Digital: Fleeting or Lasting?

[Window Bar]

Printed books tend to be around for many years, often rediscovered 200 or even 2000 years after publication.

What about digital? Will digital books be a cultural resource of greater, lesser or similar value? As technology changes, will obsolescence of stories become automatic?

--WB

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

>>As technology changes, will obsolescence of stories become automatic?

Data storage is becoming cheaper and more efficient; I think digitization will prevent texts from being lost or obsolescent. Even now, sites like Project Gutenburg give you access all sorts of old texts that you might otherwise have to hunt down in antiquarian bookstores.

Ultimately, a digital book is just a book in another format. Depending on how comfortable one is with digital formats a digital book has as much potential use as a physical one. Value is harder to peg. The contents should have the same value in any format; it seems unlikely that old digital 'editions' will have the same collectible cachet and inflated value as old physical editions of books.

 

[K. Riehl]

Eventually we will have constantly updated databases on our personal links that will have every book ever printed. Will they be of great value? Only if they retain the ability to capture the imagination.

Someday we will see of a program with the ability to create a digital picture version of a book based on interpretation of the text. On that day I would say the era of the book will be at an end.

As with music, the day that a book is released in a digital format is the day it will be stolen and duplicated. In that sense the value will decrease almost immediately.

 

[Rodders]

No, digitisation is the future. It has been coming for a while now. We use the PC as an online resource for Music, films, games and now books. As the techology for these "E/Books" improves, so the price comes down and makes it more accessible. I personally don't like it as i prefer to hold something that i own. It's definately the way forward for the environment. No paper, no printing nothing.

It'll also be interesting to see what people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett do with thi skind of thing. I can see them buying the rights to some older classics and posting them on line for free.

 

[Connavar]

Something will never become fully digital dominated, paper books are like that.

The right for books,publishing will make sure things like Google free book stuff wont happen.

For us who cant read online and digital books don't mean anything.

No fear either of ever losing the paperback no matter how big e-books get. Heck CD books are more common,better sellers.

 

[elvet]

I'm a die hard book fan, but many older books are out of print. If it comes to be that the only way I can experience a book (other than paying an arm and a leg for purchasing rare editions and shipping) is to download it, then so be it.
I'm a long time PC adventure gamer, and a similar trend is happening. Most of us love our hard copy disc games, manuals, boxes,, etc. but now many games are being released in download format only. I only consider it if the game I want is rare, or unavailable in hard copy.

 

[thepaladin]

I suppose we can't stop it, but it saddens me. We will lose so much when actual books are swallowed by Ebooks. I was in school in the 50s and 60s. I don't know if any of you remember back that far, but the preditions for the future went like this. In the next ten or twenty years we'll have labore saving devices. Workers will be able to work fewer hours and still get good wages. We'll have thirty and than twenty hour work weeks. There will be time for reading and further education which will be available to more people. On and on it went. We'd have more time for ourselves...right. I was a Commerical refrigeration tech for 25 years. When I started it wasn't unusual for a part to have to be ordered and take a week or more to arrive. Arrangements had to be made to wait and still keep thing going, refrigerated trucks, moving goods, etc. By the time I went off work if somebody had to wait a day they were livid. "Can't you express it here today?" We now work longer hours and for less pay. A lot of non or semi-skilled jobs go to places where people work for starvation wages. We have an entire generation (or 2 or 3) who have no concept of spending several hours wandering through the "stacks" at the library, looking for "inspiration" in the form of an interestin book. Spending several hours or an entire afternoon in a used book store to find a given book or maybe books from a list is almost unthinkable. We (including me) go on line and send to the library for what we want. Looking to buy a given book? Go on line and order it.

The joy of time spent and finding that unexpected treasure is all but gone. Curling up in a favorite corner with a good book and a glass of iced tea, or hot tea, or coffee... can you do that with your "Kindle" or laptop? The very tactile sensation of holding a book...how long before we lose it? I'll stay with my hard back and soft back books as long as possible.

 

[Rosemary]

I sometimes hate technology! I agree with Paladin, there's nothing better than sitting down and reading a real book.

 

[HareBrain]

Someday we will see of a program with the ability to create a digital picture version of a book based on interpretation of the text. On that day I would say the era of the book will be at an end.

Fantastic - algorithms can perform the tedious work our imaginations have to do at present! Roll on the future!

/sarcasm

 

[thepaladin]

"sarcasm" (I understand)

By the same token fairly soon they won't need us to even reproduce new humans. I mean why be that "hands-on" about anything"? All that "ooky" touching and....stuff. No, science fiction has come up with several futures where all that, "unpleasentness" is totally done away with. I mean if we really need "love" (yuk right?) we can meet digital people in games and....stuff.

BIG SARCASM!

 

[Jon Sprunk]

It looks like e-books are gaining in popularity, but I only read printed books. Someday, a collection of books in your home may seem terribly old-fashioned like lava lamps, but I couldn't imagine a home without them. Shelves of kindles isn't the same thing.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

But you wouldn't actually have shelves full of kindles. You'd have one e-book-reading device on which you could load books from the computer. Your library could be stored on your hard disc.

Yes, I know I'm being literal here, but think about it.

