Welcome to this group / Books in 2025?

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This question of this thread is big and basic, with a simple structure. Let's see if we can't get a conversation going.

So, what will books and reading look like fifteen years from now, in 2025? What are you predictions, hopes and fears?

Not sure will they have UltraWord up and running by then? ;)

Maybe we'll finally have gotten to where they were in Star Trek, with all material ever written available (and searchable) at the touch of a computer key? One can dream ...

Looking at the multi-part question that was asked above, I am immediately inspired to address the fear that the book as we know it may become obsolete. The book as I define it, is a tangible piece of material that has sensory aspects to it: you can touch it, smell it, look at it in a three dimensional form. It can substitute for a face cover when you lie in the sun; the book can become a fanning device and give you a small breeze. These are not benefits that come along with books that are contained in piece of plastic small enough to push underneath a bathroom door.

When one looks at how ubiquitous electronic devices are now and notices the trends towards instant messaging - in this world - the Ebook becomes a device that seems convenient, fashionable and something completely unlike it's original model.

My fear is that the ebook will eventually take over and we'll have libraries that resemble the kiosks in the shopping malls where one can acquire telephones and the wallets to hold them. I don't see this convenience as a dream.

We're loosing out on something more than just the book. There is a part of our consciousness that is slipping away with the trends that come along with the simple practice of stroking a screen to achieve your next few paragraphs. An entire library of great books, cannot be stuffed into a tiny glowing box.

>3 staffordcastle:

The Stak Trek world is something much weirder and scarier—one where the medium hasn't merely changed, but the content--where the computers synthesize all the information and spit out "answers" to everything.

Remember "Court Martial" where Kirk goes back to his quarters to find "Samuel T. Cogley" (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Cogley) has moved in—an attorney with a very peculiar interest in books, which lie all scattered around, and he gives a speech:

"COGLEY: What’s the matter? Don’t you like books?
KIRK: Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space.
COGLEY: A computer, huh? I got one of these in my office. Contains all the precedents. The synthesis of all the great legal decisions written throughout time. I never use it.
KIRK: Why not?
COGLEY: I’ve got my own system. Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something. My library. Thousands of books.

I think of that as the ultimate information dystopia. It's pretty remote, and indeed I think actual artificial intelligence is actually impossible. But "good enough" bad information--synthesized and human made--is already a reality many out there are living with. You see it on Wikipedia--which I love for what it is, by the way--and the explosion of Spark Notes. You see it in the decline in reference publishing. I think you'll see more and more of this, mostly for ill.

#3 staffordcastle
That is so funny, I just installed the complete National Geographic on my hard drive, and it is strange to be able to bring up any article from the past 200 years. I read the original dispatch by Maynard Owen Williams on the opening of King Tutankhamun's tomb (wow we have come so far in our understanding of Egypt).
My point though is that although bringing up the digital article was very easy and fast, reading on a screen and actually holding the magazine in my hands are two completely different animals. For me reading articles in magazines would be fine for the computer or an e-reader, but there isn't the same feel for a novel or short story. I just wouldn't enjoy it as much.

The obvious advantage now of the e-book is size, my library could not exist in a NYC apartment and younger readers of this techno age may enjoy having something electronic in their hand.

I like seeing my books, I like knowing exactly where to look in a book I've read for a reference, I like catagorizing my books.

The only thing that would interest me in an e-book would be added features, that's how the transition from VHS to DVD was sped up. Think of a character that hasn't been mentioned for a while, if you could touch that name and get a brief bio. and reference to his first mention. I'm sure more creative minds than mine could come up with an endless list of added content.

I'm sure the paper book will long endure, after all, vinyl records have made a minor comeback.

#4 pcwilliams

I don't think ebooks will replace physical books anytime soon but they will steadily rise. A few random thoughts....

While my kids enjoy being read to each night...If they are reading on their own they much prefer interactive books that they can point to and have words read, or they can choose alternate endings, or they can insert their names and they instantly become the main characters of the story. In 15 years these will be the fresh crop of adults and they will prefer digital books.

I am beginning to love digital books myself...why...I can take a bookcase of books with me on my phone and read them anywhere. I can read whatever I want on the bus, in the car, in bed, in the bathroom. When I travel I used to weigh down my luggage because I couldn't select which books to choose. Now I can take almost everything. Last weekend when we were waiting for my son's haircut I was really wishing that I'd purchased digital textbooks. I'd love to have access to my textbooks all the time.

"My fear is that the ebook will eventually take over and we'll have libraries that resemble the kiosks in the shopping malls where one can acquire telephones and the wallets to hold them. I don't see this convenience as a dream." I doubt this will happen in our lifetimes but we have to be open to change. Public libraries as they exist are no longer sustainable or at least that's what government officials are telling us. We have to be ready to evolve and ready to embrace the next big thing.

If providers like Amazon are going to pull whatever digital content they deem objectionable then even more reason for libraries to be the place where people can go for digital content.

pcwilliams again :)

"An entire library of great books, cannot be stuffed into a tiny glowing box."

Actually that is my dream. I don't know how it will happen but my dream is that all content is available electronically, from libraries, free to any device. DRM be damned.

How would publishers make money? The same way they do now. Libraries buy the materials. People buy the content they want for long-term use.

I check out books from the library to quickly review them. Then if I really want the material I buy it. It will be the same for ebooks.

How would publishers make money? The same way they do now. Libraries buy the materials. People buy the content they want for long-term use.

Deep argument, of course, but, apart from library-targeted publishers, publishers don't make money on libraries—they lose it. They can't stop it, and thank God, but it's not in any publishers' interest to sell a book to a library for basically the same price as everyone else, but have it be read 5, 10 or 20 times, mostly by people who'd hardly stop reading if it were free.

In 15 years these will be the fresh crop of adults and they will prefer digital books.

Your kids will, I'm sure. But their generation won't. Book-reading is a minority, elite activity already, and millennials are the least-reading generation in US history. The dream is that this is somehow about access--that books weren't easy to get to, or something. I doubt it.

Personaly I don't think paper books will ever go away because too many people still buy paper books (myself included) and they'll always need Libraries, Librarians & their Library Staffs to help out the Patrons. I've been working in this Medical Library over 32 years now and to be honest I don't think I'd want to be here any longer if it was decided we'd go 100% digital and toss out all of our Medical Journals and Books. We are however gettng rid of a lot of our Microfilm tapes because we can easily go Online and get the same info. Plus we also have subscriptions to E-Journals as well. I don't think that Society in general is gonna head towards a Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 kind of mentality where it's illegal to own and read books and where people come to your house and burn your house down with all of your beautiful books inside.

But that is a very scary Dystopian Society I wouldn't care to be a part of. I love so many different books I don't think I would
be able to chose just one favourite and be able to totally memorize it word for word and then be able to pass it on to the next generation. What's even scarier is the thought of a child saying they don't like your book you chose to memorize they want to memorize another book instead. What do you do then? I guess you'd have to take the time to write the entire book down word for word so it wouldn't die with you. Because so many great books would just go out of existenance it people didn't take the time to write them out before they died or I guess they could also record them on DVD.

Beatles1964

If it makes you feel any better, Tim, at least they are still reading novels in traditional book form in Star Trek. But then, I think the characters we see reading these books are usually considered anachronistic.

I have a horrible confession to make--I was reading about physical paper making on a PDF just the other day. It made me feel very very dirty.

People must have had the same kind of discussions as the codex slowly replaced the scroll, which seemed to me to take a long time. The bound book takes less space, passages are easier to mark and return to, and can be personalized and decorated. Maybe readers are slow to change their ways? The printing press got the cold shoulder, too, at first, but the difference that I see there is that the printing press made so many books that it increased the number of new readers. My personal and hastily arrived at first guess is that eBook technology will continue to evolve and people will adopt when an innovation excites them. I like holding books, I’ve never used an eReader so I can’t say much about them other than the idea of a tablet doesn’t appeal to me. If, however, I could sit in a chair and pages would appear before me and I could manipulate the pages, check references, look up words, etc., that would be by adoption point. Sort of like all the books on a desk but float about.

One of the most intriguing aspects to me about eBooks is will they make it easier to keep books from being destroyed? I’m not a techi so I don’t know what’s on the horizon, but as things stand now I understand that entire libraries can be wiped out with the flick of a switch. Didn’t Amazon remove a book from several user’s Kindle not long ago? And the US government can now remove access to the Internet, and everything is dependent on the electrical grid anyway.

In 15 years I think books will still be around but some form of eBook will have made deep inroads, especially into certain area: public domain books, books required at schools, airplane and beach books.

(One interesting anecdote- The book ‘John Dies at the End’ has always been available free on the Net, but it was finally published and the link included in the intro material. It sold out, prices on the secondary market skyrocketed, and was re-issued. I think to a great degree book collectors drove the price up rather than greater reader demand, because anyone who wanted to read it just had to sit at a computer screen. So maybe the collectors market will keep the demand for hard-copy books available in some genre. And you can’t have your favorite author sign your eReader.)

