I was walking through a bohemian part of town and ran across this place called a "bookstore". I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. I've always gotten my books electronically on my kindle, but this could be an interesting idea." So I stepped inside. What I saw was an unfamiliar way of experiencing books: on hundreds of of sheets of paper, bound up on one side with glue and wrapped in a hard cardboard cover. They even smell a little musty, at least the old ones.
At first I was excited; but then I began to think, well how would I do a text search in such a book? Supposing it was a reference book, or I wanted to find a quote that was particularly memorable? Also, I can resell it if I don't want it, but I can't take notes in the book without ruining its value. Plus, where am I going to keep these books if I buy a whole bunch of them? They're really heavy! And it uses a lot of paper - especially newspapers! What if it's dark and I need a bigger font? What if I'm on the train to work and decide I want to buy the paper version of the Times that day? Can't get it!! Not only that, but they wanted to charge me MORE for these clunky, static, physical, books than the normal electronic price! Honestly, with all these limitations and disadvantages, they should be giving them away for free. I decided I'm never going to pay a single red cent for a paper book until these issues are addressed. No way.
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Commenter Kindler writes:
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"At first I was excited; but then I began to think, well how would I do a text search in such a book?"
By looking in its index?
Maybe Google is making some of us stupid.
Huh. Don't know about you, but in a lot of the books I read -- like, say, novels -- it's really hard to find the index. And strangely, even in the books where I can find them, they tend to index by topic and not so much by "I remember he used the word 'unabashed' in that sentence I wish I could find."
Other than those minor quibbles, though, your rejoinder makes a great deal of sense and totally refutes Kindler's point.
P.S. Maybe it's not Google.
I've never seen an index half as capable as Ctrl-F. Have you?
"They're really heavy! And it uses a lot of paper - especially newspapers! "
That's "sequestered carbon," baby...
;)
Funny, I was thinking about if newpapers came after the internet. You could imagine the pitch meeting.
Pitch: What we're gonna do see, is print out the internet on huge presses. Then, were going to load the printouts on trucks and deliver them to the homes of our customers.
VC; Won't that be expensive and time consuming and won't the news be late by the time it arrives?
Pitch: Yes, but I assure you it will work.
Newspapers still have a couple of practical advantages over electronic doodads. You can discretely slip a whole section of a broadsheet (e.g., the WSJ, the NYT, etc.) into a manila folder, and then put that folder into an interoffice envelope. Then you can take that interoffice envelope with you on the way to the office crapper, without drawing any undue attention.
You can also take your paper with you to a buffet restaurant for lunch, and leave it on your table while you head up to the buffet, without worrying if it will be there when you get back.
Dave,
That's why iPhones are for.
Well then you better Lysol your iPhone.
You need to replace "Pitch" with "Pinch", heheheh.
Kidding aside:
I never worry about my book's batteries running out. My book never gets warm. If someone steals my book, or I accidentally leave it somewhere, I'm typically out less than $20 (and often half that). My book never breaks. If someone wants to borrow my book, I can use my book to beat them silly while I say NO BORROWING BOOKS!
er... I mean "I can lend it to them with no fear of huge financial loss." Unless it's a rare book, in which case my first comment still applies.
My book reads well on the beach. Sand is no problem. Bright sunlight is no problem (in fact, it's welcome). Polarized lenses are no problem.
When people visit my home, my library gives them an interesting glimpse into me. They can see titles like "Hide the Body: A Story of Book Borrowing Gone Wrong."
Heavens. It's almost as if each medium offered its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
(Remind me not to borrow any books from you. I tend to return them visibly worse for wear.)
"Heavens. It's almost as if each medium offered its own set of advantages and disadvantages."
If only Kindler acknowledged that in his comment.
Nothing makes me angrier than when a commenter fails to explicitly spell out that whatever point they're making is only part of the story; otherwise, I automatically assume that the comment represents their opinion on the matter in its entirety, and was not rather some kind of jumping-off point for a larger discussion.
Actually, if a comment doesn't acknowledge every single possible alternative to the point it's making, I consider it a colossal fiasco.
Hey, c'mon, Kindler was making an amusing point by turning the tables. I love books, and I love my Kindle. I am not at all sure which is "better" and I really don't care.
@Rob Ives: If McLuhan was right, one thing the Kindle may do is help free us typographically indoctrinated Westerners from the absurd idea that either is objectively "better."
"Nothing makes me angrier than when a commenter fails to explicitly spell out that whatever point they're making is only part of the story..."
Ah! I am eviscerated yet again by the keen blade of your Noel Coward-like wit. Touché.
@Dave: Apologies if said blade was too sharp. It's very hot where I am right now.
It's very hot where I am right now.
That means either here in Dallas, or in that place you deserve to be for wielding that blade!
In the latter case it is not quite so hot though.
Batteries: The Kindle is not backlit and uses an "eInk" display, which only draws power during page turns. So the battery lasts for a week or so. The cell phone or laptop feeling that your batteries are always about to run out is not there.
Warm: Where did you hear that? Again, the Kindle is not "on" in the same what a device with a LCD display and a hard drive would be. It doesn't get warm. You reveal your lack of experience with a Kindle here.
Theft: Yes, they're expensive and you need to keep an eye on them.
