sales of consumer ebooks down 17%, sales of physical books up 8%

[darryl]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

A device like that sounds terrible and I hope it never comes to fruition. At least crap books can be pulped. But millions of disposable e-readers holding Fifty Shades of Gray clogging up a landfill would be a disaster.

I left that one alone. I gave the poster the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was not a serious suggestion. This is because the idea, if serious, seems to be an example of extreme wishful thinking by tradpub enthusiasts. It abandons the ereader bad / paper good mantra, and all of those wonderful intangible benefits of paper like smell and feel and being able to physically flick through paper books in favour of an ereader! But a crippled version of an ereader which has only one book! And thereby preserves the need for the existing physical distribution network and no doubt the oligopoly of its bloated masters. It also preserves physical book stores, libraries and the whole existing infrastructure. Many of us who love reading and do so voraciously can again have our homes looking like the local branch of Steptoe & Sons. We can again pack our suitcases so full of books for a journey that we have little room for anything else! Those who like to show off their books can place these wonderful devices facing out on the shelves with the screensaver no doubt showing the cover. Or perhaps we can have a thick one book reader with the title and author prominent on the spine!

Just seeing the suggestion brought tears of mirth to my eyes, as I'm sure it must have been intended to do.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by darryl

I left that one alone. I gave the poster the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was not a serious suggestion. This is because the idea, if serious, seems to be an example of extreme wishful thinking by tradpub enthusiasts. It abandons the ereader bad / paper good mantra, and all of those wonderful intangible benefits of paper like smell and feel and being able to physically flick through paper books in favour of an ereader! But a crippled version of an ereader which has only one book! And thereby preserves the need for the existing physical distribution network and no doubt the oligopoly of its bloated masters. It also preserves physical book stores, libraries and the whole existing infrastructure. Many of us who love reading and do so voraciously can again have our homes looking like the local branch of Steptoe & Sons. We can again pack our suitcases so full of books for a journey that we have little room for anything else! Those who like to show off their books can place these wonderful devices facing out on the shelves with the screensaver no doubt showing the cover. Or perhaps we can have a thick one book reader with the title and author prominent on the spine!

Just seeing the suggestion brought tears of mirth to my eyes, as I'm sure it must have been intended to do.

What is Steptoe and sons?

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

What is Steptoe and sons?

It was an old 60's British comedy series. It was old even when I was growing up but it was set in a junkyard. It was screened obviously in the UK and in Australia, but I'm not sure that it ever made it to the US. It was apparently remade there and called Sanford & Son, according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steptoe_and_Son

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by darryl

It was an old 60's British comedy series. It was old even when I was growing up but it was set in a junkyard. It was screened obviously in the UK and in Australia, but I'm not sure that it ever made it to the US. It was apparently remade there and called Sanford & Son, according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steptoe_and_Son

Sanford and Son was hilarious.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Sanford and Son was hilarious.

I only saw a few episodes of Steptoe, but it was pretty funny. When I was in my late teens I had an older friend who referred to one of his neighbours houses as Steptoe's. It had a couple of rusting car bodies in the front yard and was, to understate things dramatically, rather untidy.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

. . .One point she loves about both gadgets that gets glossed over is weight. eReaders and tablets are lighter than most print books, especially hardcovers. At her age the large print and weight aspects, well, they "weigh heavily" in favor of digital.

As for sharing, it happens automatically. If I buy it, she has access to it.

My wife prefers her Nook for bedtime reading for the very reason you note -- weight. In addition, because of age, she also likes the adjustable font size.

And while it is true that sharing is automatic with the Nook (I have the older Nook tablet), we read different types of books and so although we have access to each other's ebooks, the reality is that we rarely read the same book.

When reading during the day (i.e., not in bed), my wife prefers print.

We both prefer the ebook version of a book when the print version is set in too small a font size for easy reading. In the past, that rarely happened, but I have noticed that publishers are trying to squeeze more on a page these days and so an increased number of the books I like to read use a smaller font size.

I suspect that in a few years I will either have to buy both the hardcover and ebook versions of a book or resign myself to reversing my current preferences. Some things I can't prevent, and aging is one of them.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

A device like that sounds terrible and I hope it never comes to fruition. At least crap books can be pulped. But millions of disposable e-readers holding Fifty Shades of Gray clogging up a landfill would be a disaster.

No need to worry.

On Star Trek Next Generation they had that kind of document carrier.
(Andromeda, too.)
They were erasable and reusable.
Essentially a physical form of PDF digital paper.
They are actually feasible and would be cheaper to build than a hardcover. (Think of the supercheap dollar store calculators.) The biggest cost is the screen but OLED tech has the potential to be printed at extremely low cost. (Index card cheap.) It'll take another decade or two but they can be built.

