
Books Won't Die - animalcule
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/17/books-wont-die/
======
aaron-santos
I interviewed at a print on demand book binding automation shop about five
years ago. Naturally one of the topics was the sustainability of paper media
on short and long terms. I'll be the first to admit that the interviewer had a
vested interest in selling the idea that paper books aren't going away any
time soon, but the argument was compelling.

As long as children are taught to read on paper books, we will have an
emotional connection to the printed page.

I've taught my children to read first using board books and then moving on to
paperbacks. Printed books are uniquely suited as teaching materials for
children. They are robust to dropping, food spills, and drink spills (if
you're quick to react). Losing one book doesn't imply the loss of the whole
library.

Most of my kids' book reading takes place at home so the portability afforded
by e-readers is not a concern. Children love repetition and reading the same
book over and over helps them internalize the information so being able to
carry around thousands of books electronically isn't a use case for them.

Maybe some parents are teaching their kids to read on tablets or e-readers. If
so, I'd love to hear your experience and the pros and cons.

~~~
HSO
> _As long as children are taught to read on paper books, we will have an
> emotional connection to the printed page._

 _I 've_ learned to read on paper books and I have _zero_ attachment to them
at this point.

In fact, I cringe when I occasionally have no alternative (or just scan it
myself if it's not too much).

Old books now seem to be broken to me. You can't do anything with them except
read (linearly). So much functionality is missing, it's unbearable :DD

I have no idea how representative my experience is but I know of at least a
few others who feel similarly.

~~~
sateesh

      Old books now seem to be broken to me. You can't do anything   
      with them except read (linearly)
    

At times this is a plus too. While reading online many a times I get
distracted by some reference and go tangential looking for more details on
that than moving on with the book.

~~~
HSO
The „trick“ I use is I‘m offline by default and have to „turn the internet on“
on most devices (except the phone). Been doing thst for 8 years now, works
pretty well.

------
libraryatnight
I've tried every format and device and I can't read e-books. Nothing, to me,
beats a real book. I don't enjoy the experience for one, it strains my eyes
(yes even e-ink). But also, and this is something I wouldn't have considered
back when I was younger and it seemed like books surely must die in their
dead-tree form, I actively seek ways to not be interacting with electronics
and books are sublime for this purpose. I work all day on computers, I carry a
small one in my pocket that bothers me constantly through the day, so when I
want to read. I want to read. I have no desire to have that experience coupled
in anyway to the internet or electronics.

~~~
JohnFen
For me, it depends on the book.

For recreational reading, I strongly prefer real, printed ones.

For reference materials, I strongly prefer electronic ones (stripped of DRM
and converted into a non-proprietary format). I can keep my entire technical
library on my phone and I can grep through the entire set of books for
something in particular that I need to find. I remember the days when my
technical library was in printed form. It took a lot of space and often I'd be
unable to predict which book I'd need at home vs at work, and end up not
having it available. On this front, electronic books were a total game-changer
for me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Huh, I have the reverse preference. Recreational books are read sequentially,
like tape, so they suit e-book readers well. Also, they're usually plaintext.
Reference/education books - with those I need fast random access, which mostly
rules out the usual digital form, and extra formatting and media used (tables,
images, figures, equation) make them problematic on e-book readers.

~~~
kosievdmerwe
Same for me. I would say an electronic book has the advantage in
searchability, but a well curated index might actually beat a naive text
search most of the time.

~~~
TeMPOraL
On desktop, maybe, but I haven't used a decent enough reading software (like
most web stuff, Amazon cloud reader is barely fit for purpose, and while I
don't know what's "state of the art" in epub/PDF readers on desktop, the few I
tried didn't facilitate reliable search and fast navigation either), and most
technical e-books I keep as PDFs anyway, because the formatting almost always
matters.

On e-book readers like Kindle, a profound disagreement. I can easily find what
I'm looking for in a 1000 page book even without using an index in less time
than it takes to type in a search query into Kindle's searchbox (especially
since I switched from the old keyboard Kindle to touch-only Paperwhite). If
there's a well-curated index at the end of the book, it's only that much
better.

I think software could get somewhat closer to paper experience, but it needs
to be _faster_. As long as random page access takes more than ~100 ms from
selecting the page to full render (and in my experience, it's often close to
300-500 ms), you cannot really flip through an e-book the way you would
through a paper book.

(Tangent: it's another of many cases where performance _actually matters_ ,
because the difference between lighting fast and fast enough to tick boxes on
your sprint plan is entire family of use cases.)

------
hsitz
It's amusing to note the short time frame the "books won't die" idea is
working with. The original Kindle came out in 2007, just over ten years ago.
That's a tiny blip in the passage of history.

I don't know what the long-term fate of books will be. What will things be
like in 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? I do know that if you expected books
to be gone barely ten years after the first mainstream ebook reader your
perspective is severely limited. I was resistant to ebooks for a long time;
I'm relatively recent adopter; I'm surprised at how much headway ebooks have
made in such a short time.