Lending books: If you do this a lot, the Kindle's not for you. I don't. If I found a book I wanted to give to my mother, I'd buy a paper copy. This would be a once or twice a year thing for me. So you could budget $20 a year in to the cost of the Kindle, maybe a net present value of $100, and decide if the added cost makes the Kindle too expensive for you. People who constantly lend books are better off not using a Kindle. But as a "target" of book lenders I'd ask you to consider this perspective: Do the people you lend books to really want them, or are you imposing a burden on them? I'm looking right now at a book my mother-in-law lent me that I don't want to read, and she's asked me about it, and I really don't know what to do. I guess I'll just lie and say I read it and hope she doesn't query me too closely about it. So if you lend books, please don't become one of "those guys" that people dread.
The beach. The Kindle works great at the beach. Sunlight is no problem. It's eInk, not a backlit LCD. Sand is no problem, unless you're one of those guys who cringes when your stuff gets scratched and uses cases for your cell phone and iPod. Water is no problem in moderation. A ziplock sandwich bag over the Kindle is protection if you're worried. (You can't leave the Kindle out while you swim though.) Polarized lenses? Never heard of that one. I don't have polarized sunglasses, but I just put a polarizer on my Nikon D60 SRL, and the screen reads fine through the viewfinder. Again, eInk.
Where I would still buy books is (1) if there is no Kindle edition, (2) for certain sorts of reference books where you want to grab it and look up something, like language references for CSS or HTML, and (3) for books that depend heavily on large illustrations, perhaps in color, and large tables, which are not supported by the Kindle except in image form. For the latter, I'm finding that dealing with the occasional image or table that is not displayed well on the Kindle doesn't bother me, but I wouldn't want to deal with something like a color graphic novel or Visual Quickstart software manual from Peachpit Press on the Kindle.
Books last a long time, like 100 years or so if well made. You will probably replace your reader around once/5 years. So you will have to download your library 10 times in 50 years just to keep them available. Books on my shelf stay put with no effort or imput on my part.
Until you move. Then you find there is quite a lot of effort to deal with "Gray's Anatomy", "Clinically Oriented Anatomy", "Grant's Atlas of Anatomy", and three large volumes that all happen to share the title "Human Anatomy". And there's effort in listening to your wife insist on why the subtle differences in each make the marginal value of keeping each one (for the rest of your damn life) nearly priceless. And next to them are the three different books called "Human Physiology". Oh, but don't worry...each has its own subtitle, thus proving its utter uniqueness.
Then there is the extra space you need to store them. And the dust that must periodically be removed from them. And the fact that one day they will probably crush you in an earthquake.
Books on my shelf stay put with no effort or imput on my part.
When my hard drive crashed (good and hard) I lost nearly 2 years worth of baby/toddler photos. I'd backed up some, but others are now locked in an old drive until I win the lottery and send it out for a $5,000 clean-room job.
My pre-child vacation photos, shot with a clunky steel K-1000, are fine.
My great-grandfather's diary and letters to his sister from WWI (actually, from boot camp and the ship-out process, he got their late) are stacked in a fire safe. Not sure what, if anything, will remain of my more voluminous correspondence.
When my hard drive crashed (good and hard) I lost nearly 2 years worth of baby/toddler photos. I'd backed up some, but others are now locked in an old drive until I win the lottery and send it out for a $5,000 clean-room job.
I know people who've lost all their family photos in a fire (and not just a couple of years worth). It's easy and cheap to make perfect copies of digital photos and store them somewhere else. Of course, not everybody gets around it to, but it's much harder to make even imperfect copies of photo negatives, and nobody does that (except, of course, by digitizing).
It's also easy to hand out digital copies to any relatives who want them rather than having a single family album that can be handed down only to one person (or, worse, disassembled and the photos distributed -- which I've seen done in my family).
My great-grandfather's diary and letters to his sister from WWI (actually, from boot camp and the ship-out process, he got their late) are stacked in a fire safe. Not sure what, if anything, will remain of my more voluminous correspondence.
Well, if you're convinced paper in a firebox is the way to go, you can always fire up your printer...
Obviously digital has numerous advantages. That would be why I'm all-digital these days. But hard-drive crashes and format changes are more common than fires, and I'm not convinced I'd have family wedding pictures from the turn of the century or shots of my grandfather as an infant if they had been stored on electronic media.
Digital is better for me, now. For my great-grandkids? It's probably worse.
Rob: I feel for you. You won't economize on the SATA RAID again, will you?
Allow me to slightly amend the question: what if the e-book reader had been invented before the print book?
Well, then it would not be distinctly Kindle-like in nature, since the whole idea of the Kindle's system for controlling virtual books presupposes the cultural and legal norms developed in the culture dominated by the printed book. To an inventor steeped in the norms of the manuscript culture that predated the wide dissemination of printing an e-book machine would be as a blank corpus of paper that made making, emending, and commenting upon one's personal copy of text far more simple, reliable, and quick by comparison to the previously available methods. The object would be, like many conventional books of the time, a collection of many texts spliced together at the owner's whim by his or her own copying from the the physical-book-embodiments owned by others. The idea of limiting or controlling this copying would have been quite foreign to an inventor that existed in such a time, and not one likely to lead to profitability, since the market would be dominated by a oligopsony of the educated elite that would not tolerate such an invasion into their traditional practice of copying and sharing texts.
Dare I suggest that it would be much like something I expect, or at least hope, to see in the near future as the market for hand-held general computing devices matures?
But one advantage of the Gutenberg model, which inherently limited copying of a text while also allowing it to be mass-distributed, is that it allowed for the merchandising of information on a large scale. Which meant, over time, that you could make money by writing books; which meant that everybody -- not just the first and second estates -- had an interest in getting into it.
