Will Paper books fade away?

[thibaulthalpern]

Just like back in the 70s it was claimed that the computer will eliminate paper, it has proven to be false. I don't think it eliminates paper. It will change the practice of how we interact with paper but for the foreseeable future it's not going to eliminate it. The environmental argument is a straw-man argument because electronics themselves produce a lot of toxic waste.

In academics journals, we're seeing more and more journals go online but not necessarily to the exclusion of paper journals. Journals print in both digital and paper format. It hasn't eliminated the paper versions.

This is not to say that paper will never go away. It's to say that as of now it is not possible or desirable.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I'm going with boutique item/heirloom. Only special books will be put on paper and cherished over time... the (pretty much) 99% of the rest of literature that we print today, including periodicals, textbooks, entertainment, etc, will end up electronic.

Steve,

I totally agree with you here. Considering the same thing has happened with other medium like records, video tapes, photographs, even DVDs and CDs are starting to become obsolete as digital audio and video is becomming more and more common. Of course, as band width increases the curve will steepen on these on off physical storage media's use to decline.

Things like family bibles, atlases, yearbooks, picture books, etc will be around for years to come.

I wonder who the first president will be that is sworn on a e-paper version of the bible.

BOb

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Steve,

I totally agree with you here. Considering the same thing has happened with other medium like records, video tapes, photographs, even DVDs and CDs are starting to become obsolete as digital audio and video is becomming more and more common. Of course, as band width increases the curve will steepen on these on off physical storage media's use to decline.

Things like family bibles, atlases, yearbooks, picture books, etc will be around for years to come.

I wonder who the first president will be that is sworn on a e-paper version of the bible.

BOb

Presidential Unit THX1138?

[dmaul1114]

Paper books aren't going anywhere. I probably won't buy any anymore (academic books I'll keep in the office aside) as I hate having books around the house taking up space. Too much space already wasted with DVD and CD racks.

But they're not going anywhere.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

... I'm going with boutique item/heirloom. Only special books will be put on paper and cherished over time... the (pretty much) 99% of the rest of literature that we print today, including periodicals, textbooks, entertainment, etc, will end up electronic.

+1

Art books, coffee table books.... Maybe.

Look at photos: I find that I, as well as most of my unfortunate friends I subject to travel photos viewing, prefer to view them as a slideshow on a 60" plasma, than in an album (or iPhoto book.)

The digital age is here. (Note to publishers: Deal with it.)

[Lemurion]

I don't see books fading away, not completely.

People like to use the music analogy, but there's one huge difference between a book and a recording: A book is self-contained. I have picked up and read books dating from the mid-seventeen hundreds - books that were still legible after almost two and a half centuries. I read my daughter poems from a book my mother bought in 1955.

I once had a collection of pulp magazines - a form that's almost completely gone now. The five magazines left in the US are all digests now, not pulps, and only one really dates back to the glory days of the format. The closest thing to the pulps these days are books like the Executioner series - its up over 300 now and they come out every month with another short novel just like the Shadow - but in paperback.

Paper is going to stay, but I think the next decade or two will see the end of the mass-market paperback. That's what will be replaced by the ebook - the cheap entry-level read. You can already see the paperback moving up in the market with both trade paperbacks and the unwieldy new mass-market replacements at $9.99.

It's just part of the normal process, and ebooks will slot themselves in as th replacement for mass market, while people will continue to buy hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

[etherspin]

clearly there will be applications for both, give it long enough though and even children may have more robust colour e-readers, i can even imagine water proof ones for the bath, too much has to change short term for paper to fade, in fifteen years i see textbooks gone from schools, newspapers rare and luxury , childrens books still as they are now and books only being sold in niche shops, much like has happened to the one common cd shops

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Yes, paper books will fade away - just like horses did with the invention of the automobile.

Automobiles will fade away (or the Earth will), not horses.



I think we can't compare art with technology.
Photography didn't replace painting in the late 19th century, cinema didn't replace drama earlier, digital discs didn't replace concert halls in the 80's, cellphones are not replacing human interaction now.
They just add-up.

Maybe one day paper books will belong to the same people who use film, vinyl, bicycles, tailored clothes and to add numbers with fingers...

IMHO, between p-books and e-books there's the same difference you can notice between paintings and photos. The latter lacks one dimension.
Like paintings are 3D and photos 2D, e-books lack that touch feeling only p-books can give.
Remember: 1/3 of the people are kinestethic...