Several years ago I got rid of several thousands of pounds of my books. They
were like a dead anchor in my life, a huge pain in the ass to move every few
years. I love having a library of ebooks that are weightless, spaceless, and
can be easily copied among different devices. I have de-DRM'd most of them and
can have them in whatever format I want. It's a feeling of freedom. I think
long and hard before I buy a paper-book now, and rarely do.

As far as aesthetics, yes, it's true, reading a good paper book is a nice
experience. I'm not sure it's better than reading a book on the Kindle app on
my iPad Pro, though. Different, but both are nice. And the paper book
experience has no analog to switching to a different book in your library when
you're reading but not at home. Or to carrying your library with you wherever
you go. There are other important things (e.g., searching) that paper books
simply have no good way to do.

~~~
LegitShady
cars are nice but they wont replace horses. your car ever mowed your lawn for
you before? You ever hear of mowing a lawn before cars? Your car ever come
when you whistle because it likes apples?

this car thing is a fad. I'm putting all my money in horses.

------
tzs
What I find missing with ebooks is a sense of 3D space.

With a paper book, my brain seems to tag my memories of sections and scenes
with how far into the book they were and where they were on the page. If I
need to refer back to some earlier section when reading, that tagging lets me
find it quickly.

With an ebook I don't get that page tagging, and also depending on the format
and the reader might not get position on the page tagging.

For some ebooks, the ability to search by words is enough to make up for this,
but for a lot of books I can find a given previously read section much faster
and easier with the paper edition. If it is a book where I am likely to have
to go back frequently, I'll probably get the paper edition.

Perhaps someday they will be able to make a thin enough display that someone
can make an ebook reader that has a hundred of so screens bound together like
the pages of a book. That would be awesome.

~~~
trevyn
I’ve had some success with liberally highlighting ebooks — the highlights
become the “tags”.

------
Donald
Note that this is basically an advertisement for the author's new book which
primarily focuses on the future of reading:
[https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/leah-price/what-we-talk-
ab...](https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/leah-price/what-we-talk-about-when-
we-talk-about-books/9781541673908/)

------
ineedasername
I didn't think the idea that books _would_ die to be all that widely help of
an opinion. So it's a pretty easy argument to agree with. Change? sure. Adapt
to new reading habits mediated by technology? Yep. Incorporate features made
possible in the digital realm? That too. Die? No.

~~~
keerthiko
I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more
available to lower income groups.

"Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go
that way soon too"

In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won.
Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance,
but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a hurry.

~~~
reaperducer
This is true. When eBooks started becoming big, my wife threw out all of her
books figuring that electronic was the future.

She really regrets doing that.

~~~
robin_reala
I moved country and had to make decisions about which of our books were
valuable. In the end our criteria came down to ‘would we read it again’, ‘is
it a nice edition’ and ’does the physical book have a special memory’. That
meant that we gave away probably half of the books. You can always buy or
download them again in the future.

------
meerita
I hope if you know spanish you can read my essay about "the end of books made
of paper" [http://minid.net/2013/02/07/el-inevitable-fin-de-los-
libros-...](http://minid.net/2013/02/07/el-inevitable-fin-de-los-libros-en-
papel/) if you don't I think Google Translate will do a good justice.
Basically, it is clear that the concept of books will be difficult to
eradicate. I find it hard to believe that we lose this great cultural format;
the compilation of writings with a particular objective. Reports will continue
to exist, but books, as a format, they will dissapear on paper format but they
will continue on digital. Because of this, it is probably that some things
will change.

I have an startup right now about resuming books on audio. It's becoming
increibly popular among the new generations: they don't want to read an entire
book, they want the best highlights of it. Maybe in the future we will face a
change in the format we write books: ultra resumed, different grammar,
different format.

~~~
WalterBright
PDF readers are pretty pathetic. For example:

1\. cannot recall where you were the last time you were reading the file

2\. cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book
can)

3\. herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to
write concurrent display code

4\. no way to create a 'stack' of temporary bookmarks so you can scroll around
while keeping your place

5\. no way to set a paper-like background

6\. no way to open multiple pdfs at the same time and display them in
different windows (even my 30 year old text editor can do that)

7\. display the first page of the pdf as the thumbnail

8\. make the thumbnails much, much larger - like the size of a paperback book

(Some pdf readers do one or two of these.)

It's like the people who program pdf readers never use them.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to
> write concurrent display code_

Yes, PDF readers are bad.

What makes the problem worse is that the PDF itself, is sometimes a resource-
intensive format as well. Finding information from a modern datasheet is a
pain, finding information from a scanned 300 MiB datasheet from the 1980s is
_real_ pain. Lots of rendering.