Assuming a DRM-free world where ebooks can be as easily passed around as MP3s, I'm not sure where the incentive or even ability to produce quality new content lies. Will people still write? Of course. Will as many, and will what they produce be as good? I kinda doubt it. Sure, there are a handful of people out there who have the time to write while supporting themselves, and who are very capable self-editors -- but only a handful.
Life will obviously go on, but it'll be different. We Westerners have lived in a Gutenberg-driven culture for half a millennium. It's so pervasive that most of us don't even see its effects on us. We can't expect to switch, technologically speaking, to something like the pre-Gutenberg era and not see some big commensurate cultural changes too.
I don't think the incentive problem is that great -- the long tail makes a big difference. How large is the audience for a niche ransom-model (i.e.: written when a threshold of pledged support is reached) work compared to the contemporary audience for Gutenberg's bible? So, on the contrary, I expect that not only will great authors continue to earn an income and mediocre writers keep on regardless, but that bespoke writing will continue it's incredible growth.
It's entirely possible! I certainly don't think writing is going to go away. Interesting times, anyway.
Yes indeed. When the music industry makes that point, I say Britney Spears.
Derek
If Kindle or other DRM encumbered systems were invented first, then we'd be accustomed to having the creator of a work dictate our use of their material.
that would mean...
there would be no fair use
there would be no libraries
there would be no museums
that only rich people would be educated
Dunno, I'm just as happy books were created first, thanks Mr Gutenburg!
Books were around a long time before Gutenberg, just FYI.
And imagine if you bought one of those big ol' clunky books and put it on a shelf, then, one day, when you open it up, all the pages have mysteriously gone blank and all that is left is a little note saying, "I'm sorry, we no longer offer this service anymore."
Just yesterday I was at the library doing research reading a 40 year old book. Besides the wonder I felt when I thought of who else had held this, I kinda laughed as I looked down the hall at the AV room full of "new media," which included vhs tapes and audio cassettes. Mediums I don't even have machines for anymore.
The rapid pace of adoption and abandonment for digital standards and devices can be problematic as any librarian or archivist will tell you. How many years do you expect your Kindle to work? And yes, maybe you're fine with just getting a new device every couple years, but we already throw out 100,000,000 old cell phones each year.
That is a lot of cadmium, plastic, copper, precious metals, etc. and a huge amount of it just sits in landfills. And, unlike the trees we use to make paper, we can't simply just plant and grow more of those inputs.
Don't get me wrong, the Kindle has many great advantages, but also plenty of disadvantages.
On the individual short-term level, the Kindle probably wins hands down, but in aggregate and over time, there are plenty of issues to be examined.
But, that commenter seems to be stuck in a perspective that all that matters is "me, me, me, now, now, now."
"Two guys walk into a bar. You think the second one would've ducked"
You like that joke? Well, every time you tell it to anyone, I want you to pay me a dollar. Also, if the people you told the joke to chose to repeat it, they have to pay me a dollar as well. If I find out that someone knows this joke that has not paid me, I will hold both them and you responsible, and I expect $5k from both of you, failing that I'll have the gov't fine you $80k. By laughing at my joke you agree to all those conditions.
This deal is blatantly ridiculous, yet this is exactly what the entertainment industry expects. I understand that creators should profit from their work, but selling information under the same business model as real tangible goods is absurd.
"That guy stole my car!"
"Sir, your car is right there"
"But, he has one just like it!"
I don't know what business model should be used for information, but I'm pretty sure the one we use now does not work.
Excellent statement. Also note: the founding fathers borrowed heavily and directly from literature both ancient and recent, without citations, and to a degree which today would get them sued for plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.
DRM has good points for protecting an incentive to write. But, the whole field has taken a turn to exclude what has always been considered reasonable fair use to an unprecedented degree. The merchandising of information, as a precious commenter put it, has also led to a strong incentive to forget lessons previously learned as they cannot be re-iterated without fear of a difficult to defend fair use lawsuit.
Besides the wonder I felt when I thought of who else had held this...
The physics library at my alma mater had complete sets of every major physics journal from Vol. 1 issue 1, including (of course) all the famous groudbreaking papers by people with names like Einstein, Schroedinger, and Bohr. We amused ourselves once by poking around and finding E=mc^2 derived for the first time in history.
I like books.
I still use my college textbooks on a regular basis. If they had been on Kindle, I would now be trying to access them after forty years. Forty years ago, they didn't have personal computers. Since then, my various computers have all failed multiple times taking anything I didn't back up with them. To access older data, I'd have to have a punched card reader, a DECTAPE drive, an open reel drive, a floppy reader for 8", 5-1/4 inch, and 3-1/2 inch media, a USB drive reader, a zip drive, etc. Kindle's policy isn't a description of a viable approach to accessing useful books. It's only useful for novels consumed as mental popcorn on long plane flights. For that, it's probably OK, but why not just read the things on my iPhone?
I still use my college textbooks on a regular basis. If they had been on Kindle, I would now be trying to access them after forty years. Forty years ago, they didn't have personal computers.
Uh, if they'd been on Kindle 40 years ago, then they would have had computers 40 years ago (a Kindle is a specialized small computer).
But I still have emails from the early 80s which, at this point, are 25 years old. They're ASCII text files, and I'm sure ASCII text will be just as readable 100 years from now as it is today. Same thing for HTML, PDF, JPG, and the like -- those things are so ubiquitous that even though formats will evolve, there will be no trouble having software around that's able to read the old standard formats.
As for 8" floppies and punched cards ... people who use these examples don't take into account two things. First all, that in the days of punched cards and 8" floppies, computers were specialized equipment, not part of everyday life, and second that we're not talking about particular kinds of storage media. Those old emails of mine were originally stored on floppies, too, because for a while, that's all my computer had. But long ago they were copied to a hard disk, and they move from computer to computer (taking up an tinier and tinier fraction of the available space).
space).
