Will Books ever be "a thing of the past"?

Great Debates
1

I’m a librarian (and gay*) and this question comes up a good bit at conferences, came up frequently in grad school, gets addressed in article after article, and the prevailing sentiment tends to be “Absolutely not… books will always be here”. I’m not so sure- in fact if I had to bet the retirement fund and the dog on it, I’d go with “they’ll be virtually extinct by the time I’m an old man” (I’m 38 now [not one word, thou under-25 Dopers]).

I love the tactile of a book. When doing in-depth research I love the serendipity factor of books: more often than not I’d start out researching topic A, change it to A.1 due to something I read in passing while researching the original topic, move it to B while reading through a section of the book that had nothing to do with the exact topic I was researching (e.g. I’m researching the building of the Hagia Sophia but happen to come across a section on the Fourth Crusade in the same book, which leads me to a book on Venice which leads me to Thomas Mann, etc.) and end up writing a paper on topic K.7. Tactile and serendipity just don’t really work so well with electronic sources.

BUT, I also grew up without electronic resources. I was in my 20s before I ever used a database, 30 before I ever used the Internet, etc… The generation that is now in college (not to get all Beloit here) have been using computers since elementary school, most of them grew up with 100 channels vying for their attention span, have been loading CD ROMs and surfing the net for longer than I’ve had cable, etc… For most of them it takes an act of Congress and a cocked Luger to get them to pick up a book in the library when the full-text databases are so convenient and current (and they can access them immediately and from home- they don’t have to go upstairs to the stacks or, God forbid, order them through Interlibrary Loan) and when they do use a hard copy they often as not tend to go to exact articles or index entries and ignore the rest. (Admittedly I don’t work at Harvard but at a large state school where the kids range from brilliant to slightly-dummer-than-a-snail with most being in-betwen, but it’s been true at all the colleges where I’ve worked.) I’ve heard young 20 somethings admit “I graduted college with a B average and never checked out a book until my last semester” or other horrifying confessions.

I am specifically a GovDocs librarian and the Federal Government has already massively reduced the amount of print information it distributes. They have announced that they will distribute the vast majority of their publications in electronic format only by October 2005 (“October 2005” admittedly being the Federalese term for “November 2012”, but still…). I can easily see non Federal core titles going the same way. (Hell, I would much rather use the online versions of Britannica or Books-in-Print or other core reference titles than the print version anyday, and I’ll use google rather than a print index anyday of the week to find “blip” information.)

One bright hope for print: every college I’ve worked at had access to 10,000s of full-text electronic books but invariably students avoided them like they were fat-free mayonaisse, opting for the hard-copy whenever it was available (I even convinced a few to wait for the ILL when it wasn’t), but I think this will change when it becomes a lot cheaper and easier to load onto a PDA.

My belief: in a few years when PDAs are a lot cheaper (so cheap that if lost or stolen it’s not a really major financial loss) and inexpensive technology is available that prevents copyrighted books from being electronically reproduced cheaper than buying the download rights (basically, when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy™ or something like it exists), and generations younger than the Internet begin to enter colleges and the job market, print will begin to hemmorhage. By the time I’m what’s now retirement age I doubt there will be anything like a Barnes & Noble megastore for print.

But there are those who would argue with me that books may decrease but will always be a major presence in information dissemination. I’m eager to read other Dopers’ thoughts: if we live to be nonagenarians, do you think we’ll see a world without print? (If you’re college age or under, please say so as it may make a difference in your viewpoint.)

*That part’s not really relevant, but I don’t seem to have ever posted in a thread where it didn’t come up somewhere so I figured I’d go ahead and get it out of the way.

2

I think books will still be around when we’re old and grey. (Or older and greyer.) For the record, I’m 34 and a lawyer, so books and electronic information are critical to me. I went to college at a time when the internet was a “fad,” according to some, and personal computers were somewhat exotic. In the years since then, there’s been a sea change.

When I started in law school, we were “forbidden” to research using online resources (Lexis and Westlaw, essentially) for our first semester. There were good reasons for this; researching solely in the books can take far longer than it should, while researching solely online can lead one to miss things. We needed to know how to use both methods, so that we could decide on a case-by-case basis which method to use.