Besides too many people love the way books feel when you touch them and turn the pages and take in the smell of a brand
new book you just bought at the local Book Store, Wal-Mart, from Amazon.com, etc. And being able to lovingly place one of your favourite Book Marks in the spot where you stopped reading and then pick up where you left off last time. Did anyone ever see the move The Day After Tomorrow? I love that movie except where the people that decided to remain in the New York City Public Library decided to start burning books in order to keep warm and survive. But if it came down to the choice you either burn some books to survive and keep warm or you all freeze to death I must confess I'd have to vote to start burning books even thoug it goes against my nature to even consider the destruction of books.

However, having said that I say that the first books to be burnt would be all of the very long, dull, IRS Tax Law Books that only IRS Tax Reviewers and CPA's can understand then I'd say we start burning Phone Books unless they're very old and rare. And then if you still feel the need to burn even more books because you haven't been rescued yet, I guess I'd say to start with the equally long and dull Business & Economic Books. That is they'd be very dull & long books to me at least since I was never a Business or Economics Major. After that, well who knows? I'd have to wait and see what other subjects or categories there were around that could be the next ones to go. Some that not many people would actually miss if they had to be burnt in order to save lives.

Also I wouldn't like to have to stare a screen on the Kindle for three or more hours at a time trying to read 800, 1000, 1150
pages or more in a very long book.

Beatles1964

I don't believe that the paper book will go away, for a lot of reasons. The primary one is well known to anyone who has old floppy disks or beta tapes or 8-tracks lying around. (And you can soon add VHS tapes and DVDs and CDs to that list, most likely.)

New technologies are often wonderful things, but if you need hardware to mediate between the reader and the text, you risk the text becoming inaccessible as that technology changes. The great thing about printed matter is that no further mediation is required. You open the book and go.

You know, I remember when audio books first appeared. There were those who were certain that that sounded the death knell of the printed book. They were wrong then, and I think those who proclaim ebooks to be the executioner of the codex are also wrong.

That said, there is no doubt in my mind that ebooks will have a much larger portion of the market than they do now. They are great for the traveler, for students (yet, even there, students still prefer paper texts), people who have little space for books, etc.

SomeGuyInVirginia: Preservation (or the lack thereof) of digital objects is a growing concern, and you're right, it is far easier to accidentally wipe out entire libraries with benign neglect in the digital world, whereas physical books often do perfectly fine when neglected.

It's worse than purposeful censorship, such as Amazon removing a book or the government removing webpages. What happens when the Kindle disappears, and suddenly you might have these electronic files but no way to read them? And have you tried accessing files on your computer from 10 years ago? Do you even still have your computer from 10 years ago? How often have you tried opening a Word doc (it's the same essential program from the same company, right?) from several years ago and discovered it renders completely boggled or not at all? These problems plague digital preservation folks, and if you consider all the program access restrictions publishers try to put on e-books, you can bet we'll completely lose these books sooner rather than later.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be doing homework, not procrastinating on this fascinating thread, so I'll just leave you with a link to what the U.S. government is trying to do about these issues: www.digitalpreservation.gov

Oh also, if that bores you, try the Team Digital Preservation cartoons! http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&tbs=vid:1&q=team+digital+pr...

> 16

Preservation (or the lack thereof) of digital objects is a growing concern, . . .

Something well known to anyone who has attempted to view old microfilm/fiche!

>5 timspalding:
Tim, don't get me wrong - I love books with a passion, and own somewhere between six and seven thousand (est.) physical books, which you are going to have to pry from my cold dead fingers. What I want from that Star Trek universe is access to all the books I can't get in a physical copy, either for lack of money, or because the only existing copy is sequestered in a monastery in Timbuktu, or because no publisher thinks it's worth reprinting and getting back into the market.

>6 angelikat:
Angelikat, I completely agree. I have, in fact, been rather resisting the whole e-reader thing. My husband has an iPad, which he uses mainly as an e-reader, but the only one I have is my iPhone, which, with its tiny screen, isn't a very satisfactory e-reader. (I have the National Geographic set too, but found out after I bought it that my computer can't handle it, so it's waiting for the upgrade.)

> 13 15 16

My biggest fear is that hardbound books will go out of print, and whether or not they're ever digitized, eventually will be lost forever. As pointed out in the above posts: once digital, words are too easily deleted / media corrupted / software and/or hardware lost. And at that point, if no printed copies exist ... poof. Gone forever.

I'm really interested to understand what proportion of hardbound books are now digitized, how that proportion will trend over time, and what happens to that fraction that is never digitized. Obviously non-digitized works won't disappear immediately, since the hardbound artefacts are durable. But slowly, seemingly inevitably, that proportion of digitized books seemingly will increase, and the non-digitized proportion will be lost as the books disintegrate / are destroyed.

At which point, the Fire at Alexandria will become a scenario in cyber warfare.

I like to hold a book in my hand. E-readers accomplish that for me. I am not a book listener. I have tried audio and it just does not capture my attention. As a librarian I sometimes worry about e-books, but heck, it is progress and I accept that this is going to be the future. I just hope I am old enough to retire before it completely takes over.

lilithcat: The thing about microfilm/fiche is that it's not so completely machine-dependent that you can't render it at all without the proper software/machine. Technically, if you shined a light through it on a wall, you could probably make it out--assuming it was done well in the first place. In fact, one of the reasons some people are holding out against digitizing and still prefer microfilming (I know, these people still exist??) is that microfilm is much more likely to last with benign neglect than any digital file.

But yes, microfilm is pretty much on its way out, and that produces a number of annoyances, if not outright disasters.

Books...physical ones, the industrial object Book...haven't changed a whole lot since Gutenberg ~550 years ago. The book answers a need, and it does so very well: It allows mass dissemination of novels, biographies, cartoons, etc etc, at a fairly low purchase price.

Books are low maintenance on their users. All one needs is adequate light and functional hands and eyes to consume the novel/bio/etc contained in the book. No need for satellites, WiFi hotspots, batteries, blah blah blah. Drop a book, pick it up, shake it off, it's pretty much ready to go back to work for you. Not so NooKindlEreaders.

These devices have a role to play, too, with their huge storage capacities and conservation of trees. The compactness of the device is a huge plus for students, since I remember textbooks making my back hurt the entire time I was in school.

I'd argue that books will last, because they're more flexible in their physicality than devices. I'd argue that devices are here to stay, because they're more compact and convenient for travel and toting around and storage. And I'd argue that all of this is a net positive for readers, publishers, and booksellers. Not so much the printing industry, and the libraries, and the used books dealers.

If I had the spondulix, I'd open a bricks-and-mortar bookery with download stations for eEditionsfor all devices, plus sales staffs to "fit" you to the proper device; sample books of weird/out-of-print/self-published stuff that my banks of DocuTechs could produce and bind for you in an hour or so; and huge, teetering piles of the ~250 titles per season that are most economically produced in forest-leveling, river-poisoning quantities by old-fashioned printing companies.

What will happen to libraries? It doesn't bear thinking about. Remember the Bookocaust that San Francisco threw itself 20 years ago while closing its ancient main library? Collections of 19th-century "obsolete" natural science books, elderly popular fiction ignored today, literally thousands of books not legally allowed to be sold or donated that ended up in *guarded* landfills? That can and will happen again. The main NYPL getting rid of the Baltic and Slavic, the Near Eastern collections, among others? Not heralded, not discussed, and certainly not as horrible as what San Francisco did...the materials will still exist, I think, but not be available at all easily.

Nothing anywhere ever is perfect. We limp along, reinventing many a wheel, and it serves us right for not protecting the past from the greedy present and the vampiric future.

> 19

My biggest fear is that hardbound books will go out of print, and whether or not they're ever digitized, eventually will be lost forever.

To be fair, books go out of print all the time, and have since long before digitization existed even in anyone's imagination. And digitization does increase accessibility of out-of-print and otherwise rare books, as well as documents.

Despite the fact that authors writing on computers will result in the loss of much primary research material for future Ph.D. students, as those writers send their rough drafts into the great trash can of cyberspace, nevertheless, how many people would have been able to see this, prior to digitization?

I see ebooks and digitization as additional tools in the service of information dissemination. We just have to be careful not to hit ourselves on the thumbs with these new-fangled hammers.

I am scared that there might come a time when all books are digital. Nothing against new technology. I just don't want to put my faith in it. What happens when people start crying 'censorship' (and they will)? They just wipe out the content like it never existed? At least if I have a book in my hand, I have it forever.

I see this heading the same way everything else does. First you had the record, the eight-track, the cassette, the cd and now the file. All adding up to you having to purchase new gizmos, programs and software to read your book. The new inventions that force you to purchase upgrades, then the books because it is no longer compatible. It happens with everything else. Maybe I am just old-fashioned and have to get with the times. I don't even text message.

Uh-oh, from the trend in this thread I'm seeing a need to brush up on my calligraphy and bookbinding skills if I want to keep books in the form I prefer (although I do use an ebook occasionally even though I was dragged to it kicking and screaming). And with that everything old becomes new again - physical books become rare works of art only for the very wealthy.

