4 ms·

Lovely. Just a few points: - Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete - As children I almost bro

by jkot 12y ago

Lovely. Just a few points: - Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete - As children I almost broke my back, because I had to carry 10 kg of books every day. Even today I still walk funny. - In Ireland some schools banned wheeled school bags because of some school uniform nonsense. - It is impossible to buy some digital books. You can only rent some DRM nonsense. If you want to use book for decade or longer, you must buy print - in many professions textbooks are major (sometimes only) study cost. Good gatekeepers to keep poor out. - for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US.

ashark 12y ago
> - Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete Many of my books would suck in ebook form, no matter how big the screen is. Color, predictable layout so text, meta-text, and diagrams/images can be laid out sensibly and helpfully, and having two pages visible at a time are important for some books. A good 14" e-ink screen won't make books obsolete. It'll take some much larger advances in technology and in standards (ha ha, good luck) for ebook readers to match paper books.
- jkot 12y ago
  PDF?
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    Doesn't solve the lack of colour in textbooks (graphs, diagrams, photos, etc).
    - kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
      For most of the history of textbooks there was no color or only spot color for a bit of design flair. It isn't absolutely necessary to impart knowledge in most cases.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  Also, I can (and often do) have pages open in each of my physical books simultaneously, so I can have a half-dozen on my desk at once and transfer my attention between them almost instantly. Compare that to a single 14" e-ink screen. My eReader is a fantastic replacement for a stack of novels; books I will read from cover to cover, and won't want to mark up or use as a reference. It is a terrible replacement for a stack of textbooks in which much of the functionality comes from the ease of marking up, adding sticky tabs and most importantly having them all open at once in my field of vision.
- rpedroso 12y ago
  Typesetting differences between different devices is a problem that needs to be solved for e-books to become feasible in classroom settings, book club settings, etc. If a group wants to discuss a particular scene, argument, metaphor, etc., it's important to be able to point to a page number -- ebooks make this tricky. The typesetting problem also ties into the navigation problem. There are some books in my area of study that I make use of with great frequency (e.g. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Wittgenstein's Tractatus). For the most part, if you ask me to jump to a section, I can get there (within a dozen pages or so) just by opening up the book to the right location. The TOC in something like Adobe Reader do this effectively, but I haven't seen an e-reader that makes jumping to sections as quick. Annotation is another tough problem. In one particular copy of Plato's Meno, I have a series of diagrams attempting to work out a geometry problem posed in a somewhat controversial passage [1]. Some e-readers have made advancements with text annotations, but nothing I've gotten my hands on comes close to paper (yet). I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I agree with 'ashark that a 14" e-ink screen won't suffice to make books obsolete until certain problems are solved. Even then, I enjoy having a large bookshelf packed with books. Call me old fashioned, but I love the smell of old books :) [1] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821771&uid=2&uid=4 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821...
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    You're old fashioned. I used to write book reviews, and for a couple of years I literally got boxes of books from publishers every week. After a while it got insane. The local charity shops and libraries hated me on sight. Schools wouldn't touch the leftovers. I still have no idea why. I kept a few thousand for the house, and the rest ended up in the wood burner. Ebooks would have been much more practical. The flip side of paper is the way that entire forests are laid waste. A print run of a million - not unusual for a best seller - will clear cut a huge area. Then the pulp has to be bleached, which is a nasty process. Eventually most of that paper simply gets thrown away. The whole process is incredibly, stupidly wasteful.
    - rpedroso 12y ago
      I won't deny that I'm old-fashioned :) The environmental impact of paper vs e-books is something I had not considered, but the effects of producing e-readers is still non-zero. I'd believe someone if they told me the impact was less than paper books though. I'll also admit that e-books are more practical in some contexts. For instance, I prefer taking my kindle out for casual reading on the beach or in the park -- navigating the book, annotating, etc, aren't big issues for pleasure reading. In academia, there is also another advantage to e-books: an e-book never really goes out of print. In my second year of college, I had to order an expensive copy of Gaston Bachelard's La formation de l'esprit scientifique from the UK because it was out of print in the US. I look forward to a day when e-book annotation will suffice.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Large, low cost, lightweight, flexible e-ink-like screens so that the average person can have many of them, with different books in each, and the same kind of usage patterns as with multiple physical books in use at once, might. (As long as DRM isn't used to put restrictions in place that make that useless for people who aren't actively working around it.) And there is active research in all the relevant technical directions. Maybe not in the next couple decades, but we'll get there with the technology.
tzs 12y ago
> for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US It's legal. Publishers don't like it, but it went to the Supreme Court and they decided in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc in 2013 that the First Sale Doctrine applies. AbeBooks.com and Biblio.com are good sites for shopping for such books. They generally both have listings from both sellers in India and China and other countries where the publishers sell their inexpensive international editions, and from US booksellers who have imported the international editions. Buying direct from an Indian seller is usually cheaper for the book, but much more for the shipping. The USA sellers are more expensive for the book, less for the shipping. It usually ends up about the same total either way. I replaced my 30 year old, falling apart, copy of Apostol's "Calculus", which goes for around $200 per volume for the US edition, for around $25 per volume (including shipping) by getting the international edition, which is identical except it is paperback instead of hardback. It's kind of funny, because that is pretty close to what I originally paid for the books in 1977. (The content is the same as in 1977, too. Apostol wrote the books, got feedback for a few years, made a second edition in 1967, and stopped. The books are still used in a few top STEM schools, and students using them in 2015 get the exact same text I had in 1977).

