Will e-book readers make your library obsolete?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by =X=

What does that mean?

It means that the day I can get every book and magazine I have, every shelf, every box, every nook and cranny, into a memory store that can be with me wherever I go, will not come soon enough!

For the record, I'm also glad I don't have wait three weeks for a response to a letter sent 100 miles, s**t in a pit in my back yard, or wear smelly bearskins. Progress is good!

[scottiac]

I've ended up donating a couple thousand books over the last three years due to space limitations. I just thank all of the e-reader gods that the last years cull was all books that I had electronically, and not ones I was betting I wouldn't want to re-read again.

I'm definitely a "re-reader". My favorite paperbacks will get read dozens of times, until there's little left. (And I'm nice to books!)

But I imagine most of my paperbacks will go away over the next year or two. Now when the plasticlogic beastie comes out, and my tech books can start going, that'll be a happy day!

[DixieGal]

I have a handy donation hint that have served me well:

• Stack them against a wall with the spines up, and take some photos. Just fit as many as you can comfortably identify from the photo, then go to the next group.
  
  
• I've also taken the time to check the ISBN with Amazon for used prices on some of the more expensive textbooks and references that I've donated. It helps justify the deduction in case the tax man comes calling.

That way, you have both a record of the titles you used to have, and also evidence that you actually donated $85,000 of books in a year when you only made $65,000, in case the IRS has questions.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

About 60% of homes in the USA have a computer. (55% a few years ago; I've heard the 60% number on tv news recently.)

The other 40%, including half of the African American and Latino population, will not be replacing their pbooks with ebooks anytime soon.

Interesting statistic considering I don't know one person that does not have a computer... this includes all the Hispanics and blacks I know.
.... don't believe everything you read.

However you're rebuking my statement by showing me statistics of computers. And if we where talking about computers or the consumer’s wiliness to adopt new technology I would tend to agree. But that was not the intent of my statement.

I’m referring specifically to ePaper, right now the cost is high, but that is because ePaper is a new technology. Once mass manufacturing is in full gear the cost of these devices will be cheap very cheap.

I believe the bulk of the drive to employ ePaper will be from business and institutes (hospital/schools) that are always looking for cost cutting. Who can look a year or more ahead of them and say I can save millions by using ePaper vs. printing.

Which will eventually lead to the average consumer adopting ePaper devices.

=X=

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

It means that the day I can get every book and magazine I have, every shelf, every box, every nook and cranny, into a memory store that can be with me wherever I go, will not come soon enough!

For the record, I'm also glad I don't have wait three weeks for a response to a letter sent 100 miles, s**t in a pit in my back yard, or wear smelly bearskins. Progress is good!

Ah okay, coffee is taking loner than normal this morning..
=X=

[mrborgs]

I have to agree with the comments about large personal libraries being a thing of "show" and a total waste of resources. Don't get me wrong - I love paper books and have many myself, but I believe e-books can:
1. Get into more people's hands if e-readers come down in price. Paper books can be almost $30 for new hardcover
2. Save paper and trees and resources (though there are resources used in e-books too so it isn't a total save)
a. How many print books are sitting on bookstore shelves that never get sold or used and eventually get thrown out - what a waste. No "extra" e-books lying around.
3. New distribution methods can be developed like online libraries that again will allow more information to get into more people's hands.
4. Better tools to use the books more effectively - search, tagging, bookmarks, notes, etc. I have books on my shelf that just sit there because there is no easy way to access them on a regular basis (e.g. I am a Lutheran Pastor, I use commentaries to study the Bible, I like to use Luther's Works at times too. Print version of Luther's Works - over $1500 for the 55 volume set. Have it on the computer for $200 and can search the whole set in seconds - same with commentaries. Now I use them more than if I just had the print books.

Well, enough said - print and ebooks should exist together!

Pastor Mike
Colorado

[mjh215]

Ebooks only supplement my library and will never replace it... Ebooks have replaced the paperback pulp books in my library, being the more 'disposable' format. Which makes room for more archival paper book formats.

Zelda; I have to disagree, books are not as fragile as most make them out to be. If you have modern living conditions suitable to people those can support books just fine for centuries. (Not acidic-pulp mind you) The average first world house built today is more stable then libraries and museums that housed the materials that are still with us. And recall it was not uncommon to have fireplaces, candles and gas lanterns, and direct sunlight in them (And people smoking ). Most of the damage that destroyed works thru the years were caused by people, either directly or indirectly. When texts fell out of fashion they were moved to 'storage' in dank basements and warehouses where mold and rot took hold. Transportation was also a nasty culprit. If the library or home was not upkept I don't think of that as the fault of the media. I wouldn't trust a person to keep digital media or an electronic device from degrading if they can't manage to keep a book from degrading. And trusting any source or backup service to honour your license/ownership rights a few years down the road is laudible, considering how many times we've seen the laws change, and companies discontinue services over just the past ten years.

