Did I ever say that things won’t change (did you even read my post, I wonder)? Good lord, man, I’ve worked in libraries long enough to see the transition from actual card catalogs to hyperlinked electronic databases that can tell me not only where to find a book anywhere in the world but even whether it’s on the shelf or not (and with a click of a mouse I can summon it to me as easily as I can buy a volume from Amazon). Librarians made the mistake of resisting change for the longest time, but the current crop of library and information science graduates not only embrace what’s coming next but are out there helping make the future a reality.

I can’t wait for epaper and nano-ink, and most librarians of my generation are similarly enthusiastic at these and other developments. At the same time I daresay that it will be longer than you think before these wonders are able to completely displace the old-fashioned printed word. And even then, the book will persist as a luxury item — not the “permabound” crap they hawk at Barnes and Noble but real cloth and leather-bound tomes printed on lignin-free paper that will last for centuries, if not longer.

Like a good footnote, a good link will lead you to what you hadn’t known before.

Jersey Exile,

Starting from the assumption that things won’t change is the first step in assuring you’ll be left behind.

Jeff’s Readers,

One mistake we often make is that things will, somehow, stay the same. Even when we have experienced change in our lifetime. At the moment printed books have advantages over electronic books. At the same time the electronic version does have advantages over the printed. Which is better depends on how you will be using it. A bit of light reading at the park, then a printed book is better. Doing research on early tetrapods, then the electronic book with links etc. would be the better option.

Now, I should point out that if you are going to do some heavy reading (which usually involves heavy books), even the print version is not going to be the sort of thing you read in the tub. Unless, that is, you’ve developed a very strong set of arms.

Then there are times when you simply need information fast, and it’s not readily available. It’s then that access to the Internet becomes invaluable.

Last of all, things change. New technologies and new ways to use old technologies are developed. At the moment e-book readers are pricy. But the price will come down. At the moment so-called epaper is really a new type of display, and requires a machine for use. In time, as technology improves, you can expect epaper that looks, acts, and feels like paper. In due time we can expect to see entire books made of epaper, capable of connecting to the Internet from most anywhere in the world to gather information. In other words, the paper will be the computer, the browser, and the search engine. As well as the display.

But that’s not the end of it.

A young lady thought up something. A sort of nanite ink. Nanites that would scurry about your skin forming words and images. A watch you can’t lose, or a scrolling excerpt from Shakespeare on your kneecap. Imagine watching a football game on the back of the enthusiastic fellow who’s blocking your view of the field.

Ultimately we will simply know whatever we put our minds to. We will be the computer connected to the world. We will do the searching, the uploading and downloading, the messaging, the blogging, and whatever else one can do on the Internet. And we will know the subject. We will know how it looks, how it feels, and how it tastes. We will know the weight of it, the heat of it. We will know how to use it without ever having had it in our physical presence. An engineer out in space will fly his personal craft from Luna to the Earth’s L4 point without once consulting a navigation aide of any sort, and do this without thinking about it. And the first steps towards this future have already taken place.

What we can do know is no predictor of what we will be able to do in the future. The book of ink and paper may not be doomed yet, but it’s time will come.

Leaving the aesthetic argument aside for a moment, paper is a remarkably adaptable thing, offering extremes of both permanence and impermanence that digital media is still only clumsily lunging at. How long will a hard drive last, even under ideal storage conditions? Whereas acid-free paper can remain useable for centuries. On the other end of the spectrum, paper remains the medium of choice for ephemeral publications, because even the cheapest PDA/e-book reader is going to set you back a couple hundred if you lose it, drop it on the ground, or spill your morning coffee on it.

I may be a librarian, but I’m a practical one. I like books for some things, and bytes for others, and while the latter may continue to make inroads into the former the far future will probably involve a true synthesis of the two and not the abandonment of the one for the other. The future of the book is something that looks and feels like a book, but is in fact a wireless “exploded” text that can refer to, comment on, and become any other text at will. It’s cheap, easily mass-produced, and doesn’t require a network of call centers around the world to boot up when you buy it. The laptop is the anomaly here. Who is going to mourn the passing of seared thighs and low sperm motility, when virtual paper and cheap digital ink finally carry the day?

