Here, which posits it will be (mostly) dead within 14 years.
It’s just a guess, and it’s called “dystopian” straight out, so it may not even have been written to be realistic, but what do you think of it and its likelihood?
Aside that’s only partly relevant: Personally, I’m still not sure why publishers wouldn’t love e-books: no paper to buy, no remainders, e-books destroy the concepts of borrowing or used markets, they can take away or censor or alter or slap expiration dates on the books whenever they want… There’s a whole lot of upside to it for them. (Though I’m sure a big part of it, at least right now, is the limited number of e-book manufacturers and their attendant rules; not a lot of options if they don’t like the terms they get.)
Well, I better be dead within 14 years, too, then (a fairly good possibility), because the only pleasure I *get *in life is writing actual books that get published by real publishers, which I can put on my shelf, donate to libraries, send to friends and family . . . Not to mention I enjoy *reading *books, too, and have several bookshelves full at home.
One more reason to stop taking my cholesterol and thyroid meds!
My nine month old loves her books. Turning the page is always an exciting adventure, they make a nice clatter when thrown and the covers are nice to suck on. Try that with an e-reader.
Still a fairly small percentage of readers own ereaders. Lots of disadvantages to them. Mostly, how easily hacked they are, losing money for the publishers and seriously losing money and publishing possibilities for the authors. For the reader, the benefits are portability and ability to change font size. Grave disadvantages in ereaders for speed readers, for browsers, for people wanting to leaf back to refer to a previous page, for works requiring particular graphic layouts, as in poetry, cookbooks, science tables, etc. And ereads can’t begin to match the sensuality of reading a real book.
Besides, once civilization fails and there is no more electricity, those of us with real, physical books will be the repositories of knowledge and story til humanity recovers, when and if.
Books will still exist, though the print runs will be smaller. They will not go away, since they do their job cheaply and efficiently.
If it’s all ereaders, then people without money will be illiterate. How do you get an ebook into the hands of a ten year old whose mother can barely make ends meet?
I’m going to have to disagree with you on two points here.
clay tablets
papyrus
chalkboards ???
While people are certainly making chalkboards and papyrus, how much data is being stored there? I think it is mostly display of data/menus or art, in the case of papyrus. Clay tablets, I refuse to believe are being used anywhere especially in the case of data storage or record keeping.
Clay tablets? Why, inscribed bricks with the name of charitable donors are common, & they are merely baked clay bricks.
And the amount of data is not the topic–only whether or not it is in use.
I’m not counting the Kindle Fire because I consider that more a media device/tablet than an e-reader. Plus no e-ink, so that means tablet battery life (~1 day vs 2 weeks for Kindle) and no reading in bright light or the sun.
FWIW, I am still rapturously in love with my (now old) Kindle 2. I’ve been a book lover my whole life, and frankly the Kindle was just a huge improvement in nearly every way over printed books. Books are cheaper, I can carry them all on one small device, I can skip around and search, and e-ink is just a joy to read.
I do miss the smell of books, as well as cover art.
But yeah - printed books are on the way out. I fully expect in 10 years or so printed books to be a luxury, collector’s, or antique item. They’ll never go away (One doesn’t throw away ~1000 years of glorious print media) but the mainstream is gonna be electronic.
{raises hand) – I’ve got a wax tablet and stylus. I don’t write on potsherds, though. Too hard to turn the pages.
I, too, think that paper books will still last for a while. They don’t need a power source, and last a lot longer than e-books without a recharge, and can’t be deleted long-distance by the publisher or EMPs.
On the other hand, I’m surprised at how rapidly bookstores are disappearing*. I would have thought that used bookstores in vacation spots would still hang on, since who takes their e-reader on vacation (or how many people forget to)? And you want cheap, disposable reads without the hassle of connecting to WiFi. But the used bookstores at the vacation spots I know of have dried up.
And e-books are getting easier to find. I looked today, and found that my own book apparently exists in at least five – 5! – different electronic versions, offered by library services and publishing companies. it’s still not clear to me why so many different versions exist.
My sincere hope is that the link in the OP is wrong about the speed and completeness of the collapse of hard-print books.
I am also surprised by the rise of mall-based used book stores, which appeared when the other used book stores died.
I think the end of books as a mass medium will occur sometime in the next couple of decades when the e-book format has been perfected and is cheap enough to be disposable. Current redoubts of book readership such as beach books will fall by the wayside when a Kindle 9000 is $15. However, I imagine most bestsellers will have a traditional printrun of some sort. Look at the rebirth of vinyl in recent years. People want physical cultural artefacts as well as easy access to information.
Surprisingly, the timeline seems somewhat cognizant in terms of publishers trying and failing to reign in DRM. I mostly agree with it.
Since the hurricane (boredom) and a very tiny windfall (assets), I’ve been downloading a lot of ebooks and e-comics to my ipod touch, in legal purchases.
When I was super poor, I may have (allegedly) downloaded some e-book or e-comic content by other means.
I’m thinking, in the far future, purely “text” books will be mostly downloaded. But personally, books that are predominantly visual (graphics) (and heirloom texts) will either be bought with paper, or at the very least, bought in paper, and simul- (bought or downloaded) electronically.