The thing that makes Kindle files impermanent is the DRM and only the DRM. If they were selling ebooks in open, standard formats, you could count on being able to read them forever (just as there's no chance Project Gutenberg ebooks are going to be rendered unreadable).
Everyone's comments about the limited lifespans of new media neglect to take into account what a short time we've been using them, and especially using them on a networked basis. Barring some kind of apocalypse, I'll be shocked if by fifty years from now (or much, much sooner), we haven't established some sort of broad, flexible universal protocol for producing, storing, and accessing digital content, such that a device built in 2052 has no problem handling a file from 2018. We're already working on it! Remember when websites were "best viewed with Netscape"? How often does that matter now?
I'll be shocked if by fifty years from now (or much, much sooner), we haven't established some sort of broad, flexible universal protocol for producing, storing, and accessing digital content, such that a device built in 2052 has no problem handling a file from 2018.
But we've already done that -- the computer algorithms for interpreting JPG image files, for example, are well known and are not going to be forgotten. We don't need a 'universal protocol' we just need for a format to be used commonly enough that it will always be worthwhile for somebody to take the trouble to make the code run on a current machine. And for the formats we care about (with countless billions of JPGs served), that is already assured.
True. I guess I'm thinking more about handhelds, computers, cash registers, refrigerators, ATMs, parking meters, etc., all interacting on the same platform, in a fashion that's open enough to allow for new features but consistent enough that old data can still be read decades later. Which is sort of already happening too.
For a year or so in the mid-90's I kept my personal journal on my laptop. At the time, I was using a personal information management software package (think MS Outlook w/o the email capability) and was sure I'd continue to use the package for forever -- or at least I'd be able to export my data into the new and improved solution. Of course, the software package was soon orphaned and I could not export the data to the new package nor could I find an easy way to print all my journal entries. Somewhere I've got a bunch of 3.5" floppy disks with all the data backed up. Someday, maybe, there'll be a software package that will allow me to extract that data (the old package does not run under Windows XP).
That's the problem with digital media. It's only as good as long as new and improved versions of software/hardware can still read the media. My paper journals from decades ago cannot be searched electronically, but I can still read them.
As Moff said, "it's almost as if each medium offered its own set of advantages and disadvantages."
The paper book was pretty good considering the reasonably available technology and the limitations of the medium. To make it better and more usable despite those limitations, things like indices and tables of contents were added. I can't think of anything done to reduce its functionality.
The Kindle and devices like it are deliberately disabled. For some purposes it is better than paper books, and for some it is worse. And for some purposes the Kindle could and should be better, but isn't because of this deliberate crippling.
I'll be shocked if by fifty years from now (or much, much sooner), we haven't established some sort of broad, flexible universal protocol for producing, storing, and accessing digital content, such that a device built in 2052 has no problem handling a file from 2018.
You'll be shocked.
More to the point, long-term backwards compatibility is not something that people, in general, are willing to pay for. It's one of those things they just expect, and then are disappointed when it doesn't occur, sort of like software stability.
The other thing is that if every book owner in the last 100 years had had to periodically retranscribe their book every 5 years, there'd be a hell of a lot fewer books lying around. Yes, you *can* keep your electronic versions up-to-date, it's just that you *won't*. Which means that glorious joy of finding something that people have considered nearly valueless for 50 years will be lost.
Electronic copies have lots of interesting features, but as a long-term archive medium, they suck because they're not essentially maintenance-free. Books require space, and avoidance of fire and water. Other than that, you can forget about them for 100 years.
Long-term backwards compatibility is not something that people, in general, have been willing to pay for. It's not even something they've much thought about it. But they're thinking about it now. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the PDF as an open-source format, in fact.
This is all new territory, as usual except more so. Unless there was some other time we saw a shift en masse from analog to digital communication.
Arguably, the transition from oral to written culture was similar. I'm sure that to the contemporaries of Plato the dangers that applied to a fragile bundle of papyrus made keeping important information in such a form seem almost impossible to apprehend compared to the relative security of having that information bound up the cultural constitution of a whole society, or at least some profession class within it. When more fully developed the former could outlast the later by orders of magnitude, but in living through the achievement of that development one must have seen extensive losses.
Sure, similar. But it's still a little silly (although understandable) to infer that since people have never ______, they will never ______ when we're talking about technological change.
On another note, there's an argument to be made for the long-term security of digital media over analog media: You can store the same digital information in a lot of places at once, at minimal cost. You could lose all of Grandpa's old photos in a computer crash, but if you have them backed up on an external drive and on Flickr and on a friend's server, it's a lot easier to recover them than if they burn up in a fire.
(replying to Moff @4:40 here as comments only nest finitely)
I think we're in violent agreement.
@Joshua: I concur. Vehemently.
Long-term backwards compatibility is not something that people, in general, have been willing to pay for. It's not even something they've much thought about it. But they're thinking about it now.
Actually, I strongly doubt they ever will. In almost any human generation, there will be neglect at some point in life (like when having small children reduces extra time to zero or simply being too young to care about that old stuff...). The seminal advantage of books is that (barring disaster), it doesn't matter, at least as long as you have space.
Honestly, I don't think an archiving medium that cannot survive 25 years of neglect is one worthy of the name. Books are a long way from the perfect medium, but they seem to have hit a sweet spot, at least as far as human behaviour goes.
