This chap thinks so. And he has some interesting points.
demise of books
Mostly his argument hinges on the developing world.
So you advance literacy in Africa and Asia. You need books. You need a lot of books. A lot of trees…
When phones came to Asia, they didn’t start with miles of copper wire. They used cell towers…
When electrical power comes to remove villages, it doesn’t come so much with power lines, but solar panels.
Personally, I think the market IS shifting faster than anybody had predicted. I don’t think it’ll go quite that fast, because book lovers are sentimental about books—BUT—if you’re sitting in a village in Africa, a laptop with 10,000 books installed is a library. And the classics, textbooks, and reference books will probably be the mass of books that does go that direction. The outlay school districts make in books is huge.
So what happens when that money goes, not to, say, venerable old Putnam or MacMillan, but to Microsoft, and the makers of e-readers? Personally, my money is on the Very Cheap Laptop for that job, because it doubles as a math-science-internet machine. And the cost is about equal.
But what happens to Putnam and MacMillan?
What happens when Johnny’s dog eats not just his homework, but his entire laptop? I’m sorry, Miss Jones, my computer crashed?
Not, Report to the principal’s office, but Report to IT.
It’s an interesting new world out there. Again, my bet is a long, long period when we’ll see Original print books, and then people hawking copies of Original Print, etc.
Heaven help us if we have a major Coronal Mass Ejection equalling the one in the 1800’s and a few months (or years) off the grid.
Of course by week 1, half the country would be gibbering lunatics.
Some friends have been editors for decades. They’re now having trouble finding work because editing has been outsourced by the big publishers.
I really think that they should organize a credible guild or whatever and offer editing services and a hallmark (original meaning) that readers can rely on to writers who have submitted works to them that are of publishable quality as edited.
I don’t know about the disappearance of books (I sure hope not, because I have a wee collection that I like adding to) but the new technologies are sure hammering the magazines. Realms of Fantasy just folded.
Ouch.
The growing popularity of ebooks may be contributing to current problems that the stf magazines are experiencing, but there must be other contributing factors. Jim Baen’s Universe is folding, too, and it is in ebook format.
Of course, the stf magazines have died down to a handful before; so, I wouldn’t start carving the tombstone just yet.
Do you have a link for the story on Baen? I’m curious, as I buy ebooks from Baen, and would really hate to have them go under!
http://baens-universe.com/articles/Universe_Closing
It’s the magazine that’s closing, at least at a cursory reading.
Muahahaha! For lo, I am a LIBRARIAN, and I actually read a lot of my own library’s books. When the computerized card catalog crashed last time, I and my fellow librarians knew where to find almost any freekin’ book/information in our own library. The Internet is great, but don’t rely on Wikipedia to do all your fact checking, and when it crashes, hard copy is your friend.
In library school, one point was brought up that with the increasing ability of any yahoo with an Internet connection and a modicum of computer savvy to post darn well anything that crosses their mind, editors and publishers are an increasingly necessary yet endangered species. Books, due to the time and effort involved in the publishing industry, usually have some guarantee of quality. E-pub doesn’t always mean you’ll get a filter between what burbles out of your subconscious and the rest of Teh Intarwebz. Sometimes a filter is desperately needed.
“Sometimes”, chondrite????
No smiley, either…. :-/
In regards to copying, one big issue that everyone misses when discussing DRM is that it doesn’t work. And that the only way to prevent copying, is to ban microprocessors. Which means that damned near every device that you have, would have to be replaced (microwave ovens, clock radios, etc.)
Curiously Larry Niven predicted this in a round about way, in his early stories, but almost no one caught it at the time.
Heck, I’d like having a library of 10,000 books on my laptop too, never mind remote villages.
However, that only works when the neato reader-gadget is plugged in or the battery has juice. After that, it’s down to batteries for flashlights under the covers. 😉 Then you’re down to campfires and oil lamps.
There is still a huge need for editors and librarians and skilled writers and designers. The ebook market and the web are a great democratization for “freedom of the press,” for anyone to post whatever they want to write (draw, paint, audio, video…) in whatever quality they can manage. But *good* quality work needs a little more discipline and effort. There will (somehow) remain (or arise) professions and companies to provide some degree of quality (or at least notoriety) (or notoriousness?) for web-published and ebook or multimedia presentations. And there will likely be “Like” functions to gain attention even for those Average Joe and Jill unknowns. That last is fine. It lets Joe or Jill who have no money but have computer access and raw talent produce quality work, and somehow rise above unknown obscurity to where their work can be appreciated and hopefully get them out of that crummy apartment in the ‘hood. 🙂 Even if that relies from a newly forming process instead of the Old Way It Always Was, it has to happen.
