what I’m saying is “active effort”. Obviously if people don’t value some data and allow it to be stored on media that is subsequently not readable, then that’s a failure of the data owner, not of digital storage in general. For example, I don’t have my high school assignments any longer, but that’s because I didn’t bother to copy them from 5.25 floppies to my hard drive. Had I done that, I could have converted them into MS Word format relatively easily, and they’d be just as useful as they ever were.

Ultimately, I think maybe Eyebrows of Doom may have the real answer, despite whatever we may have been saying about digital formats. Amazon is cheaper, has a better selection, and delivers in 2 days (with Prime). That’s hard to beat by a brick & mortar bookstore, especially if the recommendations are halfway accurate- you don’t have to go hunt down books and look for stuff- you can easily find it online.

This is a bigger issue than Amazon/B&N though; does anyone actually buy computer or electronic components at brick and mortar stores anymore (other than the odd cable, adapter or connector)? I don’t mean 50" flatscreens, but rather stuff like hard drives, monitors, DVRs, stereos, xboxes, etc…

57

I love Best Buy and Office Depot. Even though I do my pre-shopping on NewEgg. Instant gratification, vs waiting for shipping. Which is also why I love eBooks.

As a publisher, and I can’t wait for print books to die. They’re expensive and inefficient in every way.

As to the rest, I’ll just quote Lemony Snicket:

58

They’re energy efficient.

59

Compared to what? Not to e-book readers, when you include manufacturing and transport energy use.

60

Are you sure? I’m not sure exactly how you would compare the energy used to manufacture a paperback vs some fraction of the energy required to manufacture a reader so let’s just look at shipping.

If an average mass-market paperback is 9oz (~0.25kg) and shipping by truck is 2400 KJtonne^-1km^-1 an average shipping distance of 1000km (WAG) and 50% strip rate means that it costs 1200 KJ to get each book sold into your hands. Any energy cost to get the book home depends on your distance and method of transportation, but reading is essentially energy-free (during the day:)).

To get an ebook requires you to download an electronic file for, basically, free energywise. If you read on a dedicated reader, I use a Kobo, you should be getting about 1500 pages per charge based on this poll so at least 2 books per charge ( I personally get a lot more pages out of mine). I couldn’t find the power-consumption of this device but looking at similar batteries the capacity seems to be about 1000mAh and if it is at 3.7V that should be about 13 kJ per charge or 6.5 kJ per reading(feel free to check my math, electronics was never my strongest subject).