My mama said: "In 10 years, those will be gone."

[bobcdy]

I much appreciate ebooks, but there's a problem with building a keeper library of ebooks because the formats for ebooks will evolve over time. Eventually ebooks such as epubs or mobi will become unreadable, just as material stored on 8" floppy drives of the 1970's are unreadable now except with help by tech museums that still maintain the 8" drives and interface them to newer computers. Paper books written in the 1600s are still readable today. So mama probably is right: "in 10 years, those will be gone"

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

I much appreciate ebooks, but there's a problem with building a keeper library of ebooks because the formats for ebooks will evolve over time. Eventually ebooks such as epubs or mobi will become unreadable, just as material stored on 8" floppy drives of the 1970's are unreadable now except with help by tech museums that still maintain the 8" drives and interface them to newer computers. Paper books written in the 1600s are still readable today. So mama probably is right: "in 10 years, those will be gone"

On the contrary -- floppy disks require a hardware interface not as widely available today. But EPUB is merely a renamed zipfile, and azw3/mobi have widely available open-sourced conversion utilities. They will all remain easily available, as all you need to do is hunt up the right program to unpack the contents, which are regular old plaintext html-formatted files.

Assuming of course that the zipped file becomes obsolete; otherwise you need merely right-click and select unzip; no installations required.

It's much easier for hardware to become obsolete than software, especially if it is open-source.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Paper books are going away sometime in the near future. When that happens is anyone's guess, but they are going away. The future is digital. It's here and it's expanding. There's no stopping it. I envision a near future with internet/cell access to every point on the planet; either very cheap or government subsidized.

I was thinking of this, and I'd like to disagree.

I don't think paper is going to go in the near future (the far future, yes, but not the near one). But, I think the mass market pocket is going to disappear in the near future. Those will be replaced with electronic versions. The books that you want to keep and want to show off (the hardcovers and such) will stay for a long time.

People are getting more mobile, moving house more, going on vacation more, taking more short trips. And even those that think that ebooks are nothing will have to admit that it is easier to take one small device containing multiple books instead of those multiple books in paper form.

The ones that say that ebooks won't take off are those that read maybe a few books a year. (but that's a completely different story!)

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom

...I can't imagine students in college or graduate schools will be lugging books around...

I'm not so sure about that.
A friend of mine, for his MBA, briefly entirely switched to eBooks.
All his textbooks had been available as PDFs and he certainly had been influenced by me permanently whispering in his ear about the future of reading.
But after a brief testing period he went back to paper again - entirely.

His simple explanation, which kind of makes sense to me:
"On a paper book, you can add notes and colored markers. You can do so on an eBook as well, but you won't find them that easy. On paper books, you simply can put index sliders (don't know the exact English phrase. Basically, you just glue a colored mark of the size of a stamp to the edge of the page and find it easy enough when flipping through the book). But how do you find your marks in an eBook?

I haven't tried for myself. I've used eBooks for contracts, SLAs, price sheets and such without problems. But I can understand the problems my friend has faced.
If I think back to my own textbooks when studying: Tons and tons of colored marks, finding formulas and such within a few seconds. Search would be of no use, since I don't know the formula...

[Kumabjorn]

Guess it depends on what you study. With history, languages and literature I find it much faster and more efficient to read digitally. I can see where you would have problems searching for mathematical Formulas. Only thing that would help would be tags.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by crich70

Interesting I didn't know the slate was making a comeback, but it makes sense in a way. As I understand it back in the old days paper was an expensive media for many, far too much to use for just anything such as learning sums and how to write the alphabet so schools used slates instead. I wouldn't be surprised if one day something like an e-ink screen was used with some sort of electronic pen in much the same way. After all computers are in the classroom now so who knows.

Like the Boogie Board?
http://www.improvelectronics.com/

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

I much appreciate ebooks, but there's a problem with building a keeper library of ebooks because the formats for ebooks will evolve over time.

It's a gradual process, though. A specific format won't just suddenly disappear over night. If one format falls out of favor and a new preferred format emerges, software like Calibre will be there to convert your existing library. LIT is a good example for this.

Similarly, files from the 1970s were moved to newer systems, though that was harder due to physical hardware differences, as mentioned above. Different time, also. Today, with clouds, other forms of online storage and much better standardized media formats (even in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, disk formats weren't as unified: the main three physical formats for diskettes were 3", 3.5" and 5.25"), the chance to be unable to read or convert existing data files is probably smaller than the chance of one's house burning down (and the paper books library with it).

But this is also part of the reason why I disinfect the ebooks I buy. The data has a much higher chance to remain accessible than the DRM slime covering it.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Mivo

It's a gradual process, though. A specific format won't just suddenly disappear over night. If one format falls out of favor and a new preferred format emerges, software like Calibre will be there to convert your existing library. LIT is a good example for this.

Yes, but ebooks are not lossless. Each time you convert one from a format to a different format, the code inside gets crappier and crappier. At some point, this is bound to create problems.

Therefore, I'd prefer to start out with EPUB as a base format, and create all needed formats from that, for as long as this is possible.

Even if I buy a Kindle book, I first convert/extract it to EPUB to obtain the base format file, and then convert it back to AZW3 again because I read on a Kindle. If I get a free book from a BAEN CD in LIT format, it will also first be converted to EPUB, and then to the format I actually need. Just as Calibre puts everything through an HTML conversion, I put everything into EPUB before I do anything else.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Yes, but ebooks are not lossless. Each time you convert one from a format to a different format, the code inside gets crappier and crappier. At some point, this is bound to create problems.