I'd agree that in many cases it can be easier to electronically back things up *as long as people actively care about it*. But caring is pretty much guaranteed to fail at least once a generation. (Where guarantee really means ~90% of the time, of course.)
@Tom: Well, again -- they are thinking about it, insofar as the viability of popular formats goes. There has been a demonstrable shift since the Web went mainstream toward the formats that are most accessible. (That sounds almost tautological.) I mean, all these complaints about DRM -- and yet (thanks in no small part to said complaints) Amazon, iTunes, and the bulk of online music sellers went with the MP3 as the format of choice.
Personal computers are about 30 years old, so it's really shortsighted to suggest that a digital archive can't survive 25 years of neglect. In fact, I bet there are plenty of files running around on the Web today off of people's first IBMs or Tandys that demonstrate otherwise. Is it easy to get into all those files? No. But it's not easy to read old books, either, and for basically the same reason: There have been major changes in language and format.
As for active caring, like I said to Rob L. below, the great thing about computers is that you don't have to actively care. I have files on my MacBook now from my old Performa, and assuming (reasonably, I think) that backup solutions continue to get easier, I'll still have those files 30 years from now, without ever thinking about them. It may cost me some money to find someone who can open the proprietary formats, should I ever need to do so, but I'd have to pay someone to translate my Great-Grandpa Fredrick's letters from the Hungarian, too.
It's not just the file format you have to worry about. In fact, that might be the easy part. The main fact is that destroying an archive is as easy as tossing the computer or not knowing your father's accounts and password.
Honestly, I would expect less than 10% of electronically stored archival material to survive from 10 years before someone's death to 10 years afterwards. The odds that anyone knows what internet services grandpa used, what his email accounts were and passwords were, and most importantly, how he organized everything (which in the age of the internet is probably more important than anything) some years after the fact of his demise are not high. If they're careful, they may take an image of his hard drive before they toss it, but the odds anyone has the weeks or months to pore over the drive to extract what may be historically significant or interesting verges on nil. This is compared to the already onerous task of going through the bookshelves and desk drawers to decide what to discard.
With books and photo albums, you have vastly less information, so while organizing it is formidable, it's an orders of magnitude smaller task than organizing the electronic equivalent, which will have 10-100x more stuff. And again, with electronics, you can't just stuff the records in boxes in a basement. Does anyone really expect internet companies to keep stuff around 5 years, let alone 25. Most companies don't survive that long.
Seriously, given patterns of human behaviour, I expect that the age of archival material passed through families in generations is pretty much at an end, at least for letters and photos. (And no, I don't expect technology to change fundamental behaviour patterns, just how those patterns are expressed.)
Remember that books aren't forever, though. After a hundred or so years, they disintegrate without exceptional efforts at preservation. In college we had a collection of yearbooks dating shape and back to 1865; those from before 1900 were about four fifths of the way back to dust.
With forethought (such as that being exercised with the long now project) digital media could provide a better long term storage capability. Cloud computing has the promise of solving a lot of the issues with digital media storage; distributed, redundant copies that can be accessed on a variety of platforms, and is largely device independent. (Of course, DRM aims to ensure that everyone will have to pay for this data over and over again.)
@Tom: But it's not that easy. It was up until the past few years, but again, if backup technology keeps going the way it has been, you'll have to toss out a lot more than one computer to lose something forever. As for finding out which services someone used and how to access them, you're ignoring the reality of how people work: We know Grandpa has a Flickr account because Grandpa sends us pictures with his Flickr account. And if Grandma doesn't know how to get into it, we find a way, we contact the company. If a company goes out of business, we assume they're not going to summarily delete all the content they're holding (even now, I don't think this happens) and presumably, we have data stored in more than one place because it's so easy to. All of this is far from impossible. I do agree there's going to be a glut of information, but how to sort the good stuff out is a different problem from the preservation of it.
You seem to be suggesting that protocols aren't going to be developed to deal with the complexities of digital storage, and I just have to say again that we're barely into using these media. Do you think they're going to go away? Do you think people are just going to stop wanting to keep track of old pictures and writings? Obviously we're not going to succeed at saving everything, but when have we?
I am pretty confident that in the near future the problem of old incompatible data formats will evaporate. Given how easy it is for one person to write an application and host it on a inexpensive web server, plus the open source movement, I expect the story to go like something like this. Some hobbyist will decide she wants to convert some old digital files to a current format, so he will write a script for it. Then she will either create a web application where people can run the conversion script on their old files, or she will post the code to some open source forum. Others who need to make the same conversion will use google or equivalent to search for how to do it, find the site or code, and convert their files. Then someone else will put together a meta web application that can take any file and transparently run it through the the appropriate conversion web site. Then application developers will begin including code in their applications that automatically does the file format conversion using the available web and open source resources. I suspect in 25 years average users will not even be aware that there used to be a problem with outdated data formats; they will just assume that all applications have always been able to open all data formats.
You could lose all of Grandpa's old photos in a computer crash, but if you have them backed up on an external drive and on Flickr and on a friend's server, it's a lot easier to recover them than if they burn up in a fire.
Sure, but unless you (or grandpa) have been proactive in making backups, then it's much more easily lost, to crashes, format changes, or simple lapse in memory.
I've got 8mm of my maternal grandparents' Coronado honeymoon which I haven't watched in nearly 20 years. Before I found it in a storage shed, it probably hadn't been watched in nearly 40 years (and my grandfather had been dead for 20 years). If that had required active preservation more complicated than moving a box from place to place in the the course of moving a whole bunch of other boxes from place to place--if somebody had to know passwords, or periodically dig through the boxes in order to find the thumbnail drive and shift formats before the current one became obsolete--then all I'd have is a labeled thumbnail with an interface nobody uses and a file format nobody can read. And I might not have even that, but rather an online account with a password nobody knows and whose existence might not be known at all.