None of the problem (other than keyword searching is not available) exists in
a physical book, the human brain is a great pattern-recognizing machine.
Nothing beats flipping through the pages and using fingers as markers yet...

~~~
WalterBright
What I mean by concurrent display code is the display of the pdf file is
always up-to-date even when the renderer cannot display the data fast enough.

The trick is to abandon the current render whenever the position in the file
changes, and start a new render.

I did this back in the 1970's (!) when I designed and built a 24x80 glass
terminal. The 6800 microprocessor simply could not keep up with 9600 baud
serial data coming in. So what I did was hook an interrupt handler to the
serial port, which stored the incoming characters into a 24*80 circular
buffer.

The display renderer would start at the beginning of the circular buffer,
writing characters to the display buffer. If more characters entered the
circular buffer which would invalidate the display, the renderer would simply
start over.

Whenever the data coming in paused slightly, the display would catch up almost
faster than you could see.

It worked great!

I since incorporated the same idea into the MicroEmacs text editor in the
1980s, meaning the editor display was always crisp and responsive despite
running on an 8088. (Other editors would fall behind, and when you took your
finger off the auto-repeat page-down key they'd eventually catch up. This
behavior is what most PDF readers exhibit.)

------
codeulike
We still have candles and candleshops. Candles are an old obsolete technology
but they're still nice to have around.

------
sieabahlpark
Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on and at the
whim of when the company will revoke your license to read it?

Nevermind you're also subject to poor application design. Has anyone tried to
read books on Windows and had a decent time? I can't find a single app that
keeps track of where I am in ebooks or PDFs and it's terrible.

~~~
icebraining
> Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on

You mean a single-use device made of paper, that you have to wait to be
shipped if buying online? I agree, that's terrible :)

~~~
sieabahlpark
You must have never owned a Kindle that died on you. Now all my books are
inaccessible.

~~~
jpindar
Did you somehow get banned from Amazon?

My Kindle died on me. All my books that were from Amazon are still available:

1\. for download to the Kindle app on my computer

2\. for download to the Kindle app on my phone

3\. for download in a format I can read (and deDRM and convert) with Calibre

The ones that weren't from Amazon were on my computer before they were ever on
the Kindle, so they're still there, along with the ones I backed up.

------
Koshkin
I am sure the Babylonians thought tablets to be superior to papyrus.

~~~
jhbadger
Yeah, papyrus can burn to ash. If you burn a tablet, it just gets more
permanent. In fact, a lot of cuneiform tablets that have survived are ones
that were in fires.

------
tomkat0789
What will the books of the future be made from? Will people living on Mars or
in space stations pay dearly to ship books made from dead trees all the way
from Earth?

~~~
shkkmo
They will probably use a paper like substance created using biochemical
factories and print locally.

------
blhack
Just a general piece of information to share here, since I think everybody in
here has an interest in e-readers:

did you know that you can get a mint condition kindle 3 with 3G (free data for
the device for life) on ebay for $30?

I consider the kindle 3 a nearly _flawless_ device (save for it's lack of a
frontlight). The fact that they are available, and the included 3G which just
_works_ , for $30, is a technological miracle in my mind.

~~~
robin_reala
The hardware may be good, but you’re locked into Amazon’s non-standard formats
unfortunately.

~~~
CDSlice
You can also read DRM free MOBI and PDF books on Kindles. It's also possible
to to break the DRM on Kindle books if you own a physical Kindle device.

------
msla
Tablets didn't die. We still inscribe words onto metal and stone. And, yes,
I'm including tombstones and other memorials as being tablets.

I can't think of anyone who still makes scrolls, or papyrus, or vellum, or
writings on birch bark, but I'm sure _someone_ does it, if only as art.

Some technologies do die, like Williams-Kilburn tubes and mercury delay line
memories, but others are relegated to roles where they still shine.

------
qaq
In my personal case it is because there are no good e-ink devices. That gray
background plus either bad size or horrible interface and horrible price are
not doing it for me.

~~~
hombre_fatal
This comment kinda reeks of that "everything is amazing and nobody is happy"
thing. I mean, "horrible" everything? Really? A device that lets you carry
practically infinite books with you? Because the background color and all the
available dimensions out there don't scratch your specific preference?

~~~
qaq
Mobile phones, tablets, computers, TVs are amazing e-ink devices are not
working specifically for me :(.

------
m52go
Correct, books won't die, but copyright (as we know it now) will.

What's needed in this industry is social innovation, not technological
innovation.

Technology is already doing all it can.

------
soperj
I wonder if books would be considered a carbon sink? Or if the paper
manufacturing process would negate it.

------
jimmaswell
Horseriding never fully died either.

------
gregjotau
After using the Onyx boox max (all versions up to 3 which was released
recently), I am convinced books will die.

~~~
wibble10
Can you elaborate on your experience with it? Is that thing really worth €820?
I like the idea of a giant e-reader but that’s really quite a lot of money for
such a device.

~~~
gregjotau
For me it is worth it.

Made a review some time ago
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5tIhuk8yAU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5tIhuk8yAU)

Only used to read technical stuff and I have not missed physical books.