Therefore, I'd prefer to start out with EPUB as a base format, and create all needed formats from that, for as long as this is possible.

Even if I buy a Kindle book, I first convert/extract it to EPUB to obtain the base format file, and then convert it back to AZW3 again because I read on a Kindle. If I get a free book from a BAEN CD in LIT format, it will also first be converted to EPUB, and then to the format I actually need. Just as Calibre puts everything through an HTML conversion, I put everything into EPUB before I do anything else.

I'm not likely to go to as much trouble as you do, but I am interested in the process. How exactly do you extract the epub from the Kindle book?

I have the keep original file option turned on in calibre so that I am almost always starting with the original ebook file if I decide to reconvert for some reason, so while there is always a fair amount of crap injected it doesn't seem to increase over time. I am inclined to think that the amount of crap injected may be decreasing with newer versions of calibre.

I am not a purist though and only actually notice the added code etc. if it causes me a problem.

Helen

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I'm not likely to go to as much trouble as you do, but I am interested in the process. How exactly do you extract the epub from the Kindle book?

Use the KindleUnpack plugin for Calibre. This does not convert the book. It's not really extracting an EPUB; it's more like extracting the HTML and XML stuff from the Amazon AZW3 file, after which it gets rebuilt into an EPUB.

I don't know if extract & rebuild, or converting yields the better results. I've never had problems with the extraction up until now.

I have the keep original file option turned on in calibre so that I am almost always starting with the original ebook file if I decide to reconvert for some reason, so while there is always a fair amount of crap injected it doesn't seem to increase over time. I am inclined to think that the amount of crap injected may be decreasing with newer versions of calibre.

I don't use the original file option. After I've fixed up an EPUB like I want it, it never changes apart from inserting metadata from Calibre into it. The EPUB I create/fix is the default format.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Use the KindleUnpack plugin for Calibre. This does not convert the book. It's not really extracting an EPUB; it's more like extracting the HTML and XML stuff from the Amazon AZW3 file, after which it gets rebuild into an EPUB.

I don't know if extract & rebuild, or converting yields the better results. I've never had problems with the extraction up until now.



I don't use the original file option. After I've fixed up an EPUB like I want it, it never changes apart from inserting metadata from Calibre into it. The EPUB I create/fix is the default format.

Thanks for the reply. I was unaware of the KindleUnpack plugin. Might try it one of these days.

I'm a compulsive backer upper so the original file option makes me happy. I do occasionally reconvert a fair number of books when I get crazy and decide to read on my Aura HD for a change. (the time spent converting the books is probably longer than the time I will spend using the Aura HD before my patience runs out)

Helen

[Sydney's Mom]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

I'm not so sure about that.
A friend of mine, for his MBA, briefly entirely switched to eBooks.
All his textbooks had been available as PDFs and he certainly had been influenced by me permanently whispering in his ear about the future of reading.
But after a brief testing period he went back to paper again - entirely.

His simple explanation, which kind of makes sense to me:
"On a paper book, you can add notes and colored markers. You can do so on an eBook as well, but you won't find them that easy. On paper books, you simply can put index sliders (don't know the exact English phrase. Basically, you just glue a colored mark of the size of a stamp to the edge of the page and find it easy enough when flipping through the book). But how do you find your marks in an eBook?

I haven't tried for myself. I've used eBooks for contracts, SLAs, price sheets and such without problems. But I can understand the problems my friend has faced.
If I think back to my own textbooks when studying: Tons and tons of colored marks, finding formulas and such within a few seconds. Search would be of no use, since I don't know the formula...

Yes, that is how I used to study, as well. I just thought there was a new way. My daughter (high school) doesn't like ebooks, but that is probably because I do.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Like the Boogie Board?
http://www.improvelectronics.com/

Yep. Looks very like what I was thinking of. History does seem to come in cycles and though the idea is the same the means by which something happens is usually different each time round. So books went from clay tablets to papyrus scrolls, then to parchment and paper and now to digital. And likewise the surface to practice writing on went from a stick digging in the dirt, to unbaked clay tablets, to tablets with a wax coating, to the slate and chalk, to paper and pencil and now the electronic media. Looks like the current one (at 9.7") is at $99.99 which isn't a bad price for such a useful gadget. That's less than my 1st k3 cost me even if you add on the 2 yr protection plan (which raises it to $106.52).

[Andy_T]

That Boogie board really looks good!

Now, if it had e-ink (the description mentions "scratch-proof LCD"), e-reader functionality and some apps (e.g. a time planner and to-do-list) it could be a winner....

Best regards,
Andy

[QuantumIguana]

E-books are here to stay. The dedicated e-reader will only disappear when tablets have both the advantages of tablets and e-readers. I think we will have e-ink tablets that have the brightness, color and refresh rate of LCD combined with the lower power consumption of e-ink.

E-books may be here to stay, but that doesn't mean paper books are going away. Remember, the posters here are among the most die-hard e-book supporters, people who not only read e-books but spend their time discussing them. As a result, consensus on this message board is highly skewed compared to the general populace. Paper has advantages too, even if not everyone cares about those advantages.