For example, one thing we need to be able to do as lawyers is to tell if a case is still good law. This requires one to, basically, look at every case that cites your case to see if that point of law has been overruled. In books, that can take forever (and since cases are decided daily while the books are only updated once a month, you can still miss things). Online, I click one button, and it lists all cases that cite my case. I click on a citation, and it takes me directly to the page and line where my case is cited. I can therefore shepardize (or keycite, depending on whose brand we’re talking about) a case in a fraction of the time online that it would take in the books.

By contrast, research in a practice guide is more fluid. I may not know precisely what I’m looking for, so I’ll page through the guide looking for something to catch my eye. You simply can’t do that online. And if your online search uses the wrong phrase (you search for “motion” instead of “application,” for example), you could miss the relevant law.

But cost is an issue. Maintaining a library of books, some of which may be used once a year or even less frequently, is more expensive than permitting access to an online source. So I think you’ll find that law firms, which used to have massive on-site libraries, will be scaling down the number of books that they have in favor of online research. But there will always be a core set of book that they’ll keep.

So, for my profession, I don’t think books will go away any time soon. And, personally, I agree that the tactile sensation of a book in my hands, the smell and feel of the paper, can’t be replaced.

3

Hijacking my own thread a bit, but do you mind if I ask how much you’re charged for online legal database services?

At one time (this was years ago) a friend who was then a lawyer was telling me about the gouge&screw prices of legal databases; the same database provided free of charge to a law student was some just absolutely ungodly amount to a lawyer (something like several dollars per minute, which for an in-depth search adds up very quickly). I was wondering if that’s receded any. (There was a bit of a scandal in Montgomery AL at that time of law-firms [especially mom & pop & Jr. type operations or those that dealt with small cases in strip mall offices] hiring law students to “intern” for $10 per hour and having them do research on the databases they had free access to [which offset the cost of paying the student by several times]).

4

I’m a middle aged male, not gay, but tolerate (just thought I’d throw that in there :slight_smile: ) And no, can’t imagine not taking a book to the beach, in bed, on the bus/train or where ever . . . Books are cool, private and don’t require power to operate . . . just the thing you want in your hammock near the beach, next to your SO, or any place you want to get away from it all. Books are cool. :wink: And I’d kick any bodies arsh who . . . welll, you get my point. :smiley:

5

Pencils and pens are still around, despite the availability of high-tech alternatives. No reason books can’t occupy a similar niche.

Advantages of a book over a PDA/eBook/whatever:
[ul]
[li]Never needs battery/charging/to be plugged in[/li][li]Reader can (nearly) instantly jump to an arbitrary place in the book[/li][li]Works under any lighting conditions, short of total darkness[/li][li]More durable than an electronic gadget[/li][li]Requires no investment in hardware/software to read[/li][/ul]

6

I can only say that I sincerely hope not.
I am a true bibliophile. ALthough for work, I probably use the internet a lot for research rather than books, I own a HUGE collection of print books both fiction and non-fiction. They are practically taking over my house. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is just something so much more there about real books!

7

I’ve been using computers since I was three or four (I am now 26) as my family was in the industry.

So, for instance, I never could get the hang of paper mail, checks, bills, and such–striking me as horribly cumbersome and pointless. However, books are good.

The only way I see anything overtaking a book is if someone invents a portable electronic reader that:

  1. Is rubbery in texture (like a rubber mat) and quite indestructible
  2. Can be written on with a stylus
  3. Waterproof
  4. Very extreme pixel count and zero flicker
  5. Of course, full color
  6. There are central hard drives by the publisher that you are registered with, as are the books you own. With your book-viewers you can select which book of those you own you wish to see and it will download and appear
  7. Similarly, there would be an electronic library hard drive with free books

I imagine books would still be sold. But for work, you would just have three or four viewers that you could bring up your various reference material on and lay on your lap.

8

IMO no. In 2000 I worked for a startup called Everybook that was trying to make a 2-screened eBook. I am a geek and a reader - you would think the target market - and I just wasn’t interested. I enjoy my books. As you might have guessed, the company failed.

