Why keep digital books?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Some of my friends still threaten me with what they will do to me if I ever ask them again to help me move. My boxes of books and magazines are infamous (almost as bad as my wife's old Varityper, which needs nothing less than a crane to shift). But I want to keep those books and mags, because I go back and reread them, too.

I'm with Bob, if there was a way to convert all of that to electronic files, I'd lose the boxes, lose the bookcases, lose a LOT of paper weight. And I'd never throw away a book again for lack of space.

Are e-books disposable? No more or less than paper books. Disposable... like a lot of things... is in the eye of the beholder.

[tcv]

How long can one keep stuff in a digital format? Especially if no prevailing standard ever comes of anything...

[da_jane]

My floor to ceiling bookcase was made by Mr. Da_Jane out of plywood and it works fine for shelving. Before I went e- I had 1500? paperback books stuffed into this thing. Each shelf held three deep of the books. I'll have to dig up a pic somewhere.

[yvanleterrible]

How do you all classify anything?

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by tcv

How long can one keep stuff in a digital format? Especially if no prevailing standard ever comes of anything...

If you buy only unenecrypted stuff or convertible stuff and make it html/rtf and back it up on a cd or external drive as I do, I am pretty sure you will be able to read your e-books whenever you want.

If you must buy a locked-in, non-convertible book (something I never found necessary), you can get a good snag program, write a script to turn the pages and snag automatically on your pc screen and ocr like a regular scan.

Anyway, personally I never touch an e-book (even if free and I am not joking I saw free encrypted books) that I cannot have as an html/rtf file.

Liviu

[RWood]

We have moved several times in the 27+ years that my wife and I have been married, thankfully none for the last 15 years. The last two moves were contracted out to the same firm. When we called them to come and estimate the last move they paused and then said, “Oh yeah, you’re the people with all the boxes of books.” How nice they remembered us.

Both of us read a great amount and a lot of the books are never available at the library until we donate them. Many we keep and others are set free to find new homes and enrich other lives. The only regret we’ve had was several cases of books that were ruined when the last house developed a mold problem. (It also claimed several cases of 12” Lp albums.)

Over one-half of the eBooks around here are technical. Most of these are in PDF and a surprising number are in CHM with no DRM restrictions.

The look, the feel, the smell of a great book is unique. The typography of many is a beauty in themselves. This can never be captured fully by an eBook although some PDFs come close visually.

The library is full and overflowing on the floor, the extra bookshelves in the office area are two to three deep, there are stacks in the back of the walk-in closet that can’t be walked-in anymore, and then there are the shelves and cases of books in the basement. We are now down to our last case of 12” Lp albums as the rest have been converted to electronic form (FLAC and APE format.)

One thing the eBooks can never capture is the first edition exuberance or the author’s signature and dedication from the book signing. (See, there’s the signature right on the face of the CD.)

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by RWood

We have moved several times in the 27+ years that my wife and I have been married, thankfully none for the last 15 years. The last two moves were contracted out to the same firm. When we called them to come and estimate the last move they paused and then said, “Oh yeah, you’re the people with all the boxes of books.” How nice they remembered us.

Both of us read a great amount and a lot of the books are never available at the library until we donate them. Many we keep and others are set free to find new homes and enrich other lives. The only regret we’ve had was several cases of books that were ruined when the last house developed a mold problem. (It also claimed several cases of 12” Lp albums.)

Me too! 28 years. When we came in this house, aside from the tools and computer junk, there were more books and records than kitchen stuff. What I remember most is the looks in their faces when they compared the book piles to the really cheap appliances!

[WaxMan]

One thing that occured to me when the original poster mentioned ebooks being disposable is that gosh darn it yes they are. In todays linked electronic world is there any reason (aside from DRM and highly restrictave companys) that there should be more than 1 library copy of a book. Should not eBooks / eMagazines / Technical Journals be Load, Read, Remove. Sure you may want to one day go back to them so all you need is an index some way to conceptualize your past selections.

The only thing that should not be disposable about eBooks is access to them, and fair payment for the use (that however is another issue).

I see no reason what so ever that we should all have our catalogues of eBooks along with the source material. Of course considering the ammount of work that can go into preparing a particular text to work correctly in your favorite viewer on the available hardware, unless the text is immediatly retransferable the this can become an issue in the transient book view.

This is only playing devils advocate however I have as I expect many others here do a magpies approach to books. Although I do hope that some time there will come a time for seamless reading, a good start for me is 'safari books online' the only issue here is the portability of the text from the web.