Back in the 80’s, when the Mac and LaserWriter made this strange thing called “desktop publishing” possible, all and sundry, from the big-giant-publishers to the indie presses to the corner mom-and-pop print shop reacted to DTP as if to heretics and the undead. 😉 “Unclean! We follow the Old Ways! Get thee hence with thy sorcerous ways! It is low quality! It is not The Way It Is Done!” — No kidding. A few people were crazy mavericks and tried it anyway. It worked. It was cheaper. It was lower quality, in image resolution and too often by untrained (unwashed!) masses. But it worked. And the people with talent and interest either retrained or became trained, skilled. And lo, the clouds parted, the seas parted, and… there was change and it was (mostly) good (enough). It became the New Way, the Golden Path.
Now, those of us who know something about the Old Ways and have training are few. (Woe! Alas!) …And here, I’ll admit that I know more of the New Ways than about the Old Ways. …Yes, it’s very true that quality has suffered. People do things too fast without reviewing and revising. They skip things. They don’t have training to know what they should be doing or how or why. But they do get stuff in print / online. It may be spotty or it may be, ah, manure — or it may be the next artist or novelist, poet, or journalist or great thinker in the making. (I’m not taking sides either way there. I have seen what I consider rubbish and what I’d say are diamonds in the rough, and I’ve seen good quality books transformed into shoddily produced and proofed ebooks or in-print books, including from major publishers. A big, glaring typo in 36 point type in the first chapter? Ouch. (Not here, that was in a widely used how-to book a few years back.) Ahem, though I’ve seen a goof or two get past my proofing too.
I suppose I see it all as growing pains, earthquake and global repopulation scale growing pains, possibly, and lasting for many years, but still, growing pains, and necessary. I can identify with both sides, too, having been out there as one of those knowing both the Old Ways and the New Ways…and having to learn New New Ways these days.
By comparison, the skilled book scribes and illuminators, back in the early days of the printing press became rather upset (and rightfully and understandably) over the seemingly diabolical rise of movable type and mass-produced printed books. True enough, their crafts became relegated to artists and crafters, plus antiquarians and hobbyists. Now, printed books may become much more an artistic / craft objet d’art, a collectible or luxury item. Or maybe they’ll achieve some kind of parity.
But ladies and gentlemen, and unwashed masses, we are all of us along for the ride, whether we want it or not. The times, they are a-changin’, blowin’ in the wind. We don’t any of us know for sure where it’ll all end up yet. But it will be vastly different.
Oh brave new world that hath such ebooks and websites in it?
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy (etexts), oh Horatio?
Scoot over, oh Horatio, methinks I could use more income also. Master Scrooge hath bled my coffers near dry.
As long as I don’t end up like poor Yorick there too soon! 😀
…All that said, we are in a remarkable time. I notice we’re still using the 26 letters, 10 numerals, and a few handfuls of funny little marks. Surely people with talent will get through it. Bet on those flexible enough to try new things.
I would hope that modern communication systems would be better — and remember that we’re generally talking fiber these days for anything except, perhaps, the last few miles to the home — but I know what cost-cutting is, and why if anything the tech of today might be closer to its limits than that of before.
It really depends on the characteristics of the noise it induces in copper conductors, which I don’t know …
BlueCatShip [quote] However, that only works when the neato reader-gadget is plugged in or the battery has juice. After that, it’s down to batteries for flashlights under the covers. [/quote]
Most of the readers available today will work for at least a week without recharge. The new Kindle will go up to a month if you turn the transmitter off! If we can ensure that every village has a solar-powered means of recharge, then reading should be available most of the year (monsoons or months of snow might put a damper on things…). Even when it loses charge, the ereaders don’t dump your books. I’d much rather try to protect my library on an ereader than try to protect a library worth of books from flood and fire and stupidity.
I should add that presently the 3rd Generation Kindle only holds 3500 books, so maybe you’d need three ereaders rather than just one, but you could divide up the library into sensible topics and place two or three topics on each ereader, in order to have redundant back up in case of loss or damage.
This isn’t quite the right place for this comment, but I didn’t know where to stick it. There’s an interesting discussion about women who write sci-fi going on here…
http://io9.com/5666329/what-are-the-best-sf-published-by-women-in-the-past-10-years
… about why there have been so few female Clarke award winners in the past 10 years. I thought some of Cherryh’s fans might want to see what’s being said.
(I think you have to be vetted before you can add to the discussion, which I’m not. But we can rubber-neck.)
If you ever want to see what the new trends in Europe are see what the Perry Rhodan publishers are upto. POD, iPhone apps, ebooks, CDs the works.
The quality of books has really gone downhill, I am talking about paperbacks they do not proofread anymore it seems like. There is tons of errors also brand new books fall apart on me the pages fall out after reading some cut the words off on the edge of the page! My wife is a substitute teacher, she said they can not count off for spelling a lot of them can’t read when they graduate, they abbreviate everything, you can thank texting for this! I worry about future readers!!!
The e-book model is very much the answer to the problem of providing books to the developing world. A recent BBC item about the state of a university library in Sierra Leone, clearly demonstrated the challenge of keeping books in usable order, in a climate that works hard to destroy them. Almost all of the books had been destroyed.