9 ms·
Rumors of the Demise of Books Greatly Exaggerated
- wu-ikkyu 10y agoI'm not surprised ebooks still haven't taken over the printed book in popularity, considering the purposefully horrid user experience of most/all ebooks. As it stands ebooks are still constrained by the mores of the age of the printing press, namely the prohibition of copy/paste which is one of the primary advantages to digitizing information.
- burkaman 10y agoWhat ereader does not allow copy/paste? I don't think I've ever run into that.
- valine 10y agoBoth kindle and iBooks have their own implementation of copy paste that prevents you from copying too much at a time, and auto inserts citations into your clipboard. The kindle copy functionality feels particularly sluggish and hard to use.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoI find also that the vast majority of ebooks are very crudely formatted compared to tree-books. And they often have instantly obvious glitches that would have been picked up by the most oblivious proofreader. It seems that publishers regard them as a "digital byproduct".
- Koshkin 10y ago10-pound textbooks should definitely go. To be honest, I have a hard time singling out the kind of book that cannot be adequately (and attractively) represented in a digital format. Being able to zoom images/diagrams in and out, search, translate, etc. all seem like a big thing.
- ghaff 10y agoEbooks work well for linear (mostly) text. As soon as you have a lot of graphics or you're skipping around a lot in a reference book, they work a lot less well. (Some primarily text-based books that are purely reference, e.g. dictionaries, do work fine in electronic format but in my experience they're the exception.)
- makmanalp 10y agoI don't think this is really a limitation of the medium - a properly designed ebook can have links, references, figures, etc. EPub does suck a bit for this purpose, since it does ignore a lot of typesetting cues, like page breaks. PDFs suck for a different reason - it can't adapt to different text and screen sizes. But we've already solved this problem - HTML does exactly this. Up with HTML books!
- trentmb 10y agoAren't EPubs just zipped HTML+graphic assets?
- makmanalp 10y agoWow, looks like you're right! Then why do epub ebooks suck so bad in general? Probably publishers don't care enough to make them nice.
- yarrel 10y agoFlipping pages is faster for fuzzy search and navigation. I love searchable text though. And a hardcopy book has a built in full-screen productivity mode...
- coldpie 10y ago> To be honest, I have a hard time singling out the kind of book that cannot be adequately (and attractively) represented in a digital format. I can pick up books for a couple bucks at the used book store, and for free or maybe a quarter or two at garage sales. I don't care if I drop them or lose them or if someone borrows them and never gives them back. I'm not likely to be a target for mugging for reading a book the bus or train. I don't have to worry about some web store going out of business or some business deal changing or DRM breaking and invalidating my books. Sometimes digital is better, but not always.
- Mendenhall 10y agoUnrelated side note. I went to the local book store yesterday and the archeology and anthropology section wasn't even one shelf. I should have checked to see how big the sasquatch and ancient alien section was.
- i_don_t_know 10y agoThose sections are one and the same in my local book store. :-(
- canadian_voter 10y agoTalk to the staff. Tell them what you're interested in. But also buy a book or two. I listen a lot closer to the customer that complains and buys a stack, than to the "customer" that tells me I have the nicest bookstore they've ever seen and walks out without buying anything. Based on feedback and sales, we axed our romance section (I didn't like it anyway) and more than doubled the size of philosophy section (and it would be even bigger if we could keep the damned things in stock). A handful of customer can drastically change the nature of a bookstore. We have whole sections like "The Sea" and "Exploration" that exist for the half dozen people that come in a few times a year and are looking for that stuff. Vote with your dollar; be the change you want to see. :) Source: I am a bookstore owner.
- sharkweek 10y agoI think books, actual physical copies, will see a resurgence as more people recognize how difficult it is for the human brain to handle the constant firehouse of information the digital age overwhelms us with. Books are often times consumed at a leisurely pace, typically don't feel like a bombardment of spastic information, and offer a sense of accomplishment after completion. They let the mind explore, they make us think, they make us feel all sorts of emotions, but all at a far more reasonable pace. I have the hardest time imagining that the constant stream of news and social updates modern technology provides is actually healthy for us, I simply can't imagine we've evolved fast enough to keep up.
- norea-armozel 10y agoI must be an outlier here because I prefer reading online sources to books. And for anything in book format I prefer audiobooks. I'm not sure why this is the case for me because I use to read many books as a kid and teenager. The access to the Internet gives me more options for different kinds of information (where else can you get access to the rough draft of a research paper if you're not a researcher or college student?) which I think is why I prefer reading online sources. Books are often my second option when the information I'm looking for is hard to come by (aka old).
- ng12 10y ago> actual physical copies What does that have to do with anything? I agree with the rest of your post, and I actually think that's magnified by my Kindle since I always carry it with me so I can zone out on the subway or during lunch.
