Paper Books vs Digital Books

[cronus]

Which will be read in a hundred years?

[JimC]

According to you, neither, since we'll all be tiny bands of starving barbarians, with no time to read in between eating thistles and slower moving humans...

[cronus]

According to you, neither, since we'll all be tiny bands of starving barbarians, with no time to read in between eating thistles and slower moving humans...

Yes, I'm a realist but I was wondering what optimists think in the mean time before it all goes out of whack.

[surreptitious57]

I do not think that one should be writing the obituary of the book quite just yet. After all the internet was supposed to reference a paperless revolution and yet that antiquated medium is still with us. And rather extensively so too. I do think
that the digital alternative will become more popular but that will be more a gradual rather than an immediate transition
as paper will still be here for a long time to come. I myself prefer it anyway and as long as there is sufficient demand for
it then bookshops shall continue to exist. And while I am all for embracing technology that does not mean that the old ways have to be surrendered immediately. But regardless the question is really an academic one. For what is important here is not the packaging but what it contains

[cronus]

I do not think that one should be writing the obituary of the book quite just yet. After all the internet was supposed to reference a paperless revolution and yet that antiquated medium is still with us. And rather extensively so too. I do think
that the digital alternative will become more popular but that will be more a gradual rather than an immediate transition
as paper will still be here for a long time to come. I myself prefer it anyway and as long as there is sufficient demand for
it then bookshops shall continue to exist. And while I am all for embracing technology that does not mean that the old ways have to be surrendered immediately. But regardless the question is really an academic one. For what is important here is not the packaging but what it contains

So easy to change the news of yesterday with digital.

[JimC]

Personally, I swing both ways...

[Blind groper]

Personally, I love ebooks.
I bought a kindle a couple years back and have not bought a paper book since. The advantages of the ebook are just overwhelming. I still subscribe to some paper magazines, though.

In the long run, I can see paper getting less and less common for pure economic reasons. It costs next to nothing to publish in ebook formate, versus the thousands of dollars to do a solid print run on a paper book, not to mention the ease of electronic downloading, versus delivering material books. Ebooks will just keep getting cheaper, while paper books will keep getting pricier.

I have about 200 books in te memory of my ebook. If I am travelling, I can download a few more first, to keep me in reading matter. The ebook with a whole library of reading weighs less than a standard paperback. Easy to use. It even connects to a couple major dictionaries and to Wikipedia. All the books I have bought are available on the cloud, and I can re-download them for free onto another device as long as I keep my password.

[MrJonno]

Books will become expensive luxury items, collector items but I can't see them being mass produced in the future

[Seth]

I will be damned to hell before I buy an E-book that the vendor can wipe off my device whenever it wants. For that matter, I will never buy an E-book that phones home or can be traced in any way to my computer. I also pay cash at Barnes & Nobel because of a case out of Colorado where the police subpoenaed all the purchase records of the Tattered Cover bookstore in order to try to prove that some criminal had bought a "how to" book.

If you don't give the bookstore your personal information, then the police can't subpoena your personal information from the bookstore.

Basic privacy tactics 101.

E-books make the NSA cream its jeans because not only can it track every book you read, it can very probably hack the book and inject a keylogger into your computer so it can see everything you type.

Fucking stupid to buy them if you ask me. When I buy a book, it's MINE, and I can read it, rip it up, or sell it to someone else. The whole notion that you can't sell an E-book you're done with is completely reprehensible and a total shift in copyright law that is detrimental to society because books will now simply disappear into the ether. You'll never see an ancient copy of "The Hunt for Red October" found in a monastery library a thousand years from now.

[Azathoth]

buy?

[JimC]

I'm appalled by the obvious bias shown in this thread towards analogue books...

[Azathoth]

I can't study from an ebook. When it comes to textbooks it has to be paper

[Clinton Huxley]

Both are awesome.

[JimC]

Both are awesome.

As are fluffy bunnies...

[klr]

Both are awesome.

As are fluffy bunnies...

Pink fluffy bunnies to be exact.