Lori- well I do find some of what you said interesting and appreciate your commentary.

One of the points made by another poster concerning censorship should be taken as a serious concern. If an article cites something in a newspaper it is there in hardcopy; if it is in digital format, it's originality could be lost forever: do you remember Animal Farm when the animals are talking about the rules and say that it must be true because it is written even though they remember it differently?

Books will not go away for a long time, that is a fact. People will tend to prefer books, at least the reference ones especially for quite some time. The intervening of digital materials though should put some of us off because of the way it is affecting the profession. Instead of practicing reference, many of us are out there blogging (like right now).

All of us agree that books are items which are a delight to hold and a pleasure to read without depending on baterials or radio waves from a satellite. E books will become too convenient as well and they are dumbing us down. The interactive stories available to kids hinder creativity and originality.

They change what was once a tangible work of art into a kaliedescopic mess. This should frighten us.

My concerns are all about what changes the media entails, not so much the media itself—and definitely not preservation.

So for me it's about how digital distribution changes the power dynamics of the book world. I think we're rapidly heading in two basic directions.

First:

1. Toward renting everything. This kills public libraries (see my many posts).
2. Toward a small number of dominant providers (perhaps just Amazon).
3. Toward ebooks as a platform-dependent product, resident in a software and sealed by sunk effort, DRM and network effects. This poses major privacy and censorship risks, and threatens the ability of people to do interesting things without platform approval.
4. Massive disintermediation, putting writers directly in contact with the 1-3 remaining booksellers, rather than through publishers. Though attractive to imagine publishers and bookstores are somehow taking money out of the mouths of authors, I don't think a world with only two types of players—ants and elephants—will end up very good for the ants. Or the people who read the ants. Hmmm.

Second:

1. Rampant piracy. If books go the way of recorded music, the market will be cut in half (and music is still falling). Unlike musicians, authors just don't have the same opportunities to make it up partially on concerts, or whatever. I don't think writing and literary culture generally can survive at anything like today's level if that happens.

I think the majority of books will be digital by 2025, and most of people's "reading" will be done on devices. But I don't think it will happen until the ebook format is standardized.

I also think that as it happens, booksellers, as the third or fourth step in the retail chain, will go away and/or morph into "content providers" a la iTunes, which doesn't bode well for indie bookstores, I'm afraid. On the other hand, the Internet makes it really easy to direct sell so its possible the savvier stores could set themselves up as "tastemakers" that would command customer loyalty based on their own unique personalities. But most won't be able to establish that kind of a presence.

In any case, I don't think that the phrase "people will always want books" is anything more than wishful thinking.

The issues I have with digital books right now aren't issues of technology that isn't-quite-there, like screen resolution or color eink, but issues where the tech interferes with my. . .physicological. . .reading process, I guess. For example:

Reading digital text only involves one of my senses--my eyes. But I take in things better if more than one of my senses is involved. Especially touch. I subconsciously gauge how fast I'm reading and where I am in a story by the changing weight of the pages read verses the pages still to come. The sounds of the paper being turned and the feel of it sort of impress themselves in my mind with the text, giving whatever I'm reading a kind of weight or permanency. I do not have this experience reading digital text, which feels insubstantial to me.

This is probably a generational response. I've just been trained to read this way. Someone younger than me might not have the same experience. Although I do think that the more senses we bring to bear, the more vivid and strong will be our experience. Digital content will forever be rather "flat" in that sense.

Nor do I think the "multimedia" potential of ebooks is a good substitute. Anyone who has looked at the much lauded (and laughed at) "Blio"software will see that being able to click on a word to see a Youtube video or dictionary.com definition doesn't actually do anything for your comprehension or appreciation of the text. It's just buttons to push.(and let's face it, how much can we trust all this extra "content" -- not much) Reading, especially novels, requires a concerted focus and concentration for hours at a time. I don't think constant digital interruptions would be an asset to comprehension.

The other issue that interferes with my whole-hearted embracing of eBooks is DRM. And here I'm on the uncertain fence of both thinking that publishers/authors (soon to be completely the same entity) need to have control over the content at least to be able to make a living at it. At the same time, however, DRM obstructs the one impulse that I KNOW is still unequivocally responsible for the success of a book: the "you've got to read this" factor. Every book is sold via word of mouth. And word-of-mouth is simply the marketing term for that moment when a reader finishes a book and loved it so much they want to share it with someone. DRM is inimical to that impulse, which is basically a generous one. And I can't think of how books have any hope of reaching new readers without it.

And speaking of the future of the book and Star Trek/Ffordian literary dystopias, Samruel Delany once imagined a kind of device that would be for anyone who ever wished they could just run their hands along a bookshelf and absorb all the stories through their fingers:

http://www.willreadforfood.com/2008/07/the-future-of-the-book/

I'm going to comment on the publishing angle. I think it likely that two of the Big Six will be hanging on by their fingernails in five years. By 2025 it could very well be the Big Two. Most people assume Amazon is only a seller of media. They also analyze, track, crunch, and collect information that can be manipulated in a predictive manner. They have an inside track on self-published books, out of print books, and print on demand books that publishers can only dream of. The data collects sales rank, star ratings, reviews, conversations, and buzz from their tens of millions of users. They have publishing niches now and they continue fine tuning them.

Publishers have access to their own data and are getting better at slicing it fine. What they don't have is access to other publisher's data. They are publishing companies not information collecting and analyzing companies. Amazon, Google, Apple, and the like are. They have budgets and personnel and corporate cultures that deal with rapid change. Publishers have limited resources and corporate cultures used to dealing with change at a glacial pace.

The first big issue publishers will have to deal with in a market where ebooks are gaining in percentage of total book sales is the return system. It's an inefficient legacy system that soaks up capital needed elsewhere.

A just for fun prediction. In 2025 the Big Two will be Random House partnered with Amazon and Penguin partnered with Google. Amazon and Google do love books in their own monopolistic leaning ways. Apple is agnostic when it come to books.

I think expensive e-reading gadgets are particularly alienating to those who can't afford the new technology (and/or upgrading every x number of months/years). And for those people, and plenty of tech holdouts such as myself, the public library will remain our sacred place to gain knowledge. Mix tapes didn't kill the music industry, and books aren't going to disappear any time soon.

expensive e-reading gadgets

Ereaders are now $100. They've fallen from about $700 in—what?—two years? $100 is practically free, even without savings on titles. How many people don't own a TV because $100 is too much to pay?

Mix tapes didn't kill the music industry

No, because mix tapes aren't a digital good. They can't be duplicated forever. They can't be shared with many people. Their digital equivalent—music sharing—has halved the music industry in the course of a few years.

I don't think the music industry comparison is quite fitting, for one key reason: there was absolutely nothing lost in abandoning the CD player and moving to the iPod. All the music that we already owned could easily be converted to the new format, and new music could be converted to the old format too. We could have the exact same music-listening experience that we always had. There's not really a fundamental difference between CDs and iPods.

Books and ebooks are different in various ways. Some are better at some things and some are better at others. Ebooks have the upper hand in portability, certainly; but physical books have the advantage of requiring no technology. I can go camping for a week or more and not have to worry about whether my reading material will suddenly become inaccessible. I can spend the entirety of a 1.5-hour flight reading, not just the 15 minutes when electronics are approved.

I think books and ebooks will coexist in 2025. They both have their uses, and they're not completely equivalent.

The word 'monopoly' comes to mind...and it makes me cringe when it comes to something as important as my reading material, be it books or news. Any media.

>Deep argument, of course, but,
>apart from library-targeted publishers,
>publishers don't make money on libraries
>—they lose it.

Publishers have argued that for a long time, but it isn't completely true. They assume that all the books that people borrow from libraries are lost sales, when the reality is that many people wouldn't necessarily purchase those books on their own (particularly in hardback). That simply isn't true, particularly when you move outside of the tiny fraction of a percent of books that are on the bestseller lists. The RIAA has used the same argument with songs, assuming that every instance of someone borrowing a CD (or downloading a pirated copy) is a lost sale. The numbers just don't bear that out.

The reality is that people are more likely to sample authors they haven't read (or groups whose music they haven't heard) if they don't have to purchase a book or CD to do so. They are more risk-averse to trying new things when their money is on the line. After they have discovered a new author they like, they are more likely to track down more books by that author, even if they have to purchase them (libraries can only hold a finite number of books). If that author's books are on the midlist, as most are, that can lead to increased sales overall.

The overall success of a book is largely affected by the size of the author's fan base. Publishers look to the short-term of hardcover sales, rather than to the long-term development of a fanbase. That is maladaptive in today's world (and wasn't they way the used to do business, anyway).

Despite what publishers say, libraries purchase HUGE quantities of books. When it comes to midlist titles, a sizable percentage of sales may come from libraries. We are one of the biggest consumers of books out there - we often buy multiple copies of titles, and replace them over time as they wear out.

