Funny article about the future of paper books

[omk3]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

It's "inefficient" only when there is an infrastructure which supports the use of the car, and when you start costing THAT...

Interesting. Yes, cars need some infrastructure, as do ebooks. But would you really go back to a world without roads? Or computers?

[Dellaster]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Don't forget the joy of turning a page and finding a squashed fly that you have to scrape off with your fingernails before you can read the words underneath.

Wow, I totally forgot that experience. Erm, thanks for the reminder? Less icky but more troublesome was when some joker put their gum between the pages.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by tompe

I know you are well read on these things but are you really sure? I thought books was renewable and not at all environmentally expensive. How much energy to produce one book? My intuition think it is not huge.

You're not taking into account two things:

First, we're not talking about "one book," we're talking about enough books to level forests, run through huge paper mills and printers, transported in thousands of trucks, stored in millions of cubic feet of storage space, etc--that adds up to an enormous environmental load. And what you call "renewable" is actually being landfilled or burned (or recycled, but likely only once), releasing more carbon into the atmosphere; it's not like you can throw a book to the ground and get a tree next year. It will contribute to global warming before it contributes to the environment in a positive way.

And the time it takes to grow an adult tree that completely replaces the cut tree in handling the same environmental load is usually decades, unlike the claims of the forest industry that "we plant one tree for every tree we fell, thereby replenishing the forest." In actuality, that forest won't be replenished at that rate, because each tree felled is an additional few decades in time to regrow it and fully recover the resource, and they are chopping trees down at a much faster rate than 1 every few decades.

Second, if the energy put into producing 1 printed book is X, the energy put into producing 1000 copies of a printed book is 1000X. If the energy put into producing an ebook is X, the energy put into producing 1000 ebooks is X+Y, Y being the amount of energy needed to create 1000 copies of a digital file, which is less than X by orders of magnitude. So the cost of producing a single copy of an ebook is essentially a tiny fraction of X, meaning multitudes of ebooks can be produced for the cost of the one ebook, and much less than the cost of multitudes of printed books.

The economy of ebooks is clear, and so is its smaller environmental footprint. When you look at the overall picture, you realize you're looking at the difference between an anthill and the Empire State Building (the ebooks are the anthill). So, yeah, I'm sure.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by omk3

Interesting. Yes, cars need some infrastructure, as do ebooks. But would you really go back to a world without roads? Or computers?

Not at all, I'm just pointing out that we have a complex and expensive infrastructure, which is taken for granted.

[Jaime_Astorga]

Originally Posted by Format C:

No recording will ever replace a real orchestra in an auditorium.

Sure they will. In fact, they already have. How many people who would have in ages past resorted to going somewhere to listen to live musicians instead enjoy their music now at home with radios and iPods and internet streaming? Orchestras and other live musicians have become a small niche. Useful for rare special occasions or for people with enough spare money, time, and taste for them to afford the luxury, but the large scheme of things largely irrelevant.

Originally Posted by Format C:

What I'm saying is: there is at least a 33% of readers who won't ever be completely satisfied by ebooks as they're now.

Even if it is true that 33% of readers will stick with paper books as opposed to eBooks (and BTW, just because there are 3 kinds of people it does not follow that the population is evenly distributed among those categories), in a few more decades most of those people will be dead. Who will prop up the mass paper book industry then?

Originally Posted by omk3

Do you want them to play a sound when you turn a page?

That would probably be pretty easy to implement with a speaker, if truly desired.

Originally Posted by tompe

The difference is that horses are very expensive and inefficient. A paper book is very efficient and cheap.

Horses were once considered very efficient in the setting they operated. And then trains and cars were invented, and, relatively speaking, horses became very inefficient. Same thing with paper books; for hundreds of years, the printing press, ink, and paper have been a winning combination for producing a cheap and efficient way to communicate via books and newspapers. But now that energy-efficient computers and the internet have arrived, along with eInk screens which consume power only to change a page, paper books begin to look dreadfully inefficient by comparison. All the water and resources that must be spent growing trees, cutting them down and making them into paper, distributing the physical books in slow cars as opposed to transferring electrons via cables at near-instantaneous speed, storing them in warehouses and bookshelves as opposed to tiny flash drives, etc...

[carbonize]

We will always have books. If nothing else what will people buy to read when they go on holiday or a long journey? I mean the sort of people who only read when they're on holiday or travelling. Then there's reference books. As convenient as the internet is I find it easier to have a real book in my hands and in fact have several books on PHP, MySQL and JavaScript/DHTML. Maybe the latter is just me but I definitely find it easier to have a real bok to learn from than having to flick between a website and whatever I am working in.

[Jaime_Astorga]

Originally Posted by carbonize

As convenient as the internet is I find it easier to have a real book in my hands and in fact have several books on PHP, MySQL and JavaScript/DHTML. Maybe the latter is just me but I definitely find it easier to have a real bok to learn from than having to flick between a website and whatever I am working in.

