4 ms·

Why is this a sad thing, besides nostalgia? On my Kindle, I have a semester's worth of textbooks, a dozen periodicals, and a few novels I've been busting throu

by jmduke 15y ago

Why is this a sad thing, besides nostalgia? On my Kindle, I have a semester's worth of textbooks, a dozen periodicals, and a few novels I've been busting through. And that's a mere fraction of the allotted storage space, whereas it would take two backpacks to fit all of the physical copies. As someone for whom reading is a passion, not a hobby, this is far and away my favorite technological development of the past ten years.

corin_ 15y ago
Is nostalgia not worth caring about of and for itself? I'm a happy Kindle owner, but there's something about it that just isn't quite the same. No doubt it's only sad for people who grew up reading paper not screens - which probably will even include people being born now - and one day nobody will care how their great-grandparents read... but for now there's still plenty of people for whom books are more than just the sum of the words. In fact I think it's generally a case that physical objects can do more emotionally than digital replacements - and I don't mean that the story, or whatever the object is for, will be better, but the item itself. The books that mean the most to me were either given to me by people I care about, or passed down generations. The same thing can become true of watches (won't be quite the same to inherit a four-generations-old iPhone...)
- jmduke 15y ago
  That's my point, though. I don't like books -- I like the words in them. I certainly realize that there's a tendency to form attachments to physical objects (and, as others point out, vintage book stores are sure to thrive in the coming years) but its a tiny loss compared to the massive benefits of the digital age. Some people buy watches for aesthetics, not to tell time; generally speaking, these are the people passing them down. Personally, I'm a fan of anything that pushes away from materialism for materials' sake.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - roguecoder 15y ago
    For technical matters I much prefer physical books. It is trivial to flip between two or three pages at once, anywhere in the book. Reference books fall open to the page I'm most likely to need. I can leave three or four lying open to different pages and glance at them without needing to hit any buttons. I still haven't found an eBook interface that is as easy to pick out a single book from as my bookshelf, spines showing, organized by topic and then author. My cargo pants pockets exactly fit a paperback book, and if I ruin a paperback by being caught in the rain I'm out at most $8. Books are a great combination of disposable and persistant. I can read a book one-handed, in the bath, and can easily and quickly share books with friends or use them to answer questions I am asked. More than half of my library has been bought used, most for $2-$4, which no eBook even comes close to on price. The best thing about eBooks is how much cheaper the paper versions have been as everyone else sells them off. eBooks have a long way to go before they are as useful to me as a physical book.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      There are benefits to both sides. I do agree with your points, at work for example I'll often print off a page or two of something (even something I'd just written) for ease of having it right in front of me to reference. But there are also benefits to ereaders. I live an hour away from London on the train, and I go there for a night out probably just over once a week on average, as well as fairly often going there and other places for meetings. Until I got a Kindle I would chose between taking my bag with iPad and/or a book, or having nothing to do on the train - the latter on occasions when having a bag with me would be a nuisance the rest of the time. Now I can always read on the train, and it slips into my pocket the rest of the time. Equally for longer journeys, whether it's a couple of days back where I come from (Oxford, ~3.5 hours away from me) or a longer trip, maybe abroad - as I'd always have a bag and/or suitcase taking a book wasn't a problem, but now I don't have to think about how many books I need, or how much space they'll take, and if I fancy a break from what I'm reading I have 100s of alternatives ready to go. But yes, there's plenty of times I'll chose to pick up a physical copy rather than the Kindle, and plenty of books I have in both forms.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
dmbass 15y ago
I too own a Kindle and one of the major downsides I see is that you cannot share it. You cannot give or lend a book to someone when you are done. You cannot put a Kindle on your coffee table and have anybody who picks it up be able to flip through and actually read without losing your place in the book. It's a device designed around a single user which is often enough not the use case for a physical book.
- icefox 15y ago
  Don't forget we are at the very beginning of tablets. With book devices already under $99 pretty soon you can buy "digital books" for the cost of a paperback book today and have a dozen of them in your house and lend them out all you want.
  - jaysonelliot 15y ago
    With the disruption of the publishing industry and death of bookstores, Amazon and Apple are emerging as the only two companies to set book prices. Other small players will be involved, but they can't compete with the big guys any more than a self-published indie band competes with Lady Gaga. Creative works are not fungible. They've already shown that they will price ebooks at the same price as hardcovers, and pocket all the savings themselves. From a price perspective, their "competition" with each other will be as meaningful as Coke vs. Pepsi, and you'll have about the same amount of choice.
- cullenking 15y ago
  If you are OK with using your own moral compass to determine whether it's OK to share your ebook, you can very very easily do this with Calibre. Connect your kindle, back up your books onto your computer, which you can then share with friends and family with a simple email.
thezoid 15y ago
The one problem I have with eBooks is the lack of transferability that is inherent with print books. I've read a number of books I'd love to lend to my friends, but because I bought the kindle copy I cannot do that. With a physical book the only hoop I have to jump through is meeting up with them and giving them the book. I've done this a number of times through university with textbooks and it saved me and several colleagues hundreds of dollars.
xibernetik 15y ago
The rise of the printing press lead to the decline of scribes and handwritten books. Illumination, for the most part, is a lost art. The rise of gun-based warfare lead to the decline of sword-making in Japan. It never recovered. The movement from an oral society, where stories were passed down by story-telling, to a written society in ancient Greece, lead to the decline of the art of story-telling. Disruptive technological advancement can, and has historically, lead to the loss of an artform, even while granting numerous additional benefits. The decline of an art is sad - it is a loss of a form of expression we once had. I love my Kindle, but I also love old leather-bound books. The subtle creases and variation that marks some of my old books as unique and the sentiments/bond created by handling a physical object cannot be replicated by my Kindle, and I recognize that even while choosing to use my Kindle for convenience for most reading. Even small things like some books are designed around the structure and material, with pages or patterns that are dependent on having two sides you can view in parallel, are a huge difference. It's a new media that, if it does replace the old for the most part, will result in a small loss. There are benefits (such as hyperlinks) but there is still a cost that should be acknowledged.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I think you raise some valid history, but all of those things were mass produced items replacing hand-made items. This is a mass-produced, commercial product being replaced with an electronic product. Is there much of an art to lose? We're not losing the visual design component.
  - xibernetik 15y ago
    There are different textures to pages from different books, and the design of some books to play with the shape of the media. (Douglas Coupland did it in either Microserfs or Jpod, forget which.) Also there is some difference in how you format the pages - Kindle books you can choose your own font and its size/spacing, while in a print book it has been chosen for you. It's small, not everyone cares about it, but you can notice the typography has changed if you compare books from 30 years ago to books printed in the last five. You could really make the same argument about using a monitor to read books versus holding a physical book, just with the difference of a Kindle being designed around being held versus propped up on a desk.

