… nasty things that they are. They use up trees, and fuel, and they dirty the air in their production and transport. They take up shelf space, they’re a slow and bulky way for someone to spread their ideas. They take forever to arrive after ordering — most books I want aren’t available locally — and shipping costs heaps.
Once I’ve read the darn things it’s not easy to dispose of them again. They lie around, cluttering up the place and gathering dust. If I do manage to sell them or give them away there’s more transport and time involved.
And the reading! They’re usually too heavy, or too floppy, or the print’s too small, or a horrid font, and there’s no way to set my own preferences. Without a built-in backlight it’s hard to read a book in bed — the reading light’s always in the wrong place to see the text clearly.
And then the non-fiction books go out of date, and errors remain uncorrected.
I’ve been listening to radio interview this morning — it’s fascinating stuff and I’d like to know more. The subject of the interview has written a book on the topic, published recently.
I know without even looking that there’s no point wasting time trying to buy this book locally, so head over to Amazon. It’s available now in hardback. Hardback! Why would I want a hardback book? They cost more, weigh more and tend to be larger than paperback. This one’s US$18.48. I can pretty much double that price with shipping to New Zealand.
The paperback won’t be published for several months.
So, how about other editions? I could have it on a Kindle right now. If I were in the US. Kindle hasn’t spread to New Zealand. I have an iPod touch, an iPhone and several computers. I could read it on any one of them, if there were an appropriate edition.
Now I know from my own experience that Amazon isn’t always a reliable source of information about alternative editions 1, so I go looking. After locating and roaming around the publisher’s site and the book’s own website I discovered a link to an audio edition. That’s not quite what I want, but it may do.
Hopeful, I followed the link, only to find that, incredibly, the MP3 edition is out of stock! Unbelievable! How can an MP3 be out of stock? And, what’s more, it costs more than the hardcover edition. I know there’s voice talent and production processes and all that, but for heaven’s sake, layout, printing and most of the materials and distribution costs don’t come into play.
Books should die. It’s well past time for them to be replaced as a medium. We no longer use stone tablets, papyrus, or scrolls. They had their time and then we moved on to new media.
The time of the book is past. Saving up scads of information to ‘publish’ in a single chunk on sacrificial dead trees is a fossilised concept. The planet can’t afford such a wasteful habit, either.
It’s long past time for authors and publishers / distributors to come up with interesting, viable alternatives to ‘the book’.
We have this new stuff called technology. Let’s find ways to make it work to spread the ideas and information that used to be in books.
Readers come up with excuses: ‘I can’t read off a screen’. Well sure you can; it’s just a matter of practice. ‘I love the smell and feel of a new book.’ Well, I love the feel of a well-designed computer device on which I can read text. I love enlarging the fonts if I need to, and making the screen darker or brighter or more contrasty.
Every technology has both benefits and drawbacks. I think that dead-tree technology has had its centuries. This should be the dawn of a new era in publishing.
1 It was more than 12 or 18 months before I discovered that there was a PDF version of the book Maria Langer and I wrote, WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh how I do agree! The Kindle seems like an alternative but at a whopping $359US?! It’s time e-paper finally makes it into the mainstream. I’m contemplating getting a netbook which would be small/light enough to have in bed and read on but the batteries are too small with a max of 3hrs. And the iPhone’s screen is too small….
There is no real solution …yet. Maybe get my Mac to make Podcasts of the stuff….
there is some cool software that will convert books from one format to another … except for DRM problems … i think if you buy one format you should have rights to all others…
I agree that books *ought* to be replaced by another technology – but I don’t see any sign of that technology.
Think about it: a book is easy to handle, small enough to be portable but large enough to see clearly, cheapish to produce, and hard to copy. Don’t underestimate that last point. Publishers want to make money of selling copies and people hate DRM.
A middle way option that we might see soon is ‘on demand’ printing. The bookshop would have a machine that prints books, and you’d go down there, browse through their electronic catalogue, and pay for what you want to be printed while you had coffee. By using a local shops – even if we are shopping online – we get rid of the carbon footprint of shipping dead trees to the US, printing them into books, and shipping them back.
