Books Won't Die
theparisreview.org
Books Won't Die
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Books Won't Die
#2Correct, books won't die, but copyright (as we know it now) will.
What's needed in this industry is social innovation, not technological innovation.
Technology is already doing all it can.
Re: Books Won't Die
#3Note that this is basically an advertisement for the author's new book which primarily focuses on the future of reading:
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/leah-price/what-we-talk-ab...
Re: Books Won't Die
#4Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on and at the whim of when the company will revoke your license to read it?
Nevermind you're also subject to poor application design. Has anyone tried to read books on Windows and had a decent time? I can't find a single app that keeps track of where I am in ebooks or PDFs and it's terrible.
Re: Books Won't Die
#5Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on and at the whim of when the company will revoke your license to read it? Nevermind you're also subject to poor application design. Has anyone tried to read books on Windows and had a decent time? I can't find a single app that keeps track of where I am in ebooks or PDFs and it's terrible.
You are right about the problems of the existing e-book systems but going back towards felling of trees isn't the right solution. It is possible to build resilience and redundancy on web, either through open source or with a distributed design, and this is something a new player will have to bear in mind while building a replacement.
Re: Books Won't Die
#6I didn't think the idea that books would die to be all that widely help of an opinion. So it's a pretty easy argument to agree with. Change? sure. Adapt to new reading habits mediated by technology? Yep. Incorporate features made possible in the digital realm? That too. Die? No.
Re: Books Won't Die
#7I didn't think the idea that books would die to be all that widely help of an opinion. So it's a pretty easy argument to agree with. Change? sure. Adapt to new reading habits mediated by technology? Yep. Incorporate features made possible in the digital realm? That too. Die? No.
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 hurry.
Re: Books Won't Die
#8I hope if you know spanish you can read my essay about "the end of books made of paper" http://minid.net/2013/02/07/el-inevitable-fin-de-los-libros-... if you don't I think Google Translate will do a good justice. Basically, it is clear that the concept of books will be difficult to eradicate. I find it hard to believe that we lose this great cultural format; the compilation of writings with a particular objective. Reports will continue to exist, but books, as a format, they will dissapear on paper format but they will continue on digital. Because of this, it is probably that some things will change.
I have an startup right now about resuming books on audio. It's becoming increibly popular among the new generations: they don't want to read an entire book, they want the best highlights of it. Maybe in the future we will face a change in the format we write books: ultra resumed, different grammar, different format.
Re: Books Won't Die
#9I didn't think the idea that books would die to be all that widely help of an opinion. So it's a pretty easy argument to agree with. Change? sure. Adapt to new reading habits mediated by technology? Yep. Incorporate features made possible in the digital realm? That too. Die? No.
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.
Re: Books Won't Die
#10Why buy a book when you're limited to the device you can read it on and at the whim of when the company will revoke your license to read it? Nevermind you're also subject to poor application design. Has anyone tried to read books on Windows and had a decent time? I can't find a single app that keeps track of where I am in ebooks or PDFs and it's terrible.
You are right about the problems of the existing e-book systems but going back towards felling of trees isn't the right solution. It is possible to build resilience and redundancy on web, either through open source or with a distributed design, and this is something a new player will have to bear in mind while building a replacement.
History proves that nothing is more resilient than dead trees.
Plus, trees are at least renewable, compared to all the e-waste in landfills now.