by jmduke 15y ago

corin_ 15y ago

Is nostalgia not worth caring about of and for itself? I'm a happy Kindle owner, but there's something about it that just isn't quite the same. No doubt it's only sad for people who grew up reading paper not screens - which probably will even include people being born now - and one day nobody will care how their great-grandparents read... but for now there's still plenty of people for whom books are more than just the sum of the words. In fact I think it's generally a case that physical objects can do more emotionally than digital replacements - and I don't mean that the story, or whatever the object is for, will be better, but the item itself. The books that mean the most to me were either given to me by people I care about, or passed down generations. The same thing can become true of watches (won't be quite the same to inherit a four-generations-old iPhone...)

jmduke 15y ago
That's my point, though. I don't like books -- I like the words in them. I certainly realize that there's a tendency to form attachments to physical objects (and, as others point out, vintage book stores are sure to thrive in the coming years) but its a tiny loss compared to the massive benefits of the digital age. Some people buy watches for aesthetics, not to tell time; generally speaking, these are the people passing them down. Personally, I'm a fan of anything that pushes away from materialism for materials' sake.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- roguecoder 15y ago
  For technical matters I much prefer physical books. It is trivial to flip between two or three pages at once, anywhere in the book. Reference books fall open to the page I'm most likely to need. I can leave three or four lying open to different pages and glance at them without needing to hit any buttons. I still haven't found an eBook interface that is as easy to pick out a single book from as my bookshelf, spines showing, organized by topic and then author. My cargo pants pockets exactly fit a paperback book, and if I ruin a paperback by being caught in the rain I'm out at most $8. Books are a great combination of disposable and persistant. I can read a book one-handed, in the bath, and can easily and quickly share books with friends or use them to answer questions I am asked. More than half of my library has been bought used, most for $2-$4, which no eBook even comes close to on price. The best thing about eBooks is how much cheaper the paper versions have been as everyone else sells them off. eBooks have a long way to go before they are as useful to me as a physical book.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    There are benefits to both sides. I do agree with your points, at work for example I'll often print off a page or two of something (even something I'd just written) for ease of having it right in front of me to reference. But there are also benefits to ereaders. I live an hour away from London on the train, and I go there for a night out probably just over once a week on average, as well as fairly often going there and other places for meetings. Until I got a Kindle I would chose between taking my bag with iPad and/or a book, or having nothing to do on the train - the latter on occasions when having a bag with me would be a nuisance the rest of the time. Now I can always read on the train, and it slips into my pocket the rest of the time. Equally for longer journeys, whether it's a couple of days back where I come from (Oxford, ~3.5 hours away from me) or a longer trip, maybe abroad - as I'd always have a bag and/or suitcase taking a book wasn't a problem, but now I don't have to think about how many books I need, or how much space they'll take, and if I fancy a break from what I'm reading I have 100s of alternatives ready to go. But yes, there's plenty of times I'll chose to pick up a physical copy rather than the Kindle, and plenty of books I have in both forms.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