If libraries were not around, a lot of library users would turn to used bookstores, not hardback purchases from bookstores. The publishers still wouldn't see any more profit.

>Book-reading is a minority, elite activity
>already, and millennials are the least-reading
>generation in US history.

Library use is up around the U.S., among all age groups. YA is a rapidly growing genre. Millenials read quite a bit - they just don't read as much from paper versions of books as past generations did. If you add in all the reading they do on electronic devices, they may even be reading more, overall. As a librarian, I see it every day.

I'll add too that ebooks are a godsend for anyone with a disability. When I was pregnant I had carpal tunnel to the point that I could not hold a hard cover book. I checked out a rocket ebook (remember those!) from the library and it was wonderful to be able to read again.

I have heard from a number of elderly patrons that they prefer ebooks for the weight and adjustable font size.

pcwilliams - great point about being able to change the content too easily...that just frightens me.

and Tim - yeah we're seeing how well self-publishing of ebooks is working for Amazon! Now that the book in question has been pulled the angry moms are still not happy. They are still calling for a boycott of Amazon through Christmas.

Now that the book in question has been pulled the angry moms are still not happy. They are still calling for a boycott of Amazon through Christmas.

I actually find this reassuring. They're giving up their leverage (can't boycott again if they're already boycotting), so Amazon will be less likely to listen to them in the future.

My biggest worry is facilitated by digital text but not exclusive to it: everyone has access to more reading materials. The surplus, as opposed to scarcity, reduces the value of each item a person "has." In scholarly communication, this explosion of journal literature has meant that scientists routinely skim many more references rather than reading fewer carefully. Similarly, the introduction of cheap paperbacks, used bookstores that trade in them, and exploding numbers of copies of the newest "popular materials" in libraries meant that people *could* go through lots more books, and so now many people who consider themselves serious readers take on more books but of a lighter sort. At one time, you could start a conversation based on a spine you saw in someone's home or office and be reasonably assured the book had been read, because books were more valuable and their readers more "invested" in what they read. Less expensive (albeit DRM-restricted) books do further "cheapen" the reading experience. Project Gutenberg made many classics available to anyone with a computer, but people are reading the classics less rather than more. Imagine how little books will matter as "things" when/if borrowing/swapping digital copies takes off! It's no big deal to only pay half as much attention and sort of skim through books while multitasking or getting interrupted if you've invested little in them. With e-books, you can more easily skip to the "good parts" and ignore the rest. Books aren't so much treasured things any more to most people...they're disposable entertainment or "for dummies"-speed nonfiction.

E-books can't help but change to reflect cultural changes, either. When all other media are moving toward rapid opinions, hyperlinking, and interaction, then solo, slow, and linear critical thinking just seems passé. Compare the answers from people of different generations: how many have ever slowly and lovingly read through a novel, a play, a poem, a history, or work of philosophy, taking notes on the text or really thinking about how to integrate the lessons of the book into their lives? Not for a class, but for the act itself? Before there was "young adult" fiction, more teenagers and more adults digested complicated narratives. Not just classics either. Even within genre fiction, for example, compare the average quality of 1960's-70's sci-fi to modern. Now the generation famed for multitasking can't navigate the multiple clauses of a long sentence. Despite a larger percentage of the population going to college, graduates actually have lower levels of reading comprehension now than high schoolers of previous generations. I was appalled at the inability of younger students in my master's program to understand the articles we had to read. The trend began long before e-books, but I think it's inevitable that the public will demand e-books to be more interactive, simply because it's possible, further degrading our ability to sustain the concentration for any intelligent argument or complex plot. E-books only exacerbate the trend toward surfing pre-digested text vanishing toward the factoid or sound bite.

Seriously, would anybody really try to read literary fiction or serious nonfiction while waiting in line somewhere? Portability isn't just about the size of the gadget; it's about content, too. In Japan, where mobile is king, cell phone novels are popular and cheap. Character and plot development in these novels pale in comparison to novels intended for print or even picture-dominant manga.

I'm way too young to be so scared for our future. Reading helps people develop critical thinking skills, and I'm really concerned that the voters/business leaders/scientists of the future are more likely to embrace a "dummies" approach to decision making as literature of all types degrades. Sure we can mash-up whatever we want now, but what are we losing in the process?

I guess in the future we will have less pre-produced books.

Some time ago I read a science fiction story (can't remember the book... maybe it was in Starwater Strains) Where bookshops are merely rooms with a big printing/binding machine. If you want a book just put in the number and they print it for you.

You already have this now with the Espresso Book Machine . No need for warehouses or a lot of shelving space...

I don't know about other professions, but when I think of my own (public health), books have already been superceded almost completely. The essentials, like Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, the Jane's series on biological & chemical agents, Physician's Desk Reference and its numerous alternatives, even the "Pink Book", Epidemiology and prevention of vaccine-preventable diseases -- all of these, and many, mnay more, I carry around now on a blackberry or tap into through Traction or a sharepoint site. The loose-leaf reference manual is kaput. United States Code, Vernon's, administrative codes, CFR, etc. etc -- official versions all online.

My guess is that other professions are in the same boat -- accountants, engineers, whatever. Heck, even the 'Multiple Listing Service" and the Used Car Blue Book are goners.

Ironically, the one profession that still seems to be dependent on the book is computer programming. They never seem to get tired of such items as Ways to Write Better, More Idiomatic Perl.

I'd suggest that the controversy over the "future of the book" is relevant only to trade or literaray publishing. Insofar as professional literature is concerned, the book is already toast.

I think its always necessary in these discussions to reveal your biases upfront - especially those who haven't yet tried ebooks, and difference between reading on a screen and on dedicated device. So for the record I've been a very happy owner of a Sony* ereader for over a year. I can't imagine myself ever going back to pbooks.

The future - devices will get better: lighter, flexible, robust, and globally wireless, wherever you are you can buy the latest book you want to read. Searchable, coloured, fast, ubiquitious. Very few people will still read pbooks regularly. Pbooks will be bought, as nostalgic mementos, for decoration, and by diehards, but the future is digital. This discussion will seem very archaic.

Publishing companies will learn the music lesson, and have stopped printing all or most new releases, they may not exist at all, except as advertising mediums for authors who will sell direct. Contract editing will be a new and lucrative profession, the inital bloated volumes of bad prose, will be viciously hacked back into taut lines suitable for a time short public. All back copies will be scanned in and exist online somewhere.

Libraires where they exist at all will morph into more museum-like bodies dedicated references to the past, with perhaps an ebranch helping search and reference online data - if it's not online it won't exist for most people.

Life is good in the future. I'm hesitant to say all of this will have arrived by 2025, but it will either be on the way or have already arrived and been surpassed. Near future is the hardest genre of all to predict. It very much depends on how the technology develops, without the adavances of my 2nd paragragh pbooks will remain prevalent.

* please don't do amazon's marketing for them, everywhere other than the US ereader unequal to Kindle.

jburlinson makes an important point: we can't generalise this discussion to "all books". There's a whole bunch of different areas in which books are used in different ways and subject to different commercial pressures.

* Scientific/Professional - paper books and journals are already a thing of the past for most of us. For new publications that's fine (if you're in an organisation that can afford the licences), but some older (versions of) texts are getting harder to find.

* Other academic books - the back-catalogue is safe for the moment in big academic libraries, and access to (some) older texts is improving for people who aren't near a big library. But what's happening to new publications? Journals are all online and more searchable than they were, but do monographs in the arts and humanities have a future as ebooks? Are smaller institutions under pressure to get rid of their paper? And the big, but well-known, issue of preserving digital data long-term.

* Commercial fiction and popular non-fiction - this is what most of the discussion above is about. But I wonder how important it really is in terms of anything other than money and power (and who cares about those...?). Novels don't really have the social and cultural impact that they had 100 or 200 years ago - why should it matter that the novel might go the way of other formerly mainstream forms like narrative verse and operetta and becomes a minority interest again?

* Niche fiction, poetry, local history, etc - people who write this sort of thing don't do it for the money, so in theory a model where the cost of printing small runs becomes irrelevant should be beneficial to us all in making it easier for such things to find a market. But how do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

* Developing countries - electronic publishing could have a huge benefit in making useful knowledge available to people in countries where there are few books and libraries, but restrictive licensing and expensive readers (100 dollars buys a lot of rice) could choke this new information age off before it starts.

>26 pcwilliams: One sentence piqued my interest:

"The interactive stories available to kids hinder creativity and originality."

Could you expound on that, please?

Suncat:

I think these new interative books - one where the reader and choose the ending, manipulate the characters, get noises or possibly visual stimulations when "reading" a story are limiting in several ways:

The child or other reader no longer has to use any imagination to conjure up the sounds made by the dog who is barking at the kite. The child will click on the dog and barking is provided. He/She is told how the dog sounded and in a sense, given the official noise to be associated with dogs.