Have a look at this (TED of course):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html
It shows what Colin is talking about. How cool it would be to get your books printed on-demand. Now all we need is that technology that can reprint on paper….
Funnily enough just watched that TED Talk the other day – maybe that’s what fed my rant above.
Colin, I don’t know that the print on-demand would satisfy a very big market. I don’t want my books in print, so I wouldn’t use it.
Those of my friends who still ‘love’ books, also love the whole production stuff with them: the fancy covers, the binding, the new book smell and all that. I suspect that on-demand printing couldn’t satisfy those requirements.
Hmmm, starting to ponder the parallels between the music industry and the book industry….
For me Podcasts are the way to go. I listen to a LOT (about 1-2hrs a day) of Podcasts and AudioBooks the Wellington Library has a few (but could have more). Of curse that’s for novels and Sci-Fi and the such. For the non fiction section I suppose you still need something you can look at (which probably could be replaced by Powerpointies).
I finally got to “read” LotR that way. I could never get myself past the first 100 pages in paper. Listening to it was easy though (48 CDs unabridged for those who wnat to know).
Well, I guess if there’s something easy to hate it’s the book. It is an old technology. Don’t we just hate old technologies? The older it is, the more we hate it.
Quite predictable really. That’s why there are so few booksellers these days. It’s why bookseller premises are getting smaller and smaller, like the new Borders shops that are opening up everywhere. Tiny they are. They can hardly squeeze a paperback in the doorway, they’re so small.
And the sales. Drastic sales statistics, books have. That’s why the companies have to spend the billions they do on advertising – they just can’t get the revenue.
Yeah, let’s start a hate-the-book campagne. We’ll have a hate-the-book day when we can pile all our books on the green and have a great fire. Beats Guy Fawkes’ night.
And, hey, let’s not stop at the book. All their relations, the newspaper, the mag, the journal. Let’s get rid of them too. In fact, it’s paper. That’s the commodity we have to dispel. For without paper, there’d be no illicit books and the like. Card too, and cardboard. Lest someone succeeds in publishing a carboard book. They’d try it you know. The publishers. Anything to keep the books flowing.
Well, we can stop that.
Yes, nothing like a good hate scheme to get rid of the things you hate. Hate paper, hate card, hate cardboard, hate leaflets, hate mags, hate newspapers, hate booklets, hate books. Burn the libraries. That’s what to do. That’ll teach them to cherish books.
I don’t think burning libraries is the way to go – too much CO2, and it was a bad thing in Alexandria. I do like your idea of getting rid of excess paper and so on though.
Thanks for contributing.
Dusty, Uncomfortable to Find a Sitting Position,Bad Lighting and Cutting down trees. Sums it all up in one Screen.Another Alternative To burning down Libraries Would if Governments Gave the Citizens E-Book Readers.It would also Boost Manufacturing in these times of Economic Downturn. I know Lots of people that Work or Have Worked in Technology But Not one Person That Every Worked Printing or Publishing Books.
Actually, just to keep a site like google working (I am not talking of all the internet, just the google servers) leaves a huge, I mean HUGE carbon foot-print. The trees saved by not printing a book in fact will die anyways because you have to divert all the water you can to generate the electricity they need to operate. Think about that. Whereas a book, once produced and shipped, does not need energy ever again to work. In fact, books are the perfect technology.
That’s an interesting assertion Joes.
I know people have had a go at working out the carbon footprint for various Internet activities, but I’m not sure anyone has come up with anything reliable yet.
There are many ways to generate energy, such as wind, water, geothermal, wind, tidal.
As I write this, the Google Solar Panel Project alone has created around 9,500 kilowatt-hours in the last 24 hours:
http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home
They say that’s equivalent to 79,333 hours of flat screen TV watching or 3,461 loads of laundry. That sounds like quite a bit to me.
It’d be interesting to see the figures you’re basing your statement on.
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