dmbass 15y ago

I too own a Kindle and one of the major downsides I see is that you cannot share it. You cannot give or lend a book to someone when you are done. You cannot put a Kindle on your coffee table and have anybody who picks it up be able to flip through and actually read without losing your place in the book. It's a device designed around a single user which is often enough not the use case for a physical book.

icefox 15y ago
Don't forget we are at the very beginning of tablets. With book devices already under $99 pretty soon you can buy "digital books" for the cost of a paperback book today and have a dozen of them in your house and lend them out all you want.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  With the disruption of the publishing industry and death of bookstores, Amazon and Apple are emerging as the only two companies to set book prices. Other small players will be involved, but they can't compete with the big guys any more than a self-published indie band competes with Lady Gaga. Creative works are not fungible. They've already shown that they will price ebooks at the same price as hardcovers, and pocket all the savings themselves. From a price perspective, their "competition" with each other will be as meaningful as Coke vs. Pepsi, and you'll have about the same amount of choice.
cullenking 15y ago
If you are OK with using your own moral compass to determine whether it's OK to share your ebook, you can very very easily do this with Calibre. Connect your kindle, back up your books onto your computer, which you can then share with friends and family with a simple email.

thezoid 15y ago

The one problem I have with eBooks is the lack of transferability that is inherent with print books. I've read a number of books I'd love to lend to my friends, but because I bought the kindle copy I cannot do that. With a physical book the only hoop I have to jump through is meeting up with them and giving them the book. I've done this a number of times through university with textbooks and it saved me and several colleagues hundreds of dollars.

xibernetik 15y ago

The rise of the printing press lead to the decline of scribes and handwritten books. Illumination, for the most part, is a lost art. The rise of gun-based warfare lead to the decline of sword-making in Japan. It never recovered. The movement from an oral society, where stories were passed down by story-telling, to a written society in ancient Greece, lead to the decline of the art of story-telling. Disruptive technological advancement can, and has historically, lead to the loss of an artform, even while granting numerous additional benefits. The decline of an art is sad - it is a loss of a form of expression we once had. I love my Kindle, but I also love old leather-bound books. The subtle creases and variation that marks some of my old books as unique and the sentiments/bond created by handling a physical object cannot be replicated by my Kindle, and I recognize that even while choosing to use my Kindle for convenience for most reading. Even small things like some books are designed around the structure and material, with pages or patterns that are dependent on having two sides you can view in parallel, are a huge difference. It's a new media that, if it does replace the old for the most part, will result in a small loss. There are benefits (such as hyperlinks) but there is still a cost that should be acknowledged.

tomkarlo 15y ago
I think you raise some valid history, but all of those things were mass produced items replacing hand-made items. This is a mass-produced, commercial product being replaced with an electronic product. Is there much of an art to lose? We're not losing the visual design component.
- xibernetik 15y ago
  There are different textures to pages from different books, and the design of some books to play with the shape of the media. (Douglas Coupland did it in either Microserfs or Jpod, forget which.) Also there is some difference in how you format the pages - Kindle books you can choose your own font and its size/spacing, while in a print book it has been chosen for you. It's small, not everyone cares about it, but you can notice the typography has changed if you compare books from 30 years ago to books printed in the last five. You could really make the same argument about using a monitor to read books versus holding a physical book, just with the difference of a Kindle being designed around being held versus propped up on a desk.