Metryq
Cave Painter
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2011
- Messages
- 935
Gads, this is almost turning into a political debate.
I grew up in a house with 5000 books in it, many of them science fiction. So you might expect me to be biased towards paper books, but I love books in any form. My most prized volumes are hardcovers. Some of them are leather-bound with gilded edges and all that fancy stuff — like an Astounding Stories 60th Anniversary collection from the Easton Press.
As a graphic artist I also have many years exposure to page layout (both "mechanical" and DTP), and fell in love with the PDF format when it first appeared. No ebook format is perfect, but the formats are evolving with the hardware. Will ebooks eventually replace paper books entirely? It depends on how long that "eventually" is, and I'd say "yes, eventually." I wouldn't expect it in our lifetimes, and the many existing paper books will still be around — loved and treasured by many.
Some have expressed concern about format obsolescence. A friend and I both worry about our current libraries — books printed on cheap paper literally disintegrating on the shelves. Yet records from the ancient world still exist on clay and papyrus. What will future historians know of the 20th century when all the new media started to appear? Granted, much of early radio and television has been lost, and computer media from the '60s and '70s is no longer readable — even if the drives still exist. Much of that information was transient anyway.
Computers were very isolated in the beginning, but they and their formats are much more robust and standardized now. Many ebook formats are really nothing more than Zip archives with a different extension tacked on (like EPUB or even CBZ). That means one can "unzip" the ebook and read the HTML inside. That's right, just like the Web, ebooks are nothing more than text documents and perhaps some photos/diagrams in widely recognized formats in a neat package. The information can still be extracted with common tools. But even then, "browsers" and converters for these simple packages will not suddenly disappear.
Some formats are very poorly "future-proofed." Italian artist Marco Patrito introduced a "multi-media novel" in 1995 titled Sinkha. At that time Web formats were very primitive, so Patrito turned to Macromedia Director to weave the text, pictures, music and video together. Unfortunately, Director creates "projectors" — an executable player and document all bound up into one package. OS and hardware changes outdated the work within a tiny handful of years. Patrito released an update, along with some sequels, but even those are sliding away. (He should have re-authored with HTML.) Anyway, Sinkha was experimental and not representative of most ebook formats.
Gutenberg is an aptly named ebooking project. Like Gutenberg's first printing press, the Gutenberg Project makes many books readily accessible to the general public. But suppose the servers crash?! Electronic media can be duplicated very easily (and searched and processed more quickly). Which means that even if Gutenberg's servers went down, individuals all over the world have much (most? all?) of the data duplicated somewhere. The only way the electronic libraries of the world could be irretrievably lost is by some world-wide catastrophe. And in such a case, we'd have other things to worry about.
I grew up in a house with 5000 books in it, many of them science fiction. So you might expect me to be biased towards paper books, but I love books in any form. My most prized volumes are hardcovers. Some of them are leather-bound with gilded edges and all that fancy stuff — like an Astounding Stories 60th Anniversary collection from the Easton Press.
As a graphic artist I also have many years exposure to page layout (both "mechanical" and DTP), and fell in love with the PDF format when it first appeared. No ebook format is perfect, but the formats are evolving with the hardware. Will ebooks eventually replace paper books entirely? It depends on how long that "eventually" is, and I'd say "yes, eventually." I wouldn't expect it in our lifetimes, and the many existing paper books will still be around — loved and treasured by many.
Some have expressed concern about format obsolescence. A friend and I both worry about our current libraries — books printed on cheap paper literally disintegrating on the shelves. Yet records from the ancient world still exist on clay and papyrus. What will future historians know of the 20th century when all the new media started to appear? Granted, much of early radio and television has been lost, and computer media from the '60s and '70s is no longer readable — even if the drives still exist. Much of that information was transient anyway.
Computers were very isolated in the beginning, but they and their formats are much more robust and standardized now. Many ebook formats are really nothing more than Zip archives with a different extension tacked on (like EPUB or even CBZ). That means one can "unzip" the ebook and read the HTML inside. That's right, just like the Web, ebooks are nothing more than text documents and perhaps some photos/diagrams in widely recognized formats in a neat package. The information can still be extracted with common tools. But even then, "browsers" and converters for these simple packages will not suddenly disappear.
Some formats are very poorly "future-proofed." Italian artist Marco Patrito introduced a "multi-media novel" in 1995 titled Sinkha. At that time Web formats were very primitive, so Patrito turned to Macromedia Director to weave the text, pictures, music and video together. Unfortunately, Director creates "projectors" — an executable player and document all bound up into one package. OS and hardware changes outdated the work within a tiny handful of years. Patrito released an update, along with some sequels, but even those are sliding away. (He should have re-authored with HTML.) Anyway, Sinkha was experimental and not representative of most ebook formats.
Gutenberg is an aptly named ebooking project. Like Gutenberg's first printing press, the Gutenberg Project makes many books readily accessible to the general public. But suppose the servers crash?! Electronic media can be duplicated very easily (and searched and processed more quickly). Which means that even if Gutenberg's servers went down, individuals all over the world have much (most? all?) of the data duplicated somewhere. The only way the electronic libraries of the world could be irretrievably lost is by some world-wide catastrophe. And in such a case, we'd have other things to worry about.