The child/reader/learner is almost hindered from the experience of patience that comes along with reading a book. Instead of turning pages, the reader will scan a screen, scroll through it. The interactive experience removes the process of thinking and learning by imposing pre-determined images: it's just a bit short of television.

In addition, the sesame street like timing of vinettes decreases the attention span of young minds. They are given sounds and images instead of thinking them up themselves. They are bombarded with different ideas instead of acquiring focus.

There are also those choose your own ending stories which are a bit unhealthy: I understand there is a genre of never ending stories...and those work as a distinct genre. However, when this practice becomes the norm, it teaches young minds that if they are unsatisfied with someone elses idea of a story, they dont' have to accept it, but mold it into something of their own. This is a bit of artistic theft, coupled with a sense of disrespect towards artistic originality. You can't go back and continuously rewrite classics like Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights or Gilgamesh because you don't like a certain line or passage in the author's narrative. (Well, yes you can. You can do anything...but I think you see the point).

I'm just amazed at the blatant disregard some of you folks out there - especially given the fact that many of you work in libraries or deal with books - that you actually see a no distinct differences between a hardcopy tome and a pocket calculator.

One day, everyone in this country will be walking around with a piece of plastic sticking out of one of their ears. Everyone will be opening their mouths and talking and listening and making gestures. Some people will be three or four in a line and talking. But none of them will be talking to each other.

Did I address the points you questioned Suncat?

oh and everyone will no longer go by their real names but instead be called flatbarn or starchair or mouseday or sand.

ya know

>43 pcwilliams:
But Choose Your Own Adventure books have been around for 30 years, have they already destroyed the sense story? If not, why would they in the next 30 years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

Yes to the one with the mouth stuffed with books, you are correct. The choose your own adventure books work well, but as I said, they should be a distinct genre and not the norm. People are going to be manipulating and changing information very easily, and this practice will become too ubiquitous. It shouldn't be that all books have that vulnerability that the reader - or someone else with power -can change or eliminate content very easily. I go back the the allusion of Animal Farm when the animals question the law and the way it was written from the way they remember it.

>43 pcwilliams: Yes, thank you. I appreciate your explanations.

Personal aside: while I'm not arguing that this set of effects may hit the current generation of children harder, I myself don't have that much contact with children, let alone have opportunities to observe their styles of cognition.

Where I have observed some of this, such as the disrespect of the creator's right to establish features of their own work, is in people of my own age -- I'll admit to being very close to 50. I'm happy to say that this is still a very rare event.

Yes sun....I feel you in part because other than the children of friends or the young patrons that come in the library, I have no contact with kids either.

I have talked with other professionals about the dumbing down of our up and coming generations. And talking to young patrons through the reference interview, seeing their "research" techniques and looking at writings they've shown me, I see this trend continuing.

Some may argue that the intelligence level if you want to call it that, is moving in another direction, but I really don't think so. I have heard now that some schools no longer teach penmanship and that some universities have moved to using clickers for multiple choice exams rather than having scantrons. Can someone in the educational field verify this?

>47 pcwilliams:

I've heard about those issues with severe lack of understanding of research and evaluation of sources. Put along with that an inability to grasp ideas like "authorship" and "plagiarism".

Sadly, not all of these declines are recent. It is true that I was taught "cursive" writing in grade school in the '60s, but I could tell even then it was a far and ugly cry from the penmanship my parents had. So I made them teach me as soon as I was no longer being graded in class for it. I still practice the methods my folks gave me.

Penmanship? I don't think they bother. I know at both my Nephews schools, they don't even correct spelling mistakes. The logic is that it will make them feel insecure. I asked a teacher I know about a few things that concerned me and said "What will they do when they get out into the real world, the business world? They will be eaten alive!"

Her reply: "The scary thing is, it is their world now, we are the ones who will end up adapting to it."

Put along with that an inability to grasp ideas like "authorship" and "plagiarism".

I was actually very surprised earlier this year to see that plenty of LT users are also unsure about what constitutes plagiarism. So that at least isn't just an issue for the new generation.

As for penmanship, I think there are better things to spend our time on.

As for penmanship, I think there are better things to spend our time on.

I agree completely—except for the doctors. What's up with that anyway?

They must teach anti-penmanship in med school.

>51 timspalding:,52
I have heard the theory that it's because they can't obfuscate things in Latin any more...

>51 timspalding: Thus the rise of CPOE (computerized physician order entry).

Check out this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20101117/sc_yblog_thelookout/if-the-sci...

people care more about their twit status than they do people

From the group homepage:

Will sites like LibraryThing continue to exist, or will ereaders leverage their advantages to make book discussion a platform-dependent activity?

I'd say the odds are good through 2015. After that it's more murky. Not because I can imagine anything specific but because things can change radically in five to fifteen years. Some younger users of technology spend more time in appland than they do on the WWW. So maybe it will morph into app sets rather than an internet site.

>56 VisibleGhost:
Thanks for putting us back on track - there's an awful temptation in threads like this to get diverted into bashing "the youth of today". Maybe we should just take it as read that the kids of every generation since Homer have displayed shorter attention spans and less respect for the classics than their parents...

If people go on reading novels - and I think we have to assume that some people will, at least in the foreseeable future - then I can imagine that the ability to share your thoughts on the text with other readers directly from your ereader (shared, interactive marginalia, perhaps?) could become very interesting. Virtual book clubs, literature classes, interactive seminars packaged with the book - all sorts of clever ways for publishers to repackage public domain texts with new material the reader is willing to pay for. Every time you turn a page of Harry Potter you'll get a pop-up hologram of Harold Bloom or A.S. Byatt appearing to guide you through a bit of close-reading...

You know, having virtual book clubs really could increase sales. Look at what Oprah did for the books she chose. Tie it in with Twitter or something- Emma Watson, Lady Gaga and Harrison Ford are currently reading this book!- and that couldn't hurt, either. However, if Harold Bloom popped up and starting talking I'd have to crush his head: He may be a genius but in person he's a nauseating cross between Elmer Fudd and Charles Laughton playing Caesar. (Sorry Harry, loved your books.)

In defense of the eReaders, I think we can at least say that they're partly responsible for reviving classic literature. Almost all of my Kindle/Nook/Sony eReader owning friends have told me about a classic book they've read in the past year (Persuasion, Bleak House, Count of Monte Cristo, just to name a few) because it was available for free on their portable device. I compare this to my non-eReader friends who are much more likely to share with me the latest NYT Bestseller they enjoyed.

(Yeah, the sample size is limited and I have nothing against trading reviews of bestsellers, but I really do appreciate when someone shares a book with me that they read and loved and when it has a two hundred year old copyright!)

I know these works have been freely available with Project Guttenberg for some time, but it took the convenience of the devices to get many people to dig into them. Even in my own reading tastes, there's plenty of classics that I've been meaning to pick up for years but I never bothered getting to them. They're all stacked nicely in my Kindle TBR collection now and I'm really enjoying reading them.

On a slightly expanded version of this topic, has anyone else read M. Clifford's The Book? It's a futuristic look at a dystopian Chicago where the government controls and censors literature because everyone reads everything on digital devices. It's independently published (which I know turns some people off right away) but it was a quarter finalist for Amazon's breakthrough novel award this year. Really interesting and well-written work for those that are interested in pondering more about the future of eReading!

> 59

I've begun but not finished, primarily as I haven't any eReader and find reading online / from PDF on my PC cumbersome. The premise and world Clifford has created are quite compelling, just not enough to push me to read the eBook!

I see no reason for LT to disappear by 2025. Evolve, sure, but not disappear.

At the risk of going off topic again I want to go back to youth. I have a 3 and 6 year old. My 6 year old is struggling with spelling and penmanship yet it is still emphasized in school. He has spelling tests every week.

Sadly my kids both prefer playing on a Nintendo DS than reading on their own. However if mom or dad are reading then they love it.

Nintento makes some great programs that help kids learn the alphabet and phonetics.

But what we need is a healthy combination of parents reading to kids and kids getting the extra stimulation from educational games.

I have no doubt my kids will be using ereaders within 3 years. Granted it would be great if I could always read to them, I can't and it's nice to sit them down with the Leapster or LPad that reads to them when they point to words while I cook or help the oldest with homework.

I am seeing issues with overstimulation from current cartoons, etc. My kids literally can't sit through a normal movie like Mary Poppins...it has to be Dora or Transformers though hopefully that will change as they get older.

>59 elbakerone:

That's the fear, I think. I don't think such a truly dystopian result is remotely likely—although I wouldn't want to be reader in Iran in a age of ebooks! But as a close observer of the web and software world, I'm very scared that the book world will be subject to the same legal and social effects as the rest of the software world.

We had maybe 15 years when every entrepreneur was terrified of Microsoft's platform dominance, and users suffered from a lack of options—and crap software. It's a common view among techies that we are entering a second such age with Facebook and the app stores. Sure, companies can be built on top of such platforms—Zynga is a prominent example. But, such companies aren't in control of their own fate, but subject to the platform-company's good will and continued non-competition. As Facebook has proved a number of times recently (eg., Facebook Places), it will move into its apps' markets whenever it feels like it. And while, yes, MySpace stumbled, I think the smart money is on Facebook being dominant and increasingly exploitative for a long time. It's telling that the Web 2.0 conference this year was subtitled "Points of Control." (We've moved a long ways from the wide-open days of, say, 2005.)