9

I think books will still be around. On the other hand, I think most, if not all, professional journals will be electronic, and you’ll need to get yourself associated with a good library if you want to do research in the future. I find that sad – it’s starting to cost money for what you could do a few years ago for free.

But it’s mostly done now – try and find recent copies of things like the Science Citation Index or Physics Abstracts. In a lot of libraries these have gone elerctronic (which makes it not only cheaper and less space-occupying, but a hell of a lot easier to search). These electronic indices are connected to journals that are increasingly only electronic (again, with the staggering increase in the number of journals – JOSA split into JOSA A and JOSA B, for instance, each of which has become much thicker since they started). A lot ofhjournals became electronic in order to provide a rapid conduit for results. “Letters” journals used to serve this function, but now, for instancee, “Optics Letters” has bexcome snail-slow relatuive to the electronics Optics Express.

But as long as people like the feel of books, and the low-tech ability to take them to the beach without worrying about getting sand in the works, or getting the Reader stepped on, or lost, or running out of battery power, I think we’re still gonna have low-tech printed books.

Heck, the Status of having a printed work alone will keep it afloat – anyone can get a book or article printed online or electronically. But to have a company actually print your work in hardcover stock means that it made it past the battery of reviewing processes, and that someone in the publishing hierarchy thought it good enough or important enough to rate the effort in time and materials to get it printed.

10

This reminds me of a funny Asimov story where two scientists get the Nobel prize for re-inventing the ‘book’ after it had been lost so long that no-one even remembered it had been around before. (It also included someone re-inventing the ‘match’ similarly after self-igniting cigarettes had been the norm for a long time. “This way, there’s no risk of putting the ignition tip to your mouth and burning your lips!!”)

Personally, I found it very unlikely that the ‘film reader’ technology he described in that story would ever catch on sufficiently to be universal… you had to put your face into the projector assembly to read anything, for gosh sakes!!

11

Incidentally, bringing science fiction into it, several authors were writing about very internet-like things well in advance of the internet. H.G. Wells was the first, apparently. (I don’t recall the story, but Martion Gardner mentions it in one of his columns), where people could call into a central information bank.

M<ore famously, Murray Leinster’s A Logic Named Joe is eerily prescient about the Internet. Every household has a “logic”, whi has a keyboard and screen, and you can use it to look stuff up and buy tickets and so on. They’re all artificially intelligent, and the problem starts when one “wakes up” and overdes its “censorship circuits” (I love that he considered these an essential part of the device. This story was written in the mid-1940s, although not published until 1948 or so) People start getting recipes for poison and building plans for banks and kids start downloading porn – exactly the ills of our current, censorship-less system.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote some stories involving an internet-like entity, but I think by then DARPANET already existed, so it’s not that impressive an accomplishment.

12

No electronic form of book will ever substitute when it comes to reading to my boys at night. Those big old hard spinned kids books are usually large enough for me to hold both ends and have my arms around the little guys at the same time.

'nuff said.

13

I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, but I do expect it to happen eventually. Books will go the ways of scrolls; pens will go the ways of quills. But it’ll require tremendous leaps in technology (most importantly, screens will need to become easier on the eyes than they currently are) and big cultural shifts (fiction books now have strong cultural value among the crowd that uses them, with the objects themselves being a major draw).

Daniel

14

There are three main factors that are preventing the wide-scale acceptance of e-books:

  1. Technological
    e-books are either too heavy, or too small. (BTW, the screen resolution on some PDA’s and Tablet PC’s is practically indistinguishable from printed text.)
  2. Financial
    Most people have already purchased paper-based books and don’t want to spend money buying the electronic version.
  3. Emotional
    People want a book to “look and feel” like a paper-based book.

And it seems that many people cannot imagine an e-book that is so much better than a paper book that you just won’t want to go back to the “primitive” alternative. To have the ability to search and annotate; to have sound and video embedded in the text; to hyperlink to countless other books and reference sources; to be able to walk around with literally thousands of books in your pocket.

If someone says that current e-book technology is limited, fine. But only those with limited imagination will say that our first choice for written material will always be paper-based books.