Even then, however, dead-tree books will still have their place. Just as the microfilming revolution failed to eliminate the paper book as the postindustrial prophets said it would, so too will the physical objects you so puzzlingly hate persist not just as a long-term preservation strategy but as a luxury item. Has McDonald’s and Burger King eliminated the market for Kobe beef? Quite the contrary, actually. Even the most ardent supporters of the “Slow Food” movement have noted the seeming contradiction between the advance of homogenizing global capitalism and the rise of a viable trade in regional, artisanal, unique foods. Have you ever considered the possibility that the new digital media will give us a greater and not lesser appreciation of the book as a physical artifact?

“Parts of books will reference parts of other books.” What do you mean, they will? They already do. They always have. That’s what we have people like Isiah Berlin to show us. Now, there’s a gardener! Or Pico of course. Cultivated himself all over Europe. Neither of them is known for novels. But take their books in your hands Mr Jarvis, read them, and see how a mind can connect and refer. Then do the same. After all, it’s what you can make of your mind that interests us, not the snippets of blue print that you pull from behind your ears at dinner parties.

You can’t drag a laptop onto the subway or bus commute and read comfortably.

Yet.

Then explain this. From the Associated Press, 5/10/06:

Faced with years of slow, and even declining sales, the publishing industry has finally responded in kind. For the first time since 1999, the number of new books is going down. “In 2005, publishers were more cautious and disciplined when it came to their lists,” Gary Aiello, chief operating officer of Bowker, which compiles publishing statistics, said Tuesday in a statement. “We see that trend continuing in 2006. The price of paper has already gone up twice this year, and publishers, especially the small ones, will have to think very carefully about what to publish.” According to Bowker, the number of new books and new editions of old works published last year dropped to 172,000, about 18,000 less than in 2004. Publishers, especially small and middle-sized ones, all cut back. Bowker is projecting declines in history, biography, children’s books, technology and even religion, supposedly one of the industry’s fastest growing categories.

I call crap on that. More and more people are buying books and more and more books are being published:

“Harry Potter, books by religious leaders and textbooks for elementary and high school students were the bright spots in U.S. publishing last year, according to a report released Thursday by the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade association.

“American publishers generated net revenues of $34.6 billion in 2005, up 5.9 percent over the previous year, according to the report. The industry sold about 3.1 billion books last year, up 3.8 percent over a year earlier.

“The report, “Book Industry Trends,” is published annually by the study group. In 2006 the figures include results from small and midsize publishers with sales of under $50 million each.

“The strongest single growth niches were juvenile books, which sold $3.34 billion in 2005, up 9.6 percent from a year earlier, and religious books, which sold $2.29 billion, up 8.1 percent from 2004.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/18/business/book.php

Jeffo, you may want to do the most basic amount of rudimentary research before making one of your wacko predictions. You don’t know squat about the economics of the publishing world, and your assertions in the face of reality just makes you look old and pathetic. But I’m guessing you’ll shrug off the reality of the situation because it doesn’t fit the constructs of your perceived world.

An interesting indicator was the ‘05 Book Expo America, the US’s largest book trade show. This was the first year that they included an entire track focused on helping book publishers begin to fathom the opportunities that the digital world affords them. Book publishing is an industry that is very adverse to change and as deeply rooted in the current "system" of delivering physical books but don’t worry, it is changing.

We "Got" it about 4 years ago and the publishing industry has been somewhat slow to embrace the new opportunities. However, the genie is out of the bottle. Many of the massive houses have begun to make moves to establish their place in the digital lifestyle. For example, HarperCollins is digitally warehousing it’s book content for the potential future digital uses that may arise. Both Google and Amazon.Com clearly recognize the opportunity and have developed efforts to capitalize on the digitization of book content. In the US, consider that the 500 largest houses represent roughly 4% of the total number of publishers and 40% of the books published. of course there are a great deal of smaller, more agile publishers all over the world who could benefit from adopting a strategy or innovating themselves. In all there are massive numbers of books printed and sold each year, including back-list  titles, and any publisher can take advantage of this to trend to sell more books. As you indicated, it is the consumer that drives this change for additional value and publishers ignore this trend at their own peril.

Hat’s off Jeff, keep up the good work on focusing attention on the changes.

http://managetochange.typepad.com/main/2006/06/are_books_dead.html

Such as, “The Lord of the Pings” An expose of Glenn Reynolds.