As it stands, I need to do something about the format at this point. Beyond any rational expectation, the late 1930's projector is still operational and the light bulb in in still works (at last check). But that won't last forever, so I suppose I need to convert it to DVD or MPEG or somesuch.
I'm no IT expert, but I bet there's already software out there that means you don't have to be proactive at all, and that it'll become rapidly more common. Backup software is still a relatively new product for personal use; you can't tell me that it won't become common practice for a computer to transmit backup data to an external drive or off-site server (or both! simultaneously!) as a matter of course, and sooner rather than later.
And as for accounts and passwords, we're still working that out culturally. It's weird, as a relative newlywed, to think I should probably give a list of all my different accounts and login info to my wife, but I probably should! And no doubt someone could and will write an app that makes doing as much a piece of cake.
(I do imagine there'll be some money to be made in restoration of archaic data, for a while. But eventually I think we'll see a small handful of popular formats that'll obtain for some time.)
Love the comments on software compatibility, Moore's law, back-ups, external drives, laptops, 3.5 inch discs....which would fascinate all the poor folks, with little or no disposable income, who have been getting their books from the same place for over a century.
In short....if it HAD been invented first, how would the "technology" of Kindle work with our national system of free lending libraries?
Perhaps it would take the form of loading a book loaded on one's personal Kindle free from a central source (i.e. an electronic library stocked with electronic books, each with an individually purchased license per copy.) After a proscribed period of time (say 3 weeks), the lender must then delete it so it could then be loaded onto someone else's Kindle, such that only a single copy existed per license (with of course, $0.10/day overdue fees if one exceeds the due date without extending.)
That would require a group of people owning DRM license to donate them to a central source (i.e. the lending library) but could probably be accomplished. I dare say, though, that this is not what the perpetrators of DRM wish, and they would file lawsuits in an attempt to prevent such a library from existing.
Again, the problem isn't with the Kindle per se; it's with DRM, and the fundamental ways which some people wish to implement DRM - namely in a manner which restricts information more severely than has been done in the past.
Yes, one's personal Kindle which one paid $399 for.
When I had children at home, the $50 per year library fees were onerous. But worth it.
Come to think of it, $399 per reader in the household. And not sure how they would survive the jelly sandwiches. Books didn't do too well either, but they only cost a few bucks.
Can you color the pages on your Kindle?
Derek
? Do you think people are just going to stop wanting to keep track of old pictures and writings?
es, on the grounds that that is precisely what they already do. My mother could not immediately identify the 8mm movies I found in her stuff. Nor had she ever gone through my grandfather's stamp collection, which somewhat amusingly contained a condom dating from the 1930's. Probably less than a decade after her father's death, she had stopped keeping track of movies of his honeymoon, of her 4th birthday, etc. All she did was dutifully move a box from one house to the next based on some vague notion that she didn't want to throw it away. Why? Well, I presume having a baby may have had something to do with it.
Grandpa might have a Flikr account for posting pics of himself playing shuffleboard at the rest home. But unless he has the SAME Flikr account for 50 years, his wedding pics will probably disappear accidentally sometime into his wife's third pregnancy.
This is not to say that digital media is a bad thing, or without advantages. But it's most probably going to cost us something, too.
It's most definitely going to cost us something, very possibly something much more significant than the (not-insignificant) pleasure one gets from the feel of a good book! I'm just pretty sure the problem won't be long-term storage of data.
A friend once told me that his son awakened him on Father's Day, saying that he had made him a PB&J sandwich for breakfast, but it was gone. What happened to it? The VCR ate it. Not all of the failure modes are the obvious ones. (I had only made own my father a toasted PB&J sandwich...i'd never seen him run so fast to the kitchen).
Kindle cons:
1) hard to browse to see if it has some content I'm interested in (tekGeek looking for stuff - me)
2) difficult to have multiple parts of the content at the same time.
3) difficult to read ahead to see if a character is killed off.
4) traveling with real books forces me to focus (tekGeek with ADD)
5) a lot of books don't translate to kindle well (images, text, e.g. coffe table books etc)
6) difficult to do NYT crosswords on.
7) cant scribble in the margins
8) can't highlight with highlighter important notes (I don't have one but can you?)
9) tied ankle and foot to Amazon's whims on what to publish based on profit.
10) can't have 3-4 books open simulataneously (tekGeek with ADD)
11) books have a tactile/visual/reassuring aspect that is appealing
12) More appealing to browse in brick-and-mortar world than Amazon in some ways.
13) Imagine reading a book by Edward Tufte on a Kindle
14) books have more interesting people available to complete sales transaction
Enough for now.
Kindle cons cont'd
15) Kindle can't sell you a latte and a scone
16) Kindle doesn't provide big comfy easy chairs to browse suitability of purchases.
17) Kindle is still " a computer" I spend all my time in front of (so sayeth my spouse)
18) paranoia of traveling with a Kindle and a MacBook
19) Threatens the market for cool book bags and printers (real people).
20) reduces the magnificient clutter of books piled everywhere
21) hard to impress the guests with a Kindle on the coffee table
22) only available in black and white. (grey scale?)
23) can ruin one if I spill a tall non-latte on one.