15

I don’t know how much we’re charged, but a few dollars (two or three) a minute is likely about right. The databases are very expensive, but so am I. So from a client’s perspective, they’d rather pay for a database search that takes me five minutes (five minutes of database plus five minutes of me), than pay for me to do a longer search in the books (ten minutes of me).

It would not surprise me to hear that small firms would do something like try to get law students to use their free password. If your clients don’t have a lot of money, a few searches (just to make sure you’re still citing good law, let alone to find good law) can run a couple hundred dollars and that adds up. I know that’s one of the advantages the large firms have when it comes to low-income clients. We get free passwords from the databases that we can use for our pro bono clients, so that the people who are least likely to be able to afford us actually have access to some of the best legal work in the country. If you were to add up the legal fees donated annually by any of the “top” firms, you’d see numbers easily in the millions, but that’s only possible because we get some or all of the ancillary services donated as well (like messenger fees and database fees).

The databases give law students a free password in school so that the student learns to prefer one database over another. Then, when the student begins working, the now-lawyer will retain the preference and use one database over the other. You see that play out – the more senior lawyers seem to be Lexis lawyers, while the more junior people are Westlaw people (although I’ve seen a recent upswing in Lexis lawyers). As far as I know, though, we’re charged the same amount for either service. At other places, though, I understand that the firm would negotiate a better deal with one database than with the other, so it tells its lawyers that they should try to use X over Y.

16

Considering what you say about the ability for hypetrtexting, use of embedded other media, etc., it seems to me that once such e-books become available they will quickly morph into wht will effectively be a new medium – e-texts with all the bells and whistles, with all the capabilities and differences that will imply (just as e-journals now incorporate animated demos and the like). I suspect that in popular works, such things will be expected, and maybe most readers will come to prefer such e-texts to botring non-interactive print (which can have, at best, only color pictures).

In other words, I suspect e-texts will rapidly evolve into something wholly different, and we printed-book readers will be left with traditional books.

17

Why don’t you consider notepads and ball-point pens as successors to scrolls and quills?

18

I do, just like I consider e-books to be successors to paper books, and papyrus to be a successor to clay tablets.

Daniel

19

Let’s assume nobody ever successfully creates a ‘virtual book’ that would adequately replace the experience of reading long works on paper. I could still see plenty of scenarios in which books become all but a ‘thing of the past’ due to the march of technology.

Already, there are plenty of examples. People have already mentioned things like research resources and professional journals. But also… Remember encyclopedias? Remember Straight Dope books? Remember when every piece of software came with a thousand-page manual? I could easily envision a world where books that are compilations of short articles or data move to digital or online form. So I could see a world without paper dictionaries, cookbooks, travel books – pretty much without reference books at all.

Other forms of portable entertainment could also start to edge in on books. Thanks to Audible.com I’ve “read” more Terry Pratchett on my iPod than I have on paper. Portable movie and audiobook players might someday replace a lot of the casual reading that people do today. I think we’re going to see a huge surge in portable digital entertainment in the next few years, which will certainly reduce the market for books (which often serve exactly that purpose for people.)

Who knows if the combination of these things is going to be enough to make books ‘obsolete’ (or at least, a rare, niche hobby). I guess my point, though, is that technology making books obsolete probably won’t happen because somebody figures out a single device that does everything paper books do but better. Instead, it’ll probably happen because lots of different devices do a superior job at one or two of those functions.

20

I think people here are forgetting that the majority of the world doesn’t even have electricity, much less PDA’s and computers. Not to mention the millions upon millions of books that already exist. I am only 23 and I expect books to be around for a large part of my life, probably even until the end. I suspect it will be like tv supplanting radio as the medium of choice. Radio still exists, but tv is more universally used.

I’m also one of those students that greatly prefer electronic databases. It’s just so handy to do so much research with a mug of hot chocolate and covered in blankets while the snow and wind are blowing like crap outside. And there are so many journals you can access, too. Plus ILL goddamn takes forever to arrive, and you can’t be entirely sure when it’ll arrive, either. And I usually need books longer than a few weeks, especially if I’m writing a paper. But yeah, if there’s a physical book already in the library, I would never even consider an electronic one, no matter how cold it is outside.

I suspect that if you checked, you’d find that it’s journals and articles that are mostly being taken from e-databases, not books.