Anyway, I see ereaders as another incipient "point of control"—over authors, publishers, app developers and, ultimately, readers. The technology is highly susceptible to network effects, sunk costs, barriers to entry and technological lock-in—all the factors that made Microsoft and now Facebook so powerful.

>62 lorireed:

Okay, but why do they have a Nintendo DS? Seriously. They're 3 and 6, not 17 where everything is a delicate negotiation. You can tell them the Tooth Fairy ate it and they'll believe you.

>63 timspalding:
You're probably right, I fear. However, seen from the other side, it could conceivably have a positive effect on literature as a whole if the milch-cow, star-system side of publishing is killed off for a while, or at least forced to slim down a bit.

You can imagine a situation where the 2025 counterpart of Itunes/Facebook/Amazon controls the handful of writers capable of earning megabucks, but all the other stuff that isn't commercially interesting is distributed via some sort of samizdat network. Wikipedia seems to manage to stay non-commercial - if publishers abuse their market position, I can imagine that many interesting new writers would be willing to publish their works on similar sites, with the minimal overheads covered by donations. Obviously the same dangers re-emerge if you get one, dominant site that controls all the new texts.

Maybe it's a strength of literature that writers can fall back on their "day jobs" whilst still producing important creative work to a greater extent than, say, actors or musicians. Or maybe that's just a warm, cosy illusion we have?

Maybe a type of research done on next generation of ebooks -- according to Fast Company:

If a writer knew which parts of her book people read, would it change how and what she wrote? If marketers knew which parts of their brochure people read, would it change how they put the brochure together? Researchers producing white papers, comic book authors -- the list of people who could benefit from such knowledge is endless.

http://bit.ly/9Hy9HB

Aslo, a simple site written with HTML5, shows the possibility of ebooks, more interaction:
http://www.20thingsilearned.com/

Then again, I am biased as I have so many ebooks and I think it will be the way by 2025, if not sooner. I'd venture it will be sooner.

The only problem with all thesse is the impact such new devices will have on the environment, which is a discussion for another day.

message 10 author, timspalding,

"Book-reading is a minority, elite activity already, and millennials are the least-reading generation in US history."

Do you mean millennials are the least book reading generation?

Speaking for my generation--a dangerous act--I would like to know how you define reading, and where you learned this information about our disdain for the printed word. As a millennial, albeit a biased one as I am of the (book) reading elite, I can say with confidence that text is everywhere for us, that we access it an awful lot, though perhaps not so often through mediums so romanticized and admired by older generations of readers. To say that millennials are the least-reading generation in our nation's history would be to discredit the various forms of literacy we have adopted and created. In short, we do read, though it may not always be a physical book.

It seems to me that people, such as myself, will never let the printed book die completely--at least within the next 15 years. E-readers and ebooks are going to gain a larger share of the book-selling market simply because of their novelty and convenience. But I have serious doubts that E Ink will completely obliterate the printed page within my lifetime.

>66 tofuwad:

I think there's something to what you say. It's still clearly true that a minority of internet users are doing non-trivial reading—and better, writing—online. I don't for a moment discount non-trivial blog reading or, for example, the fan-fiction community.

But reading "counts" in descending degrees. I suspect the least-reading tag would hold if you added reasonably decent blogs, fan fiction or whatever--the gain is swamped by a generational distaste for reading. For a while it looked like the reading nature of the internet would change that. The internet was largely text, and participation required a lot of reading, the average level of which was rather higher than it is now. But, as technology improved, more people got on and social networking took off, much internet content has gravitated either to video or extremely banal chit-chat. The explosion in intelligent, amateur commentary of a few years has petered out a bit as blogs have given way to Facebook and Twitter. That the average teenager now reads hundreds or thousands of status updates and texts a week... well, I don't think it matters much to any of the reasons "reading" matters.

A minority have, I think, developed "literacies" worth noting. The internet has fostered a certain sort of critical reading, as the uncontrolled nature of the content requires everyone to constantly and actively evaluate things like author and audience, and assess quality. And, for a minority, it's fostered the sort of reading that comes from being a writer yourself. Those are massively positive things.

But while watching YouTube videos may give you a better appreciation of how stories are told there—and that may even make you smarter in some way—to call it a "literacy" is to bend terms to uselessness. Being better at understanding a non-literary something isn't a literacy. Chopping wood doesn't increase my "chopping wood literacy." The sexual revolution didn't increase our "screwing literacy."

Yeah, the sexual revolution did sort of peter out. Although the TSA has finally made flying fun again. If I have to stand in line, take my shoes off, empty my pockets, have one guy yelling at me to turn all my electronic equipment on and other yelling to turn it off, then somebody is going to touch me inappropriately. Next time I'm going to be the guy in line with beer breath, chewing Nicorette, my pants around my ankles waving my arms about and shouting 'opt out!'. But that's me, I'm a people person.

(Sorry, it's like a Tourette's thing.)

>67 timspalding: (I like how simple that is)

I approached the question of reading's future from a high school English teacher's perspective, so I suppose I have a broad definition of literacy. I recently graduated from a credential program, and the word literacy is quite the buzz word in the halls of education--at least within the halls of the diminishing English departments. I don't want to be misunderstood as supporting wood chopping as a form of literacy, but I can't help but feel hopeful about a student's developing literacy habits when they find writing a blog post through the prospective of Isabella from Measure for Measure makes them want to read (and write) more.

But of the literacy you suggest, the ardent reading of books, I definitely agree that the majority of my generation is, on the whole, an illiterate bunch. It has been my experience that those of us that do read books tend to focus on the self help, New Thought school of literature. Which is sad. I dislike being labeled an intellectual by my peers simply because I have a bookshelf stocked with, of all things, books. A well-worn Ulysses, no less! "Wow. You're, like, super smart. You, like, read a lot."

In summary, I agree that social networking is no substitute for reading a (complete) book, that the internet has indeed fostered a certain sort of critical reading (within said minority), and that very few non-reading millennials are going to change their reading habits because their parents bought them a nook for as a graduation present.

How do you feel about graphic novels being used as a gateway to getting non-readers to read works of greater literary merit?

My objection to graphic novels as a gateway is that there is little or no relation to ingestion of content via visual to ingestion of content via text. They are different mediums and non-readers are no less non-readers for looking and skimming the visual stories. It doesn't really help them with the text when faced with a story told entirely via that medium. If we welded both story and images together as in The Invention of Hugo Cabret where you actually do benefit from having both text and images to experience the story fully, that kind of story-telling might be closer to what's necessary to move non-readers into readers.

It's in considering that idea that one has to think about the issues of melding video with text in books for the year 2025. And how do we use Hugo Cabrett as an model in usefully melding the two forms together?

With the cost of digital devices and the obliteration of paper books, what will become of the poor? There is enough illiteracy in this world. With digital e-books, how will we make books available to them? How will the inner city school budgets keep up? Many of these schools are already in, what could be called, " a state of disrepair". Will literacy, once again, become an option simply for the upper class? I do not need to mention third-world nations. If it became a serious problem in our nation, I do not want to consider what would become of others. I am hoping there is something I am not aware of that will prevent this from happening.

I don't know about graphic novels. I have no particular animus against them, and I recognize they can be a subtle and complex art form. Do they serve a gateway to another subtle, complex art form--reading text? I don't know. It's an empirical question. My guess is that they tend to crowd out textual reading for some, and probably don't bring many into textual reading who wouldn't have been brought in anyway.

Even though reading is solitary and sedentary, it's an activity. It must be; if it were as passive as watching teebee then more people would be reading. I think the threshold between being able to read and being a reader is simply reading. As far as novels go, stories, I wouldn't rule out comics as viable literary tools. It's true that they might crowd out a few readers from books, but I think they probably serve as enough of a safety net, keeping people passing their eyes over words, to be useful.

>> 71 BALE- "Will literacy, once again, become an option simply for the upper class?" It is to be fervently hoped for. I am really sick of books about vampires.

This is a fascinating thread. I'm in my 60s, and was brought up to love books. I probably have more than 1000, and whenever I move packing and schlepping the books takes up more time than anything else. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on a medieval manuscript, and I love old books more than anything. I feel connected to everybody who has handled the book throughout its life.

That being said, I'm also a geek. I am a university faculty member, and for one of my classes I use an online etextbook. It's significantly less expensive than any print book I've come across, and college costs is one of the most strident plaints of university students.

My brother gave me a Kindle for Christmas, and I'm finding that I'm less and less enamored of the boxes of pulp fiction that I still haven't opened from my last move. To me, there are two kinds of books -- keepers and consumables (that is, books that you read once and then can't bear to get rid of). I find myself checking out the newest paperbacks at Folletts, and then buying any I like for the Kindle.