24) doens't force me to leave my room and get some fresh air etc
enough for now
I think the key point is understanding that the Kindle is not a perfect Venn diagram replacement for printed matter. For some things, like reading summer potboiler mass market paperback fiction, it is. For other things it might not be the best approach.
Some more comments on things people had mentioned:
Old books: One thing I've discovered since I got a Kindle is Project Gutenberg. If by "old" you mean 1950-1980, yeah, there's a copyright/backlist gap there. But if you want to read stuff that's 100 years old, there's really a lot of free stuff. I was aware of Project Gutenberg, but not at the depth and number of documents available. For instance, I downloaded a tract by Robert Louis Stephenson about political troubles in Samoa during a particular decade of the 19th century when he lived there. Wow, was it boring and irrelevant to anything I care about. But it goes to show the degree to which PG has digitized huge amounts of old crap, if you want to read it. The upcoming Google project will put even more stuff out there.
Hard to browse: This is not Kindle dependent. This is a function of the publisher's conversion. It takes work to supply all the proper detailed tables of contents and the like, and most publisher's don't enhance the content adequately for the Kindle. But the markup support of the Kindle allows for various summaries if the publisher wants to supply them.
Scribbling/highlighting: The Kindle allows memos and notes and highlighting, all saved to a text file you can copy to your PC, and linked to from a master page for each book.
Tactile aspect: You mean those acid paper, glued ("perfect bound") unstitched signature paperbacks? Or those perfect bound hardcovers that crack at the gutter when you open them hand have paper rather than cloth over the coverboards? Face it, books are cheap crap these days, and they aren't going to get any better. Of course, you don't notice that when you're immersed in reading a book, but the same is true with the Kindle.
More appealing to browse a bookstore: Well, nobody's saying you can't still do that. But I find I can't decide on a book without seeing the Amazon ratings and reviews these days, just like I find it hard to rent a DVD in a store without having net access to reviews.
Edward Tufte: You don't have to sign a contract to never buy a book again. You're still allowed to buy paper books. Amazon gestapo don't show up at your house and take you away if you buy the occasional paper book.
If any of you lived through the transition from PC apps and CD-ROMS to the internet circa 15 years ago, you'll recognize criticisms about the Kindle. The net was slow, the design of pages crude and ugly, interaction was limited to forms passed to the server, and so on. But nobody cared. It was online, immediate, could be seem by people around the world. The things that pundits thought people cared about turned out not to be what people cared about.
tiprunt, I must have 300 pdfs stored on my MacBook. I also have hardcopies of the same books. I have been reading/enjoying paper books since around 1950 as a 5 year old reading "Dick and Jane" books. I use Safari/Informit for browsing ebooks on the internet. My kindle cons are the result of thinking about it and typing them out. I am not being a zealot here but just letting my mind wander in a way to describe what I think are the cons of a kindle. I have been writing computer-based network apps/systems since 1980 so I am not necessarily a neophyte. Remember the Apple Newton? I could certainly write 24 pro's about the kindle but thought it more interesting to think about the con's. Thanks for your considered comments tho.
I think Rob Lyman @ June 23, 2009 8:56 PM pretty much said everything I was going to, so just read his comment :-).
Anyway, I'm happy to see *someone* has some trust in the IT industry. I work in it, which means that I pretty much marvel each day that civilization hasn't collapsed :-).
All I'll add is I'd love to see any example of *any* technology that did things seamlessly for you. Instead, the progress is all the other way. You require more learning and more involvement to use something because they've had to add more features.
I long learned that providing only what the customers need is a quick way to bankruptcy (at least in the software industry). You need to keep adding features to stay in business because people generally won't buy what best suits their current needs. They buy what they would like to suit their needs if they were actively involved. (There are a few exceptions, but not enough to sustain a business.) So, no, I don't see any simple, automatic solutions being created any time soon. It's not a profitable business model.
Tom, there's off the shelf software and then theres to-build software. Sort of the old make-buy balancing act that is tilted more buying then making. If make is chosen dollars to donuts it goes offshere or nearshore. But consider Agile Software Development as an alternate build approach. Actually I think software (especially operating system like Mac) have gotten much easier to use. Consider the sophisticated tasks now accomplishable with pretty easy tools e.g. iLife or iTools. Tools for the developer are incredible. Given the days of writing Assembler code and Fortran.But still my 86 year old mother-in-law can't figure out how to run a tv controler or retrive messages from here landline cell phone. Simple automatic solutions are at hand: twitter, facebook, ebay, web browsers themselves, amazon. The degree of learning scale certainly exists but the curves facing users to master devices like iPhone or a Blackberry or certainly not as daunting as learning how to use a keypunch device or enter a program using paper tape.
Is there really such a thing as long term electronic storage that isn't essentially dynamic? I can cram several hundred gigs of random files on my hard drive, but unless I conscientiously back them up every, oh, eight years or so, they're going to be lost. Hard drives, DAT, etc., are essentially impermanent storage media. The best you're going to get in that respect is the humble DVD.
Right, but a similar argument applies to print: long term storage of text must be essentially dynamic. I can cram several hundred gigs of text into a monastery, but unless the monks conscientiously copy them out every eight decades or so they're going to be lost. Books are essentially impermanent storage media -- in the long-now, ten-thousand-year view. So, really, digital storage methods only have to improve by about an order of magnitude in durability before becoming better than books for archival purposes.
One oddity that sticks out is the humble punched card. God knows why, but thirty-odd years later I'm still lugging around six or seven orange boxes full of FORTRAN programs and data. If I wanted to take the effort, it would be no problem at all to pull them out and visually transcribe them. Given their durability, this should still be easily doable one hundred years from now.