When tablets become cheaper and more prominent, I am sure they can fulfill the role of reference material while one is doing something with their computer.

[carbonize]

I already own a Sony PRS-600 but, as Format C: said on the first page, there is something more when reading a real book. Maybe it is the feel of the paper or maybe it's because I, like a lot of others, grew up learning from books. I don't know I just find it easier to learn when reading from a real book than from reading a electronic version as strange as that sounds.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by omk3

A paper book is more efficient than a horse?

Yes, in how it solves its task.

No it's not. It's very inefficient for transporting things compared to a car. There was a time when the horse was the most efficient means of transport. But we moved on. That was exactly my point.

And the point was that for horses there is a lot of room for improvement and that is not true for the case of books.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga

When tablets become cheaper and more prominent, I am sure they can fulfill the role of reference material while one is doing something with their computer.

Maybe tech advances will solve this problem, but I'm running into this with history and other nonfiction books:

While reading one book, I often want to cross-check others. Print books are still much better for that, offering easy flipping back and forth. When I read a print book, I also have a sense of where things were in the book, so I can flip through quickly and find things. With an e-book, that's lost. Even with a Kindle and an iPad (and netbooks and a laptop, if needed), I find print books less cumbersome for that kind of reading. And I'm reading for recreational learning. Students require even more of the flipping and having multiple books open.

Of course, you can search for words and phrases with e-books, but that's sometimes more cumbersome or more limiting than with print books. Not saying that e-books aren't great; just that there are tradeoffs.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

What do you think is inside those cash registers, ATM's and POS terminals? 90%+ are still dot matrix-based.

Specialist use. I have nothing against matrix printers, it's just that desktop printers have moved on. Compared to the number of printing devices in use, it's still a small number.

So they're still heavily used. They're just no longer used by home users

... and general business users alike. I readily admit they still have their place, though. As will printed books in the not too distant future

[omk3]

Originally Posted by tompe

Yes, in how it solves its task.


And the point was that for horses there is a lot of room for improvement ...

Horses are living, breathing, magnificent creatures, and talking about improving them sounds just wrong.
That they are now regarded as not an efficient means of transport is because we now have cars, trains, airplanes and so on. Before all this technology became available, horses actually were the most efficient means of transport and I'm sure many people could not see how there could be an improvement.

Originally Posted by tompe

...and that is not true for the case of books.

I believe I made it clear that I disagree, and I listed several attributes of ebooks that I miss in paper books.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Specialist use. I have nothing against matrix printers, it's just that desktop printers have moved on. Compared to the number of printing devices in use, it's still a small number.

Want to bet? There are tens of millions of POS terminals alone...

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

The economy of ebooks is clear, and so is its smaller environmental footprint. When you look at the overall picture, you realize you're looking at the difference between an anthill and the Empire State Building (the ebooks are the anthill). So, yeah, I'm sure.

Ebooks need to be stored on web servers that run 24 hours a day, and need to be read on devices that use electricity and are made using toxic chemicals that (usually) end up in the rivers. Trees used for paper production tend to be replaced with new trees, and produce oxygen while they are growing.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Books printed on paper are superior in terms of quality of display: not only for black and white text, where the gap is rapidly narrowing with dedicated devices, but also for color photos etc. But that's a technical hurdle. The day will come when these devices will be as good if not better than printed paper.

The problem is that day still seems pretty far off.

The real resolution (in dpi) of computer screens has remained unchanged for a decade. Screens have become bigger, but there's been almost no change in their density. In 2003 I bought a Palm T3 - it's still going strong and has a 3.7" screen at 480x320 pixels. The iPhone 3GS was launched in late 2009 and guess what - it has a 3.5" 480x320 screen. Six years has produced a change in resolution that's imperceptible.

250dpi WVGA devices are slowly beginning to come out that finally show a respectable resolution bump, but so far that's only happening on small scale 3.5" screens.

Let's put this in perspective: the 166dpi of current 6" eInk screens equates to around 80 line per inch, the same resolution as newsprint. A standard-quality offset press using coated paper typically prints at around 185lpi, 123% more resolution. Truly high-end printing can go up to 300lpi. And print can do that at display sizes that are far larger than an envelope.

Apart from WVGA phones, we're seeing a step backwards with larger devices, such as the miserly 66lpi of the iPad and similar tablets. Issues of quality control scale exponentially with the size of the display, meaning that it's far harder to sustain resolution as the size goes up.

Electronic display technology still has a long way to go to match the quality of print for demanding applications. Right now it's just about good enough for the mediocre rendition of text. But it's nowhere near the quality that print can provide for images. The recent history of display technology shows little more than stagnation as far as resolution goes. Innovation has focussed instead on low-power and alternative viewing methodologies rather than tackle the tricky and expensive problems involved in improving manufacturing tolerances.

Right now there is no prospect of print dying out. Konrath's article is the digital fantacism typical of someone who needs to get out more. Maybe in 20-30 years' time electronic displays will be reaching the point where they can rival print for mainstream use. Maybe.