On the other hand, I have a small collection of first editions of early 20th century novels, and I'd never trade them for a digital version. I think books with "value added" -- that is, books whose covers have interesting textures, books whose paper is especially nice to handle, books that smell interesting -- those will survive. The books whose only value is in the content will go digital.

I agree with the person who said look at 8 tracks, tapes, videos, cds, books on tape books on cds now ebooks. New stuff comes and goes but books themselves have been around for a long time and I think they will remain as long as readers do. Ebooks are fine, I even own one, but there is nothing like holding a real paper book. That's what I think anyway.

I,for one, find I get bored when reading something on a screen. Not sure if that's because of overuse in the working area or what but my mind keeps wandering and I am suspect of any information that comes in the screen format.
There is nothing like holding,feeling,smelling,seeing the typeset in a real book. I don't think I will be able to give that up.
It is another nice but useless bit of technology this world is so enthralled with. However, if "it floats your boat" at least you are reading-a definite plus!

As to the graphic novel issue...

I see graphic novels as simply another form of reading, not as a completely distinct form all its own. Certainly there are differences between a traditional novel and a graphic novel, but when you boil it down they are both about making meaning from strings of symbols.

As to Hugo Cabrett, I would categorize it as a graphic novel. What would make it different from many other graphic novels? it uses words and pictures in series to tell a story. That's what a graphic novel is. I also would say that it is not particularly more sophisticated in its use of this format than many many other graphic novels.

> 72. Graphic novels were definitely a gateway into reading text for me. Only back then, they weren't call graphic novels, they were called "Classics Illustrated." When you grow up in a little town about 40 miles southeast of Nowhere, Arizona, you tend to grab hold of anything you can get your hands on, if you've got any sort of readerly DNA in you. There was absolutely no way I was ever going to get a copy of Michael Strogoff or The Man Who Laughs -- but I could find the CI versions on the racks at the drugstore, right next to the latest "Archie". And even though we did have a copy of the collected Shakespeare, the CI Hamlet and Macbeth were very useful, nay indispensable, supplements -- better, on the whole, than Harold Bloom.

(Just to interrupt for a sec...)

I haven't bought an ereader yet but I will eventually.

The biggest thing I worry about is the dependence on a power source and working equipment. A print book seems so much more reliable.

edit: I would like to echo what adam said in >74 adamdelahalle:.

"The biggest thing I worry about is the dependence on a power source and working equipment."

And yet I'm sure you have an ipod, mp3 player, or even a hifi - and don't only listen to music at concerts? Technology is basically reliable these days. Maybe not 365 days a year, but 364 of them. (2 week battery source, and a printlike screen very different from reading on a PC monitor).

>80 reading_fox: And yet I'm sure you have an ipod, mp3 player, or even a hifi ...

No, I don't. I do listen to music CDs on my computer, but that's a small luxury for me. It's hardly as central to the many activities of my life as having reliable books is. YMMV of course. I also object to having something that, up to this point, had a relatively low technology accessibility threshold now jumping to having quite a high one.

It used to be that people looked down on what books others read.

Now people are being looked down on because of how they prefer to read their books.

It's annoying me.

No matter what reasons you give on how fabulous ereaders are, I will always prefer to read books in hand. And I resent it when I'm called a Luddite because of it.

>82 Morphidae:

It goes both ways, though. And that's not to mention audiobooks. Whether audiobooks are really "reading" is a perpetual topic around here and among book lovers generally.

>82 Morphidae:

I accept "Luddite" as a compliment. On this topic and many others. And my profession is writing software.

But, dammit, you write your software with a quill! :)

Of course not! I use a ball-point pen.

>83 timspalding: Not hardly. When someone says they prefer ereaders, others explain why they don't. It's about preferences. They talk about the *features* of each.

When someone says they don't like ereaders, others say it's because we are being difficult, or old-fashioned or Luddite. We get told to "suck it up" or that we are technologically challenged or "too bad for you, you are going to lose your books." It's about the *person* rather than the preference.

That's what annoys me.

>87 Morphidae:

Sounds like we've been having the exact same experience, because I couldn't agree more. Both your initial post and this response.

Here's a relevant post, showing decline in anti-ebook sentiment:
http://bit.ly/fKWp8p

For Pete's sake, I'm not ANTI-ebook. I PREFER regular books. I'm ANTI-intolerance.

Does that mean you simply won't stand intolerance?

:P~~~~~

>90 Morphidae:

Didn't mean to imply...

PS: I'm anti ebook. Or rather I'm anti the epiphenomena of ebooks, notably licensing and the death of first sale.

65> Aslo, a simple site written with HTML5, shows the possibility of ebooks, more interaction:
http://www.20thingsilearned.com/


Yeah, I got that link. And went to the site, and read...oh, the first 20 pages? The link is sitting in my bookmarks and at some point I'll go back there - but that is one of the _worst_ examples of 'interactivity' - or rather, one example of the worst kind of interactivity - I've run into. You get this thing on the screen that looks like a book; when you click to the next page, the page visibly turns, you can see the covers - I don't remember if the number of pages visible on each side changes. The info is mildly interesting, but it's picture-book style - a small amount of text on each page, with some illustrations - and to complete a thought, I have to click and watch the page-turn animation, frequently several times. UGH. I hate the page-turn thingy on store ads, too, and it's almost ubiquitous there (the digital edition of the weekly ads for Target, Walmart, Macys...). It represents an abstraction of the book, with all the minor aspects of it (turn pages, limited page size, etc) but none of the things that make a book better than an ebook (physicality, basically).

I read ebooks quite a bit - have for years. I don't like reading them on the computer screen - I can read quite a bit, for information, there, but when I'm reading for fun I want to curl up on the sofa not sit up in a desk chair. I read (past tense) on my Palm for years; now I read on my Android phone. The screens are small but 'turning' the page is so quick it doesn't matter (used to be tap, now it's swipe to turn); I read plain text, without links or images, because a) it makes the most of the small screen and b) it's less distracting. And yes, even curled up on the sofa with a 'book' in my hands, I'm much more likely to stop reading and do something else (play a game, check the weather...) with an ebook than with a physical book - it's harder to be completely absorbed. Not impossible - I've read ebooks in a single sitting sometimes - but more often I read them in bits and pieces (and that's where ebooks win over physical books - I've got 5-20 minutes waiting time - aha, I have my choice of books in my pocket!).

I have no idea what the future of books is going to be. I do have to say that "People will always buy books" sounds awfully like "People will always buy records/tapes/buggy whips"... people who are used to them will continue to buy them as long as they're available, which is a long way, on both sides (available and people who are used to them) from 'always'. I will always buy books. My nephews will probably buy books all their lives (though there may not be a lot available when they're my age). Their kids? I dunno.

>82 Morphidae: I regularly say that I don't like ereaders for various reasons, and I've never gotten that reaction. Maybe I just tend to be surrounded by old-fashioned bookish people. But at the same time, your starting claim that paper books will always better no matter what reasons people might give to the contrary isn't exactly inviting a constructive discussion. Assuming that everyone in favour of ebooks is intolerant or judgemental, and strongly expressing that from the beginning, also seems counterproductive.

I do have to say that "People will always buy books" sounds awfully like "People will always buy records/tapes/buggy whips"... people who are used to them will continue to buy them as long as they're available, which is a long way, on both sides (available and people who are used to them) from 'always'.

I think a better claim is that "people will buy books as long as there's no absolutely better alternative". While ebooks have certain advantages, paper books are also better in certain ways. So I expect the two will coexist for a long time.

96> Yes, true. I suppose I was inferring the notion that 'better' is more or less equal to 'what people are used to' - which is referenced a lot above, in the notion that the next generation (or the one after that, or the one after that...) will be so used to screen-reading that physical books will seem odd and uncomfortable. But overall, yeah, both will be around for quite a while. I just don't know (and neither does anyone else) whether 'a long time' is 10-20 years or 100-200 (or 1000-2000...)...

Or there might be something coming up in 10-50 years that supersedes both. Zoom! goes the tech...

As I've been posting to and reading this thread, my blanket opposition to eBooks has waned, somewhat. It would be especially nice to move all the genre lit (mysteries, horror, sci-fi) to an eReader just to save space. I move a lot, I've got 1,488 books in this apartment and a lot more in storage. Boxing them up and hauling them around is a pain.

My reservations are still strong enough that I wouldn't buy an eReader, or if I did I'd get the $139 Kindle and only download free books, but the ideas of portability and freeing up wall space are interesting.

I've bought - oh, maybe 40-50 ebooks, mostly from Baen (good current SF). That's about 10% of my ebook collection - I have a lot of old SF, old childrens, classics, romance, etc, all gotten free - Gutenberg, Amazon (there's quite a few free Kindle classics, and current books often go free for a couple days to generate interest (not bestsellers, romances mostly)), direct from publishers (a couple Early Reviewer books), etc. I'm doing a BTRIPP with ebooks - they only get listed when I read them. I have a lot I'm not likely to read (got a bundle, with two-three books I wanted and another two or three I'm not interested in) and more that I wouldn't mind reading but may not get around to. So they only get on LT when I actually read and finish them.