A single CD-ROM can contain all the books on sacred-texts.com (or at least that's what the site claims). A terabyte of storage, let's say, could contain nearly everything you'd want to read in a lifetime in one compact little unit. Maybe one day we can simply subscribe to a service that loads everything released in our areas of interest onto our storage devices. I'd love to have a larger library without running into any more storage problems! I live in a rather large apartment, but I'm going to run out of space for shelves within the decade at this rate.

The book as a physical artifact will probably demonstrate more traction than doomsayers preach - we still have newspapers delivered to our doorsteps everyday, after all. Eventually, however, there will be a generation that no longer uses physical books except for a few hobbyists - and I can sympathise with these hobbyists as an LP collector myself. But the fact is that the advantages of digital books are just too great to be ignored.

Something is lost, something is gained. The gains outweigh the losses in several important ways, or we wouldn't have switched from oral transmission to text in the first place.

 

[J-WO]

Would a world where books were free to download and share on some post-kindle device be all that bad? So what if the all the financial remuneration vanished overnight? The little Darwin on my shoulder shouts 'great!'. No more cash angle, no more writers in it just for the money. The worst reason to write would be a need for approval.

I'm not saying it would be perfect (Day jobs would eat up a lot of hours--then again, maybe it would be possible to get public grants if you proved yourself worthy), just different. There'd be a lot of love put into the novels of that age, if nothing else.

As it is, I think the printed page will always remain to some degree. But a massive cultural shift to digital isn't the doomsday we might predict. Afterall, its what everyone seems to be using in TNG, Bab 5 etc. And they all seem happy enough, even if their fashion sense has vanished somewhat...

 

[Connavar]

To me its a pure fantasy to say e-books will take over totally. Its like people that said in the 50s that in 20-30 years we will have flying cars,go to space or something.

Not that E-book is hard science wise but the physical book is too important to many people. Plus its a lot bigger market wise, people are greedy enough to still have the paper book.

Look at other more technical mediums they are still the same. For example people will go to cinema for the experience instead of downloading,pay for the movie and watch it in the computer.

Plus who cares if E-book ever takes over completely it will take like 100 years i wont be here to see it anyway

 

[Jon Sprunk]

But you wouldn't actually have shelves full of kindles. You'd have one e-book-reading device on which you could load books from the computer. Your library could be stored on your hard disc.

I was being facetious.

Perhaps e-readers will bring a revolution to the industry, but I will remain firmly stuck in the Printed Age. To each their own.

 

[The Ace]

Digital has incredible possibilities but a paper book canbe read using only hands and eyes.

Sometimes low tech. is easier to use.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Interestingly, an e-book reader does not need telepathic prompts or the operation of foot-pedals! If you can use a computer you can probably use an e-book reader.

I'm a late adopter - I was the last person I knew who got a mobile phone, an mp3 player, even a home PC. I am keenly interested in making the best use of technology, so I let the early adopters have their moment of fetishistic glee, act as beta testers for the manufacturers and then, when the dust settles and the product type has reached some degree of stability and maturity, I get one. So I'll probably have an e-book reader in another year or so. I'll still read paper books, but I can't afford to overlook another book-access mechanism with distinct advantages of its own.

J-WO's ideas re: the de-linking of financial remuneration and book writing are interesting. I would like to see the e-book shaking the publishing industry up the way the mp3 is. However, most musicians are capable of making a basic living through live shows, I am not sure if there is any real alternative to the royalty system for writers.

 

[K. Riehl]

How long before people start "tweaking" book files? I don't like certain parts of a story and I change it slightly before I release it back into "the cloud"

Government's don't like certain essays/stories and they edit them at the server/database level.

The government wants to know who is reading the Anarchist Cookbook. They track the file downloads.

Google/Amazon are developing algorithms to "smooth" the sales rankings and popularity of titles. Thus they can influence what is being read.

And my favorite, blocking programs that can block titles like they currently do for porn, adult websites etc. The ability to control and influence what people read is a very powerful and seductive tool, take China and their control over the internet for example.

 

[J-WO]

J-WO's ideas re: the de-linking of financial remuneration and book writing are interesting. I would like to see the e-book shaking the publishing industry up the way the mp3 is. However, most musicians are capable of making a basic living through live shows, I am not sure if there is any real alternative to the royalty system for writers.

I think by that point, society will have to ask itself a lot of searching questions about how much it values literature and whether its worth a slice of the tax cake- public grants etc. Some countries would be more forward thinking than others at first but--due to the 'global village'--things would roughly balance out sooner or later.

Give this process enough decades and you might just see a return of Patronage in a big way. After all, information would have no financial worth and only prestige would remain. And if you can't have the prestige of creating it, the next best thing would be that of facilitating it. Your Richard Bransons of this world, I guess--rich people with vision and a desire for the public's approval. Then celebrities of all stripes. It'd be nice to see them do something useful with their money instead of blowing it on ten sports cars.

So there you go--a world of both public and private patronage, almost certainly with real paper books still knocking around for the hardcore collector. Not a perfect system, admittedly, but no worse than the present one. Just different.

 

[Vladd67]

Digital has incredible possibilities but a paper book can be read using only hands and eyes.

Sometimes low tech. is easier to use.

Interestingly, an e-book reader does not need telepathic prompts or the operation of foot-pedals! If you can use a computer you can probably use an e-book reader.

I think what Ace meant was you can just pick up a book and read anywhere for as long as you like, you don't need to plug it in or worry about batteries failing.