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Sonist

+1

Art books, coffee table books.... Maybe.

Look at photos: I find that I, as well as most of my unfortunate friends I subject to travel photos viewing, prefer to view them as a slideshow on a 60" plasma, than in an album (or iPhoto book.)

The digital age is here. (Note to publishers: Deal with it.)

Good point.
But you're talking "photo" generically.
And in photography you can't part content from medium, like you can for (most of the) books.
You can't see Ansel Adams photos digitally: most part of his work were done in the darkroom. Just like Bresson, Kresnetz, and every other great photographer. If you try, you just miss it all. No digital device, today, can give the viewer the same visual impact a good fine art print gives.
OTOH you can read Shakespeare's poetry from a file without missing a thing.
It's true for most books, not all. I remember a mystery novel in which clues were given by watching in transparency the back of the page I was reading... Hard to do in an electronic reflowable format, don't you agree?

But how audiobooks fit in the picture (pardon the pun)?
Why they didn't replace printed text?

I think it's about feeling, and in the future we will see 3 kind of "readers" (I mean people who read books): listeners, p-readers and e-readers.
Usually I don't believe in NLP, but I see that in this case it gives a pretty good point of view.

[cerement]

Originally Posted by Format C:

If you try, you just miss it all. No digital device, today, can give the viewer the same visual impact a good fine art print gives.
OTOH you can read Shakespeare's poetry from a file without missing a thing.

This is also probably far more subjective than most people realize. It's a matter of how we're raised and what we've become accustomed to. Recent survey at Stanford found that our next generations prefers the sounds of MP3s over sounds of higher quality recordings. We are not going to be the last generation (not by a long shot) raised on paper. But, just as sci-fi authors predict, there will come a day where a generation will look back and see us as quaint, where paper books will be a privilege of the elite collector ...

[forwhatitsworth]

I don't think paper books will ever fade away... There's something about owning a hard copy of a book that is just better than having it in some other format... I feel the same way about music, I'm all about the future and mp3's but if I really like something, I'm either buying it on CD or Vinyl so I can tangibly hold it in my hands.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by forwhatitsworth

I don't think paper books will ever fade away... There's something about owning a hard copy of a book that is just better than having it in some other format... I feel the same way about music, I'm all about the future and mp3's but if I really like something, I'm either buying it on CD or Vinyl so I can tangibly hold it in my hands.

(giggle) I have a whole cabinet of LP's that everyone once in a while we play.

There are sounds on them that you don't hear on the CD's of the same album. A very enjoyable experience.

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by dmaul1114

Paper books aren't going anywhere. I probably won't buy any anymore (academic books I'll keep in the office aside) as I hate having books around the house taking up space. Too much space already wasted with DVD and CD racks.

But they're not going anywhere.

I agree that they aren't going away. For one thing, ebooks are dependent on the digital device that you read them on. That means we don't have uniformity in the mechanism (i.e., the reader) to access the ebooks. Also, ebooks themselves have too many varying formats. In addition, highlighting and annotating an ebook is generally cumbersome, and both are needed in teaching, writing, and reading to learn. Furthermore, as I've mentioned elsewhere, one digital reader equates to one screen or only one open book at a time. Paper books is like having multiple screens because you can open multiple books at the same time and see them. Now, this may not be useful for leisure reading. It's not a necessary form of interaction. But, for something beyond leisure reading there are many times when you want to rapidly have various documents open and visible at the same time.

Paper books occupy space and there is an advantage to that. Spatial memory aids us in recollection so we can say, "Ah, I remember the information was in this physical location." By virtual of being digital, ebooks are non-spatial and so it pretty much eliminates our ability to use spatial memory in access and interacting with the text. That's a disadvantage at times.

With all these disadvantages, paper books are not going away any time soon.

What is happening instead is the spawning of new interactions with text via the digital medium and also a few new things added on to the old such as more self-published authors and so forth.

Just like the advent of the computer in home and office life has not eliminated paper documents, ebooks are not going to kill paper books either. And don't forget that computers have been in the home in a significant way (for some parts of the world) since the 1980s, almost some 30 years ago.

[Stringer]

For me, paper books are already dead. As long as they keep publishing e-books, I couldn't care less what others think.

[yagiz]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

future readers = current children

They all play video games with portable devices... They start to have phones when they're 7 (maybe even younger). Yeah, when they're toddler, they break and tear. But much less when they're a little bit older...