-MJ

[acprinter]

Paper and ink will remain for a long time but will become a niche market. As ereaders grow and develop we will see more of them handle photographs and color. There is one company called "Lenswork" which produces a high quality magazine for the fine-art black and white photographic crowd. I subscribe to there digital version and it is amazingly good. I have to view it on my computer at this time but I am sure it will change.


What I will miss is the book signings by authors. Maybe they can autograph the cover on my Sony reader.

I am a retired printer and do not miss the smell of ink and paper and those nasty nasty paper cuts.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

It means that the day I can get every book and magazine I have, every shelf, every box, every nook and cranny, into a memory store that can be with me wherever I go, will not come soon enough!

For the record, I'm also glad I don't have wait three weeks for a response to a letter sent 100 miles, s**t in a pit in my back yard, or wear smelly bearskins. Progress is good!

I almost agree with you. I'll probably want to have high-quality editions of my very-most-favorite books. Otherwise, bring on the bits! We're certainly planning a vigorous thinning of our shelves to remove paperbacks whose content we know own in bits.

Xenophon

P.S. On the subject of bearskins... When in highschool I had a calculus prof who showed up at the school halloween party dressed in a bear-skin. Its head over his; front paws over his hands. Necklace of teeth and claws. "Ugh! Me MIGHTY hunter!" was about all he would say. We got the story out of him next class day...

He was an avid bow-hunter. Went on a special trip (deer hunting!) deep in the Rockies with a guide. Several days out, they unexpectedly encountered a Grizzly with a wounded paw. Mr. Grizzly hadn't been able to get enough food due to the injury, and decided that my prof and his guide would make a lovely meal. The guide decided to fire in self defense, but his gun jammed. My prof said that when he realized that they wouldn't be able to run away, he figured that he was certainly dead. But he had a perfectly good hunting bow and a quiver of hunting arrow. With nothing to lose, he decided that Mr. Grizzly might eat him, but it was going to KNOW that it had messed with him!

Three arrows later(!), he had a dead grizzly at his feet... and a severe need to change his underwear. That's some pretty damn amazing shooting, by the way. Grizzly are NOT easy to kill, even with firearms.

The guide radioed to the PTBs, to get a game warden on-site: they weren't licensed for bear, only for deer. When the warden arrived, he told them that there had been reports of a wounded bear causing trouble in the region and ruled it to be a righteous kill. My Prof then had the joy of blowing 3x his original budget to get his trophies and meat out of the back of beyond. In a hunting-permitted part of a wilderness area. (Can you say "hire a helicopter?")

Anyway... I figure that anyone who can bag a Grizzly with a bow and arrows has an unshakeable claim to "Me MIGHTY hunter!" And since he didn't set out to do it, perhaps he's not even dangerously insane!

Oh yeah, that bearskin was well tanned, and certainly not smelly!

[Milarepa]

As this is a forum all about reading, it would seem to me that all of us here probably love "books" more than the average user. Many of us seem to be the types of people who have hundreds if not thousands of books in our homes. I think that for most people an e-book reader is years away from making any kind of economic sense, and for many people the one or two books they pick up a year as impulse buys at the airport just don't clutter up their homes enough to matter.

However, I for one have loved getting rid of the cheap books and replacing them with digital copies and if I say I love it, I doubt that there are words to describe how my wife feels about getting rid of the book "clutter." Ecstatic is probably as close as you could get. I plan on still having full bookshelves, but they will be filled with books that are first editons, or nice leather bound copies. They will be books that are as much works of art as a painting that is hung on the wall. Like somebody else mentioned, no matter how far technology progresses I would never put up LCD screens on my walls to mimic paintings, nor does a cheap poster replicate a fine piece of art.

There is room for both e-books and p-books, but hopefully the dynamic will shift back to finer p-books. I hope that as the e-book reader market grows more publishers will see it as an opportunity to release nicer books, and capitalize on my sentimental attachment to p-books while at the same time I am buying digital copies of the same books.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by mjh215

Ebooks only supplement my library and will never replace it... Ebooks have replaced the paperback pulp books in my library, being the more 'disposable' format. Which makes room for more archival paper book formats.

Zelda; I have to disagree, books are not as fragile as most make them out to be. If you have modern living conditions suitable to people those can support books just fine for centuries. (Not acidic-pulp mind you) The average first world house built today is more stable then libraries and museums that housed the materials that are still with us. And recall it was not uncommon to have fireplaces, candles and gas lanterns, and direct sunlight in them (And people smoking ). Most of the damage that destroyed works thru the years were caused by people, either directly or indirectly. When texts fell out of fashion they were moved to 'storage' in dank basements and warehouses where mold and rot took hold. Transportation was also a nasty culprit. If the library or home was not upkept I don't think of that as the fault of the media. I wouldn't trust a person to keep digital media or an electronic device from degrading if they can't manage to keep a book from degrading. And trusting any source or backup service to honour your license/ownership rights a few years down the road is laudible, considering how many times we've seen the laws change, and companies discontinue services over just the past ten years.