The only problem is that ram chips don't come in single ebook sizes anymore and a screen that can display one book can display thousands. It costs no more to build a hundred ebook reader than a single book reader. The 80's STNG digital paper vision belongs in the 80's along with other skeuomorphic concepts like MS BOB.

By the time disposable readers can be built and make economic sense they won't be needed. People willing to read on ereaders want full libraries in their hands not a hundred hunks of plastic cluttering the house. And they wouldn't even smell like proper books, anyway.

The proper evolution of the book is ebooks, not digital paper.
That ship has sailed.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

No need to worry.

On Star Trek Next Generation they had that kind of document carrier.
(Andromeda, too.)
They were erasable and reusable.

Yes, PADDs, or Personal Access Display Devices.
In the Star Wars books they are called "datapads."

I posted a photo around here somewhere of Captain Picard at a desk covered in PADDs of various sizes.

Still, remember that ST:TNG is a post-scarcity economy, and those PADDs could be instantly replicated out of cheap energy and raw materials, and recycled back the same way with complete efficiency, so it didn't matter how many were made or whether they break, or lay around unused.
For the nearer-future, I'd prefer to see consumers eventually start demanding that their "primary device" be a durable good designed to serve for years, not a disposable fashion accessory that they replace every season.
Not that I want to hold back progress, or stop people from upgrading, I'd just like to see the fundamental philosophy shift from "This is a disposable device I will replace next year, so who cares if I can't change the battery or repair it, or if it never gets a firmware update" to "I expect this device to serve me for a long time, and I only feel the desire to upgrade or replace it if there is compelling reason to to do so. I'd prefer to keep and maintain this one."

ApK

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ApK

Not that I want to hold back progress, or stop people from upgrading, I'd just like to see the fundamental philosophy shift from "This is a disposable device I will replace next year, so who cares if I can't change the battery or repair it, or if it never gets a firmware update" to "I expect this device to serve me for a long time, and I only feel the desire to upgrade or replace it if there is compelling reason to to do so. I'd prefer to keep and maintain this one."

ApK

No-contract Android phones are at the disposable stage. Whether you use them as phones or media players, paying $10-$20 for a very functional device means you can easily upgrade it every year and not worry about taking a financial hit.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

No-contract Android phones are at the disposable stage. Whether you use them as phones or media players, paying $10-$20 for a very functional device means you can easily upgrade it every year and not worry about taking a financial hit.

I know there are cheap phones, but I wish the fact something was cheap didn't make people feel like it had to become disposable, nor that the goal was to make everything so cheaply and frailly that it all becomes disposable.
There are other resources that warrant concern beside money, the aforementioned landfill space being just one among them.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by darryl

It was an old 60's British comedy series. It was old even when I was growing up but it was set in a junkyard. It was screened obviously in the UK and in Australia, but I'm not sure that it ever made it to the US. It was apparently remade there and called Sanford & Son, according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steptoe_and_Son

I've seen some of Steptoe and I used to watch Sanford and Son and I have to say that Sanford and Son is the better show.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ApK

I know there are cheap phones, but I wish the fact something was cheap didn't make people feel like it had to become disposable, nor that the goal was to make everything so cheaply and frailly that it all becomes disposable.
There are other resources that warrant concern beside money, the aforementioned landfill space being just one among them.

Manufacturers drive this because they won't allow OS updates on these phones.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've seen some of Steptoe and I used to watch Sanford and Son and I have to say that Sanford and Son is the better show.

You could be right. I've never watched Sanford and only ever watched a handful of episodes of Steptoe, so don't have an opinion. It was however iconic in its time and entered the language for a while to describe general untidiness. I recall a friend referring to one of his neighbour's properties as Steptoe's because of the old rusted out car bodies and general rubbish at the front of the property concerned.

I do wonder if your preference is wholly or partially a cultural thing. Often programs, particularly comedy, which screen in one country, in this case the UK, are re-made for another, in this case the US. Yet it would usually be more cost effective to simply screen the original series rather than re-make it. Presumably the reasoning was that the idea behind the show would travel well, but the actual show itself would not.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

No-contract Android phones are at the disposable stage. Whether you use them as phones or media players, paying $10-$20 for a very functional device means you can easily upgrade it every year and not worry about taking a financial hit.

Is the most apt analogy with the one book ereader perhaps a phone that could only call one number?

[barryem]

Phones that can only call one number existed long before cell phones. They were called intercoms, I think. They came in pairs and they could talk to each other.

I'm not sure "intercom" was actually what they were called but something like that. I never had much to do with them and that was a long time ago.

Barry