by jkot 12y ago

ashark 12y ago

> - Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete Many of my books would suck in ebook form, no matter how big the screen is. Color, predictable layout so text, meta-text, and diagrams/images can be laid out sensibly and helpfully, and having two pages visible at a time are important for some books. A good 14" e-ink screen won't make books obsolete. It'll take some much larger advances in technology and in standards (ha ha, good luck) for ebook readers to match paper books.

jkot 12y ago
PDF?
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Doesn't solve the lack of colour in textbooks (graphs, diagrams, photos, etc).
  - kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
    For most of the history of textbooks there was no color or only spot color for a bit of design flair. It isn't absolutely necessary to impart knowledge in most cases.
EliRivers 12y ago
Also, I can (and often do) have pages open in each of my physical books simultaneously, so I can have a half-dozen on my desk at once and transfer my attention between them almost instantly. Compare that to a single 14" e-ink screen. My eReader is a fantastic replacement for a stack of novels; books I will read from cover to cover, and won't want to mark up or use as a reference. It is a terrible replacement for a stack of textbooks in which much of the functionality comes from the ease of marking up, adding sticky tabs and most importantly having them all open at once in my field of vision.
rpedroso 12y ago
Typesetting differences between different devices is a problem that needs to be solved for e-books to become feasible in classroom settings, book club settings, etc. If a group wants to discuss a particular scene, argument, metaphor, etc., it's important to be able to point to a page number -- ebooks make this tricky. The typesetting problem also ties into the navigation problem. There are some books in my area of study that I make use of with great frequency (e.g. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Wittgenstein's Tractatus). For the most part, if you ask me to jump to a section, I can get there (within a dozen pages or so) just by opening up the book to the right location. The TOC in something like Adobe Reader do this effectively, but I haven't seen an e-reader that makes jumping to sections as quick. Annotation is another tough problem. In one particular copy of Plato's Meno, I have a series of diagrams attempting to work out a geometry problem posed in a somewhat controversial passage [1]. Some e-readers have made advancements with text annotations, but nothing I've gotten my hands on comes close to paper (yet). I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I agree with 'ashark that a 14" e-ink screen won't suffice to make books obsolete until certain problems are solved. Even then, I enjoy having a large bookshelf packed with books. Call me old fashioned, but I love the smell of old books :) [1] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821771&uid=2&uid=4 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821...
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  You're old fashioned. I used to write book reviews, and for a couple of years I literally got boxes of books from publishers every week. After a while it got insane. The local charity shops and libraries hated me on sight. Schools wouldn't touch the leftovers. I still have no idea why. I kept a few thousand for the house, and the rest ended up in the wood burner. Ebooks would have been much more practical. The flip side of paper is the way that entire forests are laid waste. A print run of a million - not unusual for a best seller - will clear cut a huge area. Then the pulp has to be bleached, which is a nasty process. Eventually most of that paper simply gets thrown away. The whole process is incredibly, stupidly wasteful.
  - rpedroso 12y ago
    I won't deny that I'm old-fashioned :) The environmental impact of paper vs e-books is something I had not considered, but the effects of producing e-readers is still non-zero. I'd believe someone if they told me the impact was less than paper books though. I'll also admit that e-books are more practical in some contexts. For instance, I prefer taking my kindle out for casual reading on the beach or in the park -- navigating the book, annotating, etc, aren't big issues for pleasure reading. In academia, there is also another advantage to e-books: an e-book never really goes out of print. In my second year of college, I had to order an expensive copy of Gaston Bachelard's La formation de l'esprit scientifique from the UK because it was out of print in the US. I look forward to a day when e-book annotation will suffice.
dragonwriter 12y ago
Large, low cost, lightweight, flexible e-ink-like screens so that the average person can have many of them, with different books in each, and the same kind of usage patterns as with multiple physical books in use at once, might. (As long as DRM isn't used to put restrictions in place that make that useless for people who aren't actively working around it.) And there is active research in all the relevant technical directions. Maybe not in the next couple decades, but we'll get there with the technology.

tzs 12y ago

> for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US It's legal. Publishers don't like it, but it went to the Supreme Court and they decided in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc in 2013 that the First Sale Doctrine applies. AbeBooks.com and Biblio.com are good sites for shopping for such books. They generally both have listings from both sellers in India and China and other countries where the publishers sell their inexpensive international editions, and from US booksellers who have imported the international editions. Buying direct from an Indian seller is usually cheaper for the book, but much more for the shipping. The USA sellers are more expensive for the book, less for the shipping. It usually ends up about the same total either way. I replaced my 30 year old, falling apart, copy of Apostol's "Calculus", which goes for around $200 per volume for the US edition, for around $25 per volume (including shipping) by getting the international edition, which is identical except it is paperback instead of hardback. It's kind of funny, because that is pretty close to what I originally paid for the books in 1977. (The content is the same as in 1977, too. Apostol wrote the books, got feedback for a few years, made a second edition in 1967, and stopped. The books are still used in a few top STEM schools, and students using them in 2015 get the exact same text I had in 1977).