-MJ

what you say is true of good quality books, sure. if you buy nice hardcovers (or good quality paperbacks, with sewn bindings and good paper) then a book can be quite durable.

however, my books are not stored in particularly extreme conditions (i live here too after all) but still, i have countless not-that-old paperbacks which are literally falling to pieces : the glue of the binding doesn't hold anymore, so the pages fall out in clumps or individually, and the paper is yellow and brittle and sometimes just turning the page is enough to tear it, or the corner will actually break off in my fingers (and before you say it, i have a gentle touch).

the problem is a lot of books are not made to last and i think often people don't make the distinction. some are, and i won't dispute that ; i also have some very nice books on good quality paper (which is still white and not brittle) and i think i can count on keeping them for many years to come, hopefully my whole life, for some of them. i'm not saying that books are all so poorly made and so fragile that the slightest exposure to indirect sunlight for more than 30 seconds will cause them to disintegrate. but they *are* nonetheless fragile, and some of them are not made to last, and those ones will certainly be outlived by digital media as long as you take the minimum precaution to keep access to it ; much like there are certain precautions you must take to preserve paper books.

[Greg Anos]

Well said, Xenophon! There is always a need for backup technology! I plan on keeping a certain percentage of my p-books for that reason (and thy're paid for already, another reason to keep them). But even so, I dream of the day when I have an e-book copy of each and every one, and I buy only e-books from now on. I had that rapped in my teeth in 1999....

After working 2 1/2 years straight (continual heavy overtime) on a Y2K project, I chose to treat myself to several months in Hawaii to recuperate. I loaded two bags with clothes and books, and shipped three more boxes. The two bags (which were small enough so I did not have to check them) weighed 75 pounds (about 35 Kilos). I knew nothing about Honolulu International Airport... I had to strap on those 75 pounds and walk 3/4 of a mile to get from the internation part of the airport to the inter-island part of the airport. I D--ned near killed myself doing it! Now those 50 pounds of books would weigh less than a pound in my handy dandy e-book reader! And I have 50 times as many books. We bookworms can now travel and take the comforts of home (the books!) with us. It's as great an invention as the car.
So say I.

[Studio717]

It's going to take a while before all my books are available in e-format. I have a lot of old books for research, and though GoogleBooks has said they are working on making a number of orphan books available (as well as those OOP but not orphaned, per se), but it hasn't happened yet. Even when they are available, I can't always rely on them - several of the pd GoogleBooks that I've downloaded have blurry pages.

That said, I think it will happen, just not right away. A universal format (where I don't have to worry about the specific reader I use), high quality OCR (even for old fonts), and a hi-res color screen in e-ink will all be necessary before I give up my pbooks.

As has been mentioned, ebooks for research can be superior to pbooks - searching is one big point (but, again, reliable OCR is imperative here). I think the horse analogy is a good one - we no longer rely on them for day-to-day living, but they are still around and beautiful as ever.

As we go forward, it's wonderful that new books are (almost) all already rendered digitally, even when they will be printed physically. For new books, I'd say, we need the good readers they keep dangling before us but don't give us. When the current mantra of "next year, next year" becomes "now!" - then we'll see that wholesale movement to ebooks, imo. (Though the Luddites will just have to die off, of course.)

Until all that happens, most of my books are staying right where they are.

[kazbates]

I would love to replace all of my leisure reading with ebooks! My reader makes it so much easier to read wherever and whenever I want. Unfortunately, I have been collecting paperback books for years and having just recently cataloged them using the CollectorZ software with a barcode scanner, found that I have over 2000 books! It will be sometime before I can replace many of those.

As for my teaching manuals, professional journals and reference guides, I will have to wait until they have perfected eink and epaper to the point where I can display a larger page with better pictures.

On the other hand, I also have many children's books that I use as read alouds in my classroom (both picture and chapter books) and can't quite imagine how I would use an ereader in that context. The younger ones love to turn the pages for me!!
Kaz

[d.culloch]

I started to read again 4 years ago when I moved in with my girlfriend, who already has a huge collection of paperbacks. you can guess what happened next, books every where because I would not part with my books and she would not as well.

When I discovered ebooks the problem was solved. We both have a Sony, I only read ebooks, my girlfriend both.
We have saved some space and I have discovered authors I would never have in my local book shop.

Eventually I hope to replace my paperbacks with e versions to make what I think of as the best library I have managed to create so far.