- thelegday 10y agocheck out richard stallmans notes on ebooks: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.en.html i am an ebook fan myself, but it has some valid points, one of which is ebooks are digital and it is really easy to censor or erase information that way. in the past you had to track down and burn physical books, now you can just send a request to kindle over the network
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoMy eyes don't do fine print very well. An e-book means I get eyestrain, or else (if the print is big enough) it means I'm scrolling all the time. Books (with not too small a print) work better for me. On the other hand, my daughter is in college, and I worry about what her backpack is doing to her spine...
- canadian_voter 10y agoGet her a hip belt so the weight isn't resting on her shoulders?
- jimmaswell 10y agoThis widespread phonomenon of eyestrain from digital screens has always seemed so strange to me. I spend over 10 hours a day (sometimes closer to 15) looking at screens (CRT and flatscreens) and I don't feel any different. Maybe it's genetic?
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI've had cataract surgery. My lenses have been replaced with fixed-focus lenses. My left eye focuses at infinity (I haven't seen this well at distance since kindergarten), and my right eye focuses at 20 feet. Of course, I get some range on either side of that, but it degrades the further away from 20 feet you get. I can read a book with medium-sized print in good light. With a computer, I can get further away from the screen. But something I have to hold at arms length, and that has small print because of a small screen size. That's not so good for me.
- gnicholas 10y agoI was struck by the first line: "35% say they read more than 11 books in the past year" It turns out my surprise was warranted — this is the number of books that respondents started reading during the year. It doesn't mean they finished any of the books. From the linked survey: During the past year, how many books did you read, either all or part of the way through? Setting aside the question of self-reporting bias, this is a material omission from the article. Putting this as one of the "highlights" at the top is very misleading. I think "read more than X books" is generally considered to refer to the number of books finished, or at least substantially completed.
- bigtunacan 10y agoI don't find it to be a surprisingly high number. I wouldn't consider myself an avid reader; these days though I try to track everything I read on Goodreads. This lets me get recommendations for other things I might like, but more importantly serves as a reminder of things I have read in the past so I don't re-read the same thing, or can locate and refer back to something I read in the past in the case of non-fiction materials. According to Goodreads I completed 10 books in 2016 and read roughly 3500 pages.
- gnicholas 10y agoI'm not surprised that there are some people who read this much, but 1/3 is not in line with other statistics I've seen. According to a literacy foundation, 45 million adults, or roughly 20% of the US adult population, are functionally illiterate (read below a 5th grade level), and in another survey 44% of US adults said they did not read a single book in a year [1]. I work in literacy and see stats like this regularly. I've never seen anything indicating that 1 in 3 US adults reads (and finishes) a book nearly every month. I am even a little surprised that 1/3 report starting at least 11 books a year, based on the basic illiteracy facts I've seen elsewhere. I'm certainly interested to see if anyone has seen other relevant stats. 1: http://literacyprojectfoundation.org/community/statistics/ http://literacyprojectfoundation.org/community/statistics/
- 10y ago
- zitterbewegung 10y agoI think books like comic books or special edition books that would target the same group of people that like Vinyl records would be a way forward for books. For instance I read A Killing Joke which is a graphic novel without paying for it. Once I walked into a comic book store I bought the Hardcover comic. Typically when I go to a comic book store I will buy graphic novels or at least story lines that are self contained. Sometimes I will buy individual comics but most often I gravitate to collections.
- DelaneyM 10y ago"Books" is also not a static category. Just like the way we consume movies has changed to adapt to technology and taste (3D, lux theatres, etc.), the book business has innovated as well. Amazon is printing books at the edge for rapid delivery, printing presses are featuring 4800+ DPI films and 1200 DPI standard text, old companies are embracing what it means to be enhance the reading experience and promote emerging authors (I'm biased, but check out: http://www.bookofthemonth.com http://www.bookofthemonth.com as an example.)
- mrcactu5 10y agoi can't speak for everybody or for all book consumption. in New York City book consumption is unevenly distributed. there are places like Strand Bookstore where thousands of books in carts are left out in the street. I found a copy of the CLRS Algorithms textbook for $1 or $2. there are places in the Bronx where book consumption is more limited. in fact with the close of Barnes and Noble there will be no bookstores in the Bronx.
- i_don_t_know 10y agoI got really close to buying an ebook reader that's tied to a big book store chain here in Germany. A colleague suggested that I check out Hemingway. So I looked for ebooks of his in the ebook store. They didn't have any German ebooks, just print copies. They did have English ebooks but they were at least twice as expensive as the English print copies. A big international competitor wasn't any better. The ebook versions of Hemingway novels weren't available in my country. I don't know if I can get them through another store, but presumably then I won't be able to get German books anymore (other than Hemingway). Or at least it's going to be a hassle. tl;dr I'm sticking to print books.