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Will books survive? A scorecard.

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11–20 of 22 posts

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#11
They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

This is not true! I can imagine Apple adding something to FrontRow that acts as a "Virtual Bookshelf." Heck, it doesn't even have to be Apple. Microsoft with that "Project Natal" tech would be able to make an awesome version of this! Just have that up all the time as a sort of screen-saver. Don't limit yourself to just a simulated screenshot of the backs of books. I can imagine something with "cover-flow" and a sidebar of related works. Also, one would have the ability to "magically" re-arrange the books according to whatever indexing/ordering scheme they wanted.

A coffee table sized "Surface" would be ideal for this sort of thing. A "slate" form-factor computer to sit on top of a conventional coffee table would be dandy as well. (Just have it display a different "cover" every 3 seconds in "screen saver" mode.)

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#12
To me it is totally clear that ebook readers will dominate. The key technology is e-ink, which is not luminescent. I believe that luminescent displays are more difficult to read and that products like sony reader and amazon kindle will get smaller, more efficient (remember, only need power to change the page, you can power this with a handleheld generator or solar cell) and eventually replace paper altogether. Also, paper requires killing all those tree things which are so convenient for breathing...

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#13
post #2

A teenage perspective, where computer-based reading loses nothing and gains everything. I assume an open or hackable system, which any sensible user will take advantage of. Readability: Change font, size, aliasing, and spacing to your liking. Convenience: access millions of books using search Annotation: Text editor or some kind of application. Cost: free Social flags: You can still tell people what you're reading. B…

> Rarity: If text is not online, it doesn't exist.

Be careful with that line of thinking. Time and again throughout the history of the digital age, data has ceased to exist precisely because it was in a digital form. Consider this remark from the US National Archives: "By the mid 1970s, when computer tapes for the 1960 census came to the attention of archivists, there remained only two machines capable of reading them. One was already in the Smithsonian. The other was in Japan!" An entire task force now exists at the National Archives (http://www.archives.gov/era/papers/preservation.html) to address the problem of expiring data formats (old cassettes, magnetic tape, etc).

Take the following hypothetical: if Google goes under sometime in the next decade, and takes all of its data with it, the thousands of volumes that have been archived by the Google Books project will persevere only because university libraries around the world have copies of them on their shelves. Data continue to exist even when they're not immediately available to us at our terminals.

[And this is most certainly not the forum for this, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly you seem to be speciously implicating that Judaism was surpassed by Christianity as the predominant western religion because of its failure to embrace the printing press, but I would point out to you that a.) I own a lovely bound copy of the Tanakh, published by the JPS and available from Amazon for the low low price of $23.10, b.) the total number of adherents of Christianity had leapfrogged Judaism by at the latest the 4th century--a full millennium before Gutenberg--and would only continue to skyrocket seeing as it was the de facto faith of a sprawling political empire, and c.) Judaism is an inherently non-evangelical faith, so talk of such competitive tallying is really irrelevant anyway.]

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#14
For several decades a sufficiently large number of books will be sold to make enough money out of production, distribution, storage, and sale. Then BOD will take over but books will be still there.

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#15
post #12

To me it is totally clear that ebook readers will dominate. The key technology is e-ink, which is not luminescent. I believe that luminescent displays are more difficult to read and that products like sony reader and amazon kindle will get smaller, more efficient (remember, only need power to change the page, you can power this with a handleheld generator or solar cell) and eventually replace paper altogether. Also,…

Unfortunately, the energy needed to build & power ebook readers & to generate & distribute ebooks (incl. maintaining the necessary server farms and other ICT infrastructure) doesn't grow on trees.

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to have thousands of books. I eventually got rid of them all for health reasons Interesting. Would you expand on this?

I lived for 4 1/2 years in an apartment that had to be gutted and inspected by some environmental office or other prior to me moving in. Anytime I took a hot shower or boiled water on the stove, brown goo ran down the walls that smelled like cigarette tar. While living there, I ended up bedridden for about 3 1/2 months and spent about a year at death's door. I had a long history of respiratory and other health issues…

This doesn't surprise me one bit. I think we all have sensitivities to various unnatural concentrations that we "politely overlook." Food and chemicals are the most obvious ones. Most paper gets treated, but it could also be intrinsic to paper being a fibrous, naturally decomposing product. I will have to let my parents know about this one, since they have zillions of books and my dad has persistent asthma.

Personally, I've been food-focused and have discovered that the occasional mild, but painful swelling I had was caused by the excessively high amounts of EFAs found in vegetable oils(the naturally occuring amount is tiny); simultaneously, most of my tired/inactive/sick feelings were the result of eating grains and beans. It took a very long time to sort through bullshit nutrition info and figure out the exact triggers, but minimizing intake of those three has been a tremendous lifestyle improvement.

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#17

They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies. This is not true! I can imagine Apple adding something to FrontRow that acts as a "Virtual Bookshelf." Heck, it doesn't even have to be Apple. Microsoft with that "Project Natal" tech would be able to make an awesome version of this! Just have that up all…

You may be interested in the app Delicious Library: http://delicious-monster.com/

Edit: Also, Readernaut and Shelfari both offer the sorting features you describe.

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#18
post #15
post #12

To me it is totally clear that ebook readers will dominate. The key technology is e-ink, which is not luminescent. I believe that luminescent displays are more difficult to read and that products like sony reader and amazon kindle will get smaller, more efficient (remember, only need power to change the page, you can power this with a handleheld generator or solar cell) and eventually replace paper altogether. Also,…

Unfortunately, the energy needed to build & power ebook readers & to generate & distribute ebooks (incl. maintaining the necessary server farms and other ICT infrastructure) doesn't grow on trees.

To be fair, it also takes a lot of energy to cut down a tree, ship it to a paper mill, boil and smash it to pulp, mold that into paper, ship the paper to a printer, ship the printed book to you...

I don't really know which will win in energy-efficiency terms. Probably depends on the lifetime of an ebook reader before it breaks or -- far more likely -- becomes obsolete and needs to be either thrown away or kept in the back of my closet until I can bring myself to throw it away. I really wish I knew how long that was.

Re: Will books survive? A scorecard.

#20
post #15
post #12

To me it is totally clear that ebook readers will dominate. The key technology is e-ink, which is not luminescent. I believe that luminescent displays are more difficult to read and that products like sony reader and amazon kindle will get smaller, more efficient (remember, only need power to change the page, you can power this with a handleheld generator or solar cell) and eventually replace paper altogether. Also,…

Unfortunately, the energy needed to build & power ebook readers & to generate & distribute ebooks (incl. maintaining the necessary server farms and other ICT infrastructure) doesn't grow on trees.

once the technology is mature, it will be 1 ebook reader as a client for thousands of books. They don't use that much energy during operation.
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