Since my brother lost some photos to a HD crash a few years ago, he's had a family account to a remote backup service. It automatically backs up all his data to RAID setups at several different physical locations. If a tornado hit his house while it was on fire due to a terrorist attack, his vacation photos and MP3 collection would be safe. What can I say? He's in emergency services and is a bit more cautious than most of us. But it's not an expensive service, and will become more and more commonplace, I think.
Here's a point I haven't heard: There are ancient Greek plays which we know made it out of antiquity, but there were a finite number of copies, and those manuscripts were scraped during the middle ages by monks who did not value the knowledge they contained. Having many, many copies in open formats on a cheap storage medium does cut the odds of that sort of thing happening. The Samoa tract references above is actually a great example of the sort of thing that is preserved now that might have been lost earlier.
It's important to remember that DRM is a condition imposed by the publishers, for the most part. The ebook as it exists today is a transitional product from a print world to a digital one. And there are companies working out how to do ebook lending libraries. Some of them are having decent success at it.
Despite the advantages of e-books, a carbon-based book is still the ideal data storage and transfer medium:
1) It is usually of a convenient transport size.
2) With the exception of bifocals there is never a download problem.
3) It has relatively rugged hardware, usable for over 100 years with reasonable care.
4) It is virtually immune to data rot. Books of sheepskin are still readable after 1000 years.
I do wish that publishers would produce an online version of their books which I could purchase the rights to (for a non-extortive fee). Then if I needed to do text searching, I could.
Resolved:
1) We're glad books were invented. Books are good.
2) We're glad digital information technology exists. The Internet is good too.
3) If you take care of your stuff, it will last. If you don't, it won't.
4) The proper response to the original post was "heh....cute." But a 50-part discussion on the pros and cons of all information delivery mechanisms since Gutenberg is fine too...
Why would they be lost? I own several books considerably older than 80 years that don't look as if they were printed for the ages(a nineteenth century marriage guide, for example, which tells which Types to avoid, and how they can be discerned through facial shapes, skull bumps, etc.)
Yeah yeah, and all baryonic matter decays in a mere 10^50 years, so there has to be some other storage scheme if one wants a truly permanent record. Look, I'm not asking for super-long term storage of hundreds to thousands of years; I just don't want to lose everything if my hard drive goes bad, which has a significant probability over a mere 10 years. Since I have cheap paperbacks from the 50's I can still read, I don't think it excessive to demand the same from electronic storage.
When a hard drive goes bad, you tend to lose huge chunks of data, not just a word or two, or a page or two. That is, electronic storage tends to be more of an all-or-nothing proposition. So to avoid the failures you're talking about, up your estimate by another order of magnitude, or rely upon some other form of storage where the data can be lost a bit at a time (no pun intended.)
Well, first off, data can, literally, be lost a bit at a time in even pretty tersely coded data without loss of information -- important RAIDS use encoding schemes with redundancy that can handle the loss of several bits within a given code word, and NASA has been known to use codes that could handle 12 or more for communication over highly noisy channels. The techniques just haven't really penetrated the consumer market.
I think your demands are reasonable, and also that it is reasonable to expect that they will be met and even exceeded within the next decade.
So quibbling about exact values within the close order of magnitude (80 years is just a stab at where the bathtub curve for a ISO book starts to curve upwards, basically just a reference point for guessing at what rate books will have to be replaced on average over the long run), I think my estimations about the long-term difficulty of information storage are pretty reasonable.
a nineteenth century marriage guide, for example, which tells which Types to avoid, and how they can be discerned through facial shapes, skull bumps, etc.
Does it happen to explain how one goes about evaluating the skull bumps of suitors in an uptight Puritan/Victorian environment? I get the sense that the promiscuous offering of scalp massages would have caused a scandal.
Also, what does it say about people with sharp corners near the back of their head? My younger son's head is so square that somebody patting him on the head once made sympathetic noises because she thought his skull corner was the swollen result of a cranial mishap.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite forms of literary "new media" - Narrative Magazine (www.narrativemagazine.com). They do such a good job of combining what I love about books and literary journals (friendly low-tech format) with what I love about the internet (accessibility, especially to new voices, and sent directly to my email). They are truly doing something innovative - new voices in literature, free.
Ah, these protrusions, creases, whatnot are easily visible to the unaided eye. I misremembered the topic of the book btw; it's more of a self-help personal betterment manual, approximately one third of which is selecting the most appropriate life partner. I picked it up for the copious illustrations, for example, the illustration of the Lugubrious Individual. I'd say it was a parody, except for the fact that the inkings are quite competently done. Think Tenniel crossed with whoever did the art for Fussell's "Class".[1]
I don't know why, but over the years I've managed to collect a fair number of self-help books, possibly because they tend to be both cheap and of comparatively high quality. The thing is, aside from a core set of principles, they seem to degrade into farce within a few decades of their appearance. Anyone remember the Turtle Guy from "Looking Out for Number One"?
That's the sort of thing my 19th century primer for the good life is big on. There appear to be some quite vicious caricatures of the Irish type, the English type, and so on and so forth, but a reading of the accompanying text shows that this is intended to be plain and sober advice on who to associate with and who not to. Oddly enough, the book advises against mingling with stick women, on the grounds that they are frail, sickly, demanding, on not of good temperament or brains. Also, bearing children is problematical.
[1]That's another thing that digital storage just isn't very good at, at least not yet. It's very hard to capture technique or texture in a digital format. And yet, this is something that can be reproduced fairly cheaply in a book. Don't chivvy me, I said 'fairly' cheaply.