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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Some of us are planning for a long run, you know...  |
I have a friend who used to say if he couldn't take it with him, he wasn't going. I haven't heard him say that since the day he was in the emergency room with congestive heart failure and blood pressure so high their equipment couldn't measure it. The ER intern kept walking by muttering under his breath "I don't know why he's not dead" over and over.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Still, no, pbooks aren't going away soon... but they're going to get very expensive.
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No, they'll actually get cheaper, adjusted for inflation, and be produced largely as print on demand. Quality might suffer, but those buying hardcovers 20 years from now won't be interested in poor quality. Not this year, mind you, not next, but we'll live to see it. An sfnal view that's eerily accurate so far can be found in Julian May's Intervention (in which the narrator owns a used book store), with "book plaques" being the order of the day for new stuff, but old, paper books being highly collectible. (Also treated gay marriage as an everyday thing, interestingly, though the brother/sister couple - with children - is still pretty outre even today).