Nonsense. There are a raft of good PDF readers that allow for annotating, highlighting and scribbling on PDF files. Not for the kindle, obviously, but works well on tablet thingies, which are a fine or adequate form factor for reading. And IRS tax forms can be downloaded as pdfs that have embedded text boxes that you can easily fill out on your computer.
The downside to electronic text books is that they have extremely tight IP on most e-book formats, so they are kind of hard to share. At the prices that are charged for textbooks, college students would rather have a physical object that they can get a few dollars back in trade when they are finished (though some or many textbook sales come with an access code for a related website, so there is that much less physical thing for your money).
Yes, you have to draw a line somewhere. That’s the rule.
I suspect paper will start to become like film… It has its uses, and it will remain available as a specialty item, but the volume produced will be a lot smaller.
For me, it’s not so much scribbling notes and highlighting, but flipping back and forth. For most reference books and some fictional books, I’m flipping back and forth between this page and that, or referring to an illustration from the last chapter, or I need to skim the index, or whatever. And it’s really easy to do with a 3D book, I can visualize that what I want is “about a half inch from the front, on the left page, on the bottom” and a quick scan through the front of the book will bring it up in seconds. Ebooks are very bad at this sort of thing.
Yeah, you can maybe search the text using a crappy touch screen keyboard. But it just doesn’t cut the mustard in my mind.
Indeed, with many pdfs, the TOC is embedded in the file so that you do not even need to go to the front, you just click/tap on an icon or menu and you have it right there. With my reader, you can easily bookmark pages and pull the bookmark view right up the same way. And, as for that crappy onscreen keyboard, I would be surprised to find a usable tablet that is unable to use a proper bluetooth keyboard.
I would not celebrate the total demise of the dead-tree book. They are easier on the eyes, sometimes more portable and their batteries never wear out. But e-things never get moldy or smell like cat piss.
I disagree. I know that there exist ways to highlight and annotate, but they are slow and cumbersome to use when compared to leafing through something and scribbling quick notes and highlighting the old fashioned way.
It depends on your definition of modern. This trend started about 55-65 years ago. Plantation trees I planted for Weyerhaeuser as a kid in 1971, were harvested 25 years ago, primarily as dimensional stock for the construction industry, with the balance going to the pulp/paper business. This method was initiated in the generation*** before my ***time, so it is nothing modern to me. Subsequent plantings afterwards were devoted more and more toward pulp production for paper… To the point that the “dimensional” mills were shut down, and all the harvests were going into paper production in the 1990’s.
May be different for the young, but books offer tactile pleasure. I was given a Kobo Book reader thing and in reading it felt like being given a piece of plastic processed cheddar after years consuming wonderful cheeses. it captured words on the page and that is where the comparison ends.
I’ve also travelled places where books have been scarce and the few novels have almost turned black and fallen apart, having passed through so many hands. The idea of a book is to convey information, but the digital book industry seems largely driven by firms trying to monetise access rather than fostering ideas and facilitating access.
As an extension of your, and other (dead tree) comment(s)… AMEN.
The tactile advantage of print media has an advantage (for me) that has not as yet, been supplanted by any “”“E”“” form.
The future holds who knows what… Undoubtedly, we will enjoy something that supplants the “hard copy” experience we enjoy now. Unfortunately we are not there yet… Despite the early adapters’ premature notion of superiority.
When I’m reading an ebook novel and want to check something from a previous chapter, I have to wrack my brain to remember a word on that page, search for it, and then read through a list of fragmented sentences. If it were a paper book, I can flip and skim the pages much faster than pressing the lagging touchscreen. HOWEVER, my Nook is a godsend when I travel, something I dreamed about for years before ebooks existed (“a computer the size of a paperback book…”) and I would never go back to the days of packing a half dozen books and trading them when finished.
Funnier still. On a whim, I bought a Kindle collection of very old stories by Andre Norton, an author I read a lot in my early years. I kept meaning to read it so I’d put it on my phone; but when I tried to download it to my new iPad, it said my license count for that book had been exceeded. Yay technology!
Newsprint and magazine paper are way down and still dropping. Newsprint is a big share of the market.
OTOH, boxes are up.
I used to save good shipping boxes for later re-use. Now they get broken down and put into recycling right away. Otherwise The house would be buried in them. If I need a box for something, it’ll show up at the door soon enough.
But always remember: when plants are shutting down or laying off people, it’s more than likely due to automation than anything else. E.g., during the debate over the spotted owl in the NW years ago, people kept forgetting: While jobs in the lumber industry were rapidly disappearing, production was going up.
Yep, this is it. Very few industries go away completely. You can still buy new buggy whips, flintlock muskets, and candles. Do we still have a candle shop on every corner and a dozen independent candlemakers per town? No. Is the candle industry “dead”? Of course not.
A brass bell factory (specializing in the huge “jingle” bells you see on harnesses) with roots in the colonial era burned down up here a few years ago.
It’s been rebuilt. And the great New England Harness Bell crisis is over.
You’re just being pendantic. There’s reams of these jokes, but I think we should just turn over a new leaf and forget them.
To get to the OP point - I remember when the daily edition of the newspaper (and there were 3 competing papers at one point) was thicker than the current weekend edition. Especially the want-ads - now virtually gone - was the thickest part of the paper. That’s the major loss. Many of the closing-down paper mills produced cheap newsprint by the ton.
Former paper mill employee here; I was at the Macon Paper mill which has not only been going strong nonstop in the same spot on the river since the late 1940s but has some major equipment from that era still in use. They shut down every piece of equipment for a couple of weeks once or twice a year to maintain them, otherwise they run 24/7.
What’s increased in demand is the packaging that requires paper board (what goes on cardboard and into corrugated packaging like the ubiquitous Amazon boxes); that comes into the plant as round stock (pine logs harvested from fast-growing forests in GA, usually) but also from chipped wood and pre-/post-consumer paper goods recycled onsite. There’s a hopper out front locals know they can dump their boxes and paper from home to be recycled into, it’s usually dumped out twice a day. So long as it’s not foil-coated or shiny it’s all the same to the pulper.
Attendant to the mill business is a nearby facility that converts the Kraft stock the mill makes to many different consumer packages (the rectangular 12 can package of pop that fits perfectly in your fridge is the biggie); as reliant as they both are on each other I don’t see an end soon for either kind of facility.
