Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Books Won't Die

theparisreview.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 93 posts

Re: Books Won't Die

#31

Post by jaredklewis »

libraryatnight wrote: post #12

I've tried every format and device and I can't read e-books. Nothing, to me, beats a real book. I don't enjoy the experience for one, it strains my eyes (yes even e-ink). But also, and this is something I wouldn't have considered back when I was younger and it seemed like books surely must die in their dead-tree form, I actively seek ways to not be interacting with electronics and books are sublime for this purpose.…

As a fellow curmudgeon who really loves dead-tree books, I still sometimes smile thinking about an appearance Maurice Sendak made on a variety show shortly before he died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPEZj21NmE

I have a few reasons to prefer paper books:

- They don't have to be charged.

- First sale doctrine applies. No 50 page TOS explaining what I can or cannot do with my own books.

- I can lend my books to friends and family

- After reading a book, I can easily give it or sell it to someone else

- Notifications don't pop up when I'm reading.

But like Sendak, I think I mostly just have an innate aversion to ebooks. I just don't like them. To me, an ebook feels like one of those electric wine bottle openers: efficient, but charmless.

Re: Books Won't Die

#32

Post by tomkat0789 »

What will the books of the future be made from? Will people living on Mars or in space stations pay dearly to ship books made from dead trees all the way from Earth?

Re: Books Won't Die

#33

Post by meerita »

reaperducer wrote: post #9
keerthiko wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more available to lower income groups. "Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go that way soon too" In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won. Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance, but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a…

This is true. When eBooks started becoming big, my wife threw out all of her books figuring that electronic was the future. She really regrets doing that.

I don't. Unless you see a value of collecting them, having a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a book means nothing if you can access that content next time in any format. The only argument to that is that you like to collect that particular edition because of the artwork, paper, etc. Outside that, there I cannot find any other logical argument.

Re: Books Won't Die

#34

Post by mulmen »

reaperducer wrote: post #9
keerthiko wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more available to lower income groups. "Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go that way soon too" In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won. Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance, but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a…

This is true. When eBooks started becoming big, my wife threw out all of her books figuring that electronic was the future. She really regrets doing that.

She threw out books? Do you mean literally in the trash or sold them to a book store?

Re: Books Won't Die

#35

Post by WalterBright »

meerita wrote: post #29
WalterBright wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF readers are pretty pathetic. For example: 1. cannot recall where you were the last time you were reading the file 2. cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can) 3. herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code 4. no way to create a 'stack' of temporary bookmarks so you can scroll around while keeping your place 5. no way to se…

Probably PDF is not the best format. EPUB can be quite good. I'm an EPUB reader and I never found any impediment. Most of the examples you mention, like "cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can)" are not really useful for reading, but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram. The rest of the points I think are improvements to ebook experience that can be achieved but has litt…

> but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram

Consider the aspect ratio of most monitors. It's ideal for side-by-side viewing of pages. Also, most books that have mixed illustrations, pictures, and text are designed for side-by-side viewing.

This, and all of the other shortcomings I mentioned, are technically very easy to accomplish. For example, Foxit does support side-by-side display, but if you switch it to full-screen display, that goes away. It's almost like they had to work extra hard to make side-by-side not work.

Side-by-side is also very useful for "flipping" through a book. You can do it literally twice as fast as page-by-page.

Re: Books Won't Die

#36

Post by WalterBright »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #21
WalterBright wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF readers are pretty pathetic. For example: 1. cannot recall where you were the last time you were reading the file 2. cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can) 3. herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code 4. no way to create a 'stack' of temporary bookmarks so you can scroll around while keeping your place 5. no way to se…

There are a number of PDF readers around, and as an academic who spends most of the day working with references in PDF format, I can tell you that Zathura combined with a tiling window manager and a little shell scripting (for temporary bookmarks) can do most of what you say you want.

Thanks for the reference. BTW, I've now and then sent these lists to PDF reader makers. None have ever paid any attention nor acknowledged it. So I complain here :-)

Re: Books Won't Die

#37

Post by msla »

Tablets didn't die. We still inscribe words onto metal and stone. And, yes, I'm including tombstones and other memorials as being tablets.

I can't think of anyone who still makes scrolls, or papyrus, or vellum, or writings on birch bark, but I'm sure someone does it, if only as art.

Some technologies do die, like Williams-Kilburn tubes and mercury delay line memories, but others are relegated to roles where they still shine.

Re: Books Won't Die

#38

Post by telotortium »

JohnFen wrote: post #18
libraryatnight wrote: post #12

I've tried every format and device and I can't read e-books. Nothing, to me, beats a real book. I don't enjoy the experience for one, it strains my eyes (yes even e-ink). But also, and this is something I wouldn't have considered back when I was younger and it seemed like books surely must die in their dead-tree form, I actively seek ways to not be interacting with electronics and books are sublime for this purpose.…

For me, it depends on the book. For recreational reading, I strongly prefer real, printed ones. For reference materials, I strongly prefer electronic ones (stripped of DRM and converted into a non-proprietary format). I can keep my entire technical library on my phone and I can grep through the entire set of books for something in particular that I need to find. I remember the days when my technical library was in pr…

How do you do this in practice? What do you use for OCR, and what do you use to search all the books on your phone?

Re: Books Won't Die

#39

Post by WalterBright »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #19
WalterBright wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF readers are pretty pathetic. For example: 1. cannot recall where you were the last time you were reading the file 2. cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can) 3. herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code 4. no way to create a 'stack' of temporary bookmarks so you can scroll around while keeping your place 5. no way to se…

> herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code Yes, PDF readers are bad. What makes the problem worse is that the PDF itself, is sometimes a resource-intensive format as well. Finding information from a modern datasheet is a pain, finding information from a scanned 300 MiB datasheet from the 1980s is real pain. Lots of rendering. None of the problem (other than…

What I mean by concurrent display code is the display of the pdf file is always up-to-date even when the renderer cannot display the data fast enough.

The trick is to abandon the current render whenever the position in the file changes, and start a new render.

I did this back in the 1970's (!) when I designed and built a 24x80 glass terminal. The 6800 microprocessor simply could not keep up with 9600 baud serial data coming in. So what I did was hook an interrupt handler to the serial port, which stored the incoming characters into a 24*80 circular buffer.

The display renderer would start at the beginning of the circular buffer, writing characters to the display buffer. If more characters entered the circular buffer which would invalidate the display, the renderer would simply start over.

Whenever the data coming in paused slightly, the display would catch up almost faster than you could see.

It worked great!

I since incorporated the same idea into the MicroEmacs text editor in the 1980s, meaning the editor display was always crisp and responsive despite running on an 8088. (Other editors would fall behind, and when you took your finger off the auto-repeat page-down key they'd eventually catch up. This behavior is what most PDF readers exhibit.)

Post reply on HN