My phone (and my Palm before it) is primarily an organizer - I use it for my calendar, alarm clock, records of when and on what I worked, etc; the ebook functionality is a bonus. If I had to carry around another gadget to read on, I wouldn't - maybe for a long trip I'd think to take it, but I wouldn't keep it in my purse/pocket for easy access any time. The phone, though, is always handy for other reasons, which makes it great for a quick read.

So yeah, for those books where the story is what matters and the physicality is relatively unimportant, reading digitally works fine.

While ebooks have certain advantages, paper books are also better in certain ways

My worry here is that, as "enhanced" ebooks take over, they will push paper readers toward digital. The "enhanced" issue isn't about interactivity or even video, which I think will remain marginal so long as writers write books, not teams of people with different talents, but just about extra content. Books are constrained by the economics of paper to avoid adding material if it bulks the book up too much, making it expensive or making it look boring.

Enhanced ebooks aren't going to have those restrictions. Classic literature is going to get photographs of drafts, old newspaper reviews. New books are going to get author's notes, discarded chapters, statistical tables, footnotes to books the publisher wanted footnotes out from, author interviews, etc. etc. That's what'll push many of us over, I think.

>100 timspalding: I'm not necessarily concerned about paper readers moving over to ebooks. If ebooks somehow do become strictly better, great. I don't really see how that can happen, though. Despite fancy features, paper books are much more reliable. If I want to be sure to have a book around in the future, an ebook probably isn't going to cut it (unless it's out of copyright and there are endless sources of free ebooks available, so that it could at least be replaced if not reliably kept). Ebooks are fine for novels that I'll read once and don't care to keep, but for books I care about, fancy features aren't a substitute for reliability.

100> Ooh, maps. History books never have enough maps.

fancy features aren't a substitute for reliability

I'm sympathetic to this, but most people don't agree with you. Most people discard books shortly after reading them. And for that matter most people read novels. You can't sustain a paper-based book economy on collectors and non-fiction readers.

>100 timspalding: Enhanced ebooks aren't going to have those restrictions. Classic literature is going to get photographs of drafts, old newspaper reviews. New books are going to get author's notes, discarded chapters, statistical tables, footnotes to books the publisher wanted footnotes out from, author interviews, etc. etc. That's what'll push many of us over, I think.

What I wonder most about is what this means for fiction and the way we currently speak of "getting lost in a book." It seems to me that these kind of enhancements are inimical to the kind of focused attention the writer wants from the reader, especially if they are telling a story, and especially if the story is something the length of a novel.

But I'm willing to concede that this might just be an issue of what you are used to. I get annoyed by things like internal links and pop up definitions in online articles I'm trying to read. They are always trying to divert my attention from what I'm reading. But maybe my nephews will take all that in stride. And maybe their kids will find a block of straight text without "enhancements" to be a poor way to tell a story.

>104 southernbooklady:

Right, but a lot of this stuff is already creeping in, without bad effect. Many (most?) HarperCollins books now have the PS section, with interviews and such.

Also, while such features MIGHT become integral to the book, my guess is they aren't. Think of DVDs. The enhancements don't change the movie so much. But at lot of people—including myself—much prefer to buy DVDs with good enhancements, like a director's track.

>103 timspalding: You can't sustain a paper-based book economy on collectors and non-fiction readers.

Why not? Publishers like Eisenbrauns seem to be doing fine.

Of course, I don't think fiction publishing will disappear entirely. A lot of the costs of producing a book aren't about the physical production; there will be editing and advertising regardless of what form the book ultimately appears in, so I don't think mainstream publishers will stop offering hard copies anytime soon.

>106 _Zoe_:

Right, but that cuts out the vast majority of book publishing. Certainly it would kill of bookstores.

>107 timspalding: Yeah, but I'm not particularly concerned about bookstores. See this thread.

I do think you should give some thought into how LT can replace certain important features of bookstores. Recommendations from knowledgeable book people? Social interaction around books? Etc. What is it about bookstores that matters to you, and can you get that from LT?

>104 southernbooklady:

well that's certainly true, but I have to point out that DVD special features tracks and things like book club questions come at the end of the story, outside the actual text or movie. Even the "watch this movie with commentary" options on DVDs have to be searched for.

I'm thinking more about internal hyperlinks and stuff like that which is more "in your face" and potentially interrupts the flow of the narrative.

I think the "death" of the paper book will be much more subtle. There is, of course, my generation and the one following it that are addicted to the flashiest and shiniest technology available; the Recession changed some behaviors, but not many, and there are plenty who will discard something perfectly usable for the new. For these, a book proper will be boring. They will want the ereaders: first they want it in color; then with high-speed internet; then the "enhanced" ebooks will be in demand, with videos and maybe even audio. And they will feel compelled to buy it, because they will get the most for their dollar: it took me a long while to convince myself that I do not need to own the special features-loaded DVDs unless I really enjoy the movie, because it otherwise goes to waste.

There will also be the misguided environment groups, those who would rather see thousands and eventually millions of plastic ereaders in a landfill than cut down (and replant) the trees necessary to make paper. As I predict more people in the next decade will be thinking Green, some group will cast all who do not own ereaders as Luddite anti-environmentalists.

The only speed bump I see doing a lot of damage to the credibility of ebooks is a major scandal, one that will leave Amazon's Orwellian accident looking like a slip of thought. A government official will have to have been shown interfering with a published work, or simply wiping out books period. People will accept that sort of behavior from China. Once it happens in Great Britain or America, the older readers may become cautious of making the full jump to ebooks.

It will be interesting to see if the nature of the reader changes over the next several decades, and how that nature may adapt to new technology or how the nature of readers will force technology to adapt to it. Reading is the solitary vice, but both fiction and non-fiction have communal counterparts (story time/lectures).

The ongoing LT debate on whether audiobooks are reading or not illustrates one part of the fundamental nature or readers. I say audiobooks aren't reading, in that the cognitive processes of having eyes run over symbols and applying meaning doesn't happen, but I count audiobooks I've listened to as having 'been read'. I also remember the plots to non-fiction books I've listened to much more clearly than I do for books I've read. I didn't read Great Expectations but I listened to it. The book had a profound impact on me, and I'm not sure that it would be any different if I had sat down and read it.

I'd like to hear what others have to say about the nature of readers themselves.

I've found this discussion interesting as well as enlightening. A lot of points have been expressed that bear further thought. As a life-long book lover, I fervently hope and pray the printed book never goes out of style...at least for the remainder of my lifetime! I'm one of those who love the look, feel and smell of books. Any books. I was always thrilled in school to receive at the beginning of a new school year, those brand new textbooks that would be mine...all mine for the next year! I've had an appreciation for books for as long as I can remember. I think in part fostered by relatives who also appreciated the written word. I am rarely without at least one book with me, or at least nearby. Hence my name on this site which has now morphed into the name of my "used" bookstore. A place I am most happiest to be, surrounded by thousands of those beautiful books, walls lined with paperbacks in all their shining glory, and shelves packed to overflowing with beautiful hardcovers. So many books, so many new to me authors, so little time for reading but still I find time each day to spend a few precious moments with a book. This topic of eReaders vs physical books has come up in conversations with my customers, and I have found the general consensus is one that has been expressed here as well. Book lovers love their books. They may not want to read a particular book more than once, but they do love to hold a book in their hands, smell those printed pages, and immerse themselves in the written word. Among those customers are a few who also own an eReader of some sort or read electronically on their phones although less often on their computers. (Too cumbersome). I am also the owner of an eReader. I received one as a gift from my well-meaning son last Christmas. Although I've downloaded several free ebooks to it, I don't think I'll tell him I have yet to read anything on it. It's a lovely piece of technology and a fun toy, but my physical library calls to me much more loudly with all the many books I've accumulated that are anxious to be read. As I said, too many books...to little time. I think that in time, ebooks may become the more accepted way to read a book, but I don't believe that the physical book will ever disappear entirely. I for one plan to foster a love of the physical book in my Granddaughter, and I know just how to do it because it was the gift my Grandmother gave me as a child.

> 100. It's odd, but I read your post within 30 minutes of reading about the projected publication of the New Edinburgh Edition of The Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, about which the following claims are made for the eVersion:

"The edition will be available both as printed volumes and an electronic edition, showing the different stages of the texts... Each volume considers the various states in which Stevenson's texts appeared, from magazine publication to final editions, allowing readers to discover what Stevenson wrote, and how this hugely popular writer responded to the burgeoning literary market of the late nineteenth century.

This new, ground-breaking complete edition allows readers to understand for the first time the development of Stevenson's work, his collaborations, his relations with publishers, and his place in the literary history of his period. Disentangling Stevenson's writing from the changes made by his first editor, Sidney Colvin, the New Edinburgh Edition will provide a completely fresh, authoritative text."

Can't wait.