Let’s look over to the Engine to see this interesting commentary about print:
“With films and music being knocked from pillar to post and suing everyone, why is it that books are still the same as a hundred years ago. Print, distribute/buy, read. The only thing that changed is the distribution (ie. Amazon) …Book sales up 2.9% in 2006, for, I think, the fifth year in a row. (Not going to mention that Sony Reader Thing, I hate it.) I’m fascinated how book publishers are, ultimately, not having the problems of other producers. And really the only strugglers are people selling them in an old fashion way, but thats industry for you.”
“I think one of the reasons that books aren’t having the same problems as music or movies is in the nature of the book itself.Technology makes it easier to get access to many different things, but the experience from getting them digitally can be minimal, or drastic. Take music for example, if a cd is downloaded off the internet or bought in store, the sound waves coming to your ears are basically the same, sometime exactly the same if good quality music is downloaded. Your ears still hear the same thing. The only difference is a bought CD contains the jacket, which is a nice add-on, but not the main product itself. Movies are the same, if someone rents or borrows a DVD then copies it, then they have the same thing as a store-bought version, only cheaper. They won’t notice the difference when it’s in the DVD player and they are watching it. For books however, there is a large difference between looking at a book, and words on a screen. The manner in which the medium is enjoyed is fundamentally different, and in my opinion worse. Therefore it will not be subject to the same problems as other mediums.”
“Books = portable non-volatile storage medium that does not require electricity to operate = not going away.”
“But you need electricity to reproduce film & music anyways – and anything that is an electric medium will end up fully digitized, eventually.”
“Of course there will always be printed books. But will they retain their current place as popular entertainment medium? Every electronic reader so far has been disappointing, although each new iteration appears less disappointing than the last. It seems to me as though technological progress should get us to the point within the next decade that a portable reader that’s good enough can be made and sold cheaply enough that reading-as-entertainment will finally begin to happen more with e-readers than on printed paper. Even then I don’t see paperbacks disappearing overnight, but more likely doing a slow fade into a niche market. Art books, classic works both literary and pop, that sort of thing.”
“Book sales are still going up. Electronic readers are a dumb idea. Because, quite simply, a paperback doesn’t run out of display power before the last chapter.”
More in the link, but isn’t it enough to say that print has the benefit of tactile qualities?
January 10th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Print has a LOT of things going for it that electronic media doesn’t. One of the biggies is as the poster said – non-volatile, non-powered, super-portable storage. I can take a book literally anywhere with zero problems – the battery never runs out, I never need to turn it off because a plane is taking off, etc. The only areas where print is being overrun by digital media is in reference works, where the ability to index by anything you want to is a small price to pay for a lack of portability that you usually don’t need in a reference work anyway.
However, where print may run into a barrier is in cost. The cost of paper is still going up, and eventually the choice may be between a cheap electronic reader that lets you read anything you want for a small fee or having to shell out a large chunk of money for each book you want to buy. (Codger that I am I can still remember when paperbacks were less than $1, sigh).
January 10th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Most of these arguments in favor of books are going to look pretty silly in five years. By then, electronic paper will be on the market, and current prototypes for ebook readers using it can provide the same reflectivity properties (IE looks like paper) with hours and hours of battery life and gigs of storage.
Once mass production kicks in, does anyone really think apple won’t be able to put together something that’s not “disappointingly”.
Paper books will still have a place, just like paper comics will always have a place, but to think that because there’s no good reader now, there will never be one, is just kind of silly.
January 10th, 2007 at 10:41 am
People were predicting a paperless society to happen before the end of the 20th century. I was in library school in 1979 and we read books about it. Instead, we’re even more inundated by paperwork than ever before. I also don’t know about most other people who read these blogs, but I’m middle-aged and wear bifocals. I now have to wear special reading glasses in order to see the computer screen. There’s no way in the world I’m going to give up books to read them digitally when it’s going to cause me even more eye strain than I’m suffering now. Digital books will happen sometime in the future, but a lot farther off than pundits were predicting almost 30 years ago. I hope to be long gone before it happens, because I ain’t giving up my books.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Two points Kat
1)I don’t think anyone is preaching a paperless society in the near future any more. I know I’m not, and I know a bunch of people who work at a software company that sells document management software. They haven’t been calling it paperless office software for some time.
2)There is digital paper out there right now that for all intents and purposes looks exactly like paper. It not nearly as flexible, its more like the floppy plastic cover of a 3 ring binder, but reading it is exactly the same as normal paper. Its not pixelated or backlit, and it just looks like ink on medium. The prototypes are crazy expensive, but its going into mass production late this year/early next year in the UK.
January 10th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I think the issue is, as Ed Tuftee notes, that we don’t have screens that can offer the resolution that paper can. You can cram a lot more of information on a sheet of paper than any kind of electronic screen (if you want to keep the text readable, at least) and the tech barrier to e-books will be crossed when portable high-resolution screens become affordable.
I think, too, the next biggest issue with e-books is that people have always needed an electronic device to listen to music or watch a movie, but they’re not used to the idea that they’d have to buy an additional device before buying any books.