[NatCh]

More of a packrat myself.

[johnnaryry]

Originally Posted by tcv

Ah-ha. I am curious: Why is it not disposable?

To some degree, it's a 'cultural thing'. While growing up in Europe and the U.S., I was taught and advised by almost every adult I encountered to respect and appreciate books (''Books are your friends!"). To this day, I still have a very special feeling regarding bound volumes. I still feel a strange sadness when I see a damaged or poorly disgarded book. Books are somehow, more significant than a magazine or newspaper. A book is meant to be consumed, absorbed over a period of time and also to be available for revistation. Magazines and newpapers serve a much more immediate need. It's sort of like comparing a McDonald's or a Burger King to a Michelin star rated resturant, you can fill your belly at either, but the memory of the meal will last much longer, more vividly at one of those.

I think that, more than anything, our cultural attachment to and reverance of books is the greatest barrier to a more widespread acceptance of ebooks...

--ryan

Talking with some friends last night about the new e-ink book readers (and taking a lot of ribbing for being a gadget hound because I actually went against my normal advice and picked up a first gen item). Of course it got around to P-books, e-books and the pros/cons of each.

One thing that did come up (and was touched on here just a few messages ago) was that ebooks use digital data that can be reloaded on demand so why keep them around at all when done? You can always just get the latest when you need it.

Reason NOT to just get the latest version? Because it IS the latest version. The latest version with any and all the changes made for correctness, convenience, expedience, revisions, or embarrassment. Because just because something is available NOW does not mean that it will stay available years down the road.

The landscape of what is popularly acceptable changes. Sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly but always it changes. It's part of the way society is. If it doesn't change, it stagnates and eventually dies. The problem is that society is made of people (which also shows the truth to the adage that "A person is smart. People are dumb.") which can make some pretty silly judgment calls. (Such as, oh, editing old cartoons because it could make todays kids violent psychopaths determined to run off cliffs and chew dynamite.)

Some things could become unavailable due to a "correction" of history or policy. Even now people are still trying to rewrite the American Civil War and Watergate because it doesn't agree with their world view. Not content with presenting their side they seek to make it the official one and say all others are wrong (all the while forgetting that history is not one view but myriad views) and should be discarded, forgotten or "unavailable". One of the things holding actions like this in check is a solid basis of what was said, seen and thought before. (Pbooks are excellent in this regard and have security and authority that ebooks with their transient and malleable nature do not have.)

Shoot, when you think about it, digital packrats could be the modern day equivalent of medieval Irish monks sitting around in their little beehive huts. Except with better lighting. And cable. (You know they would have had it if they could have. Medieval monks would have been big fans of home shopping and the Discovery channels.)

[nekokami]

How many people here have read Farenheit 451?

I think it's important to have knowledge as widely distributed as possible. Too many things can go wrong if all the backups are in one place. (And it doesn't have to be a dystopic book-burning government-- there are plenty of natural disasters that can take out servers and backups-- or libraries.)

I'm wary of having my books depend on electricity or a specialized format. Though I'm an optimist by nature, I also tend to take the long view. Will I still be able to read these books if (when) there's a power crisis? Will my kids/grandkids etc. be able to read these? These both seem like reasonable questions to me. I would keep all the copies possible, backed up in the most basic format possible, with copies in a firesafe and (if possible) off-site. One of the reasons I'm attracted to eBooks is that it might be physically possible to do this and still have room to move in our house.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by stxopher

Reason NOT to just get the latest version? Because it IS the latest version. The latest version with any and all the changes made for correctness, convenience, expedience, revisions, or embarrassment. Because just because something is available NOW does not mean that it will stay available years down the road.

Oh, ya. This hits home. We have too many schools around my area that want to ban Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from schools because their use of the N-Word.

These same schools had banned (for a little while) all the Tarzan books because they thought that Tarzan and Jane were living together but weren't married (they confused the books with the movies - they are married in the books).

The fear that the book you read tomorrow will be different than the book you read today is a very real fear. With pBooks, the probability of that happening is low. But with eBooks, it becomes very easy to do such a thing.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

The fear that the book you read tomorrow will be different than the book you read today is a very real fear. With pBooks, the probability of that happening is low. But with eBooks, it becomes very easy to do such a thing.

If we're going to be paranoid, let's imagine a virus written especially to target the contents of specific eBooks, to change their contents.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

It's called "Find/Replace."