Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. Arthur Schopenhauer
The state of technology nowadays is that hard copy books are going away. We still have big libraries of paper books but little by little books are being published electronically.
The science fiction direction, to follow the trend, is that books will become obsolete, new things will only be electronic, paper copies will be a luxury for eccentric rich people, and there will be an underground secret society of zombie/scholars like ancient monks preparing illuminated manuscripts in shocking physical decrepit hand--held -substance-.
That's science fiction, but there is currently just the foreshadowing of nostalgia. "I love the smell of paper books, my Kindle doesn't give me that", "I order my bookshelves by color of the binding; I have a personal relationship with that color and size and the backpack I put it into at that time of my life", "That quote by that author? Somewhere on the top left page, two lines from the top about a third of the way through". "Wandering through the stacks, I pulled out a random volume, and opened a new world".
But all this is to say... so what? We're reading more than ever (possibly not in long stretches, but the quantity has certainly increased). We have so many sources for reading and so much more availability of time for reading. We have the old stuff newspapers, magazines, books, and paper memos. But we also have computers and laptops and phones, which all can read modified versions of the old stuff, plus emails and blogs and tweets. We can read these easily while sitting or standing, with one hand, on the bus, on a plane, standing in line. No dependency on the location of some heavy object to carry around constantly.
And more importantly for the cognitive experience of reading that paper object, as software, it is universes beyond some dumb stack of paper. The character refers to something they said the day before? No need to reread three chapters, just search for it.
So we lose the physicality in an electronic book. All the current tricks to make an electronic book feel like a 'real' book, simulating a page leaf turning over, placing icons of books on a picture of a bookcase...they seem so...juvenile, so derivative, so ... last century.
Yes, there'll be no more 'memory palace', arbitrary connections to arbitrary referents that connect the narrative in a long fluent pathway. I'm at this part of the river with the island with no trees...I'm at the next part of the river with the house on one side and cliff on the other... None of that.
Hey. I love books. I love everything about them. All that nostalgia, that's me.
But it's all going away. Electronic is better.
"Oh telling stories around the tribal fire is so much better intellectually than this paper thing. You're training your memory much better when you're forced to remember."
We're also very dependent on whatever technology is producing this stuff. What if the power grid goes out? We're screwed to the point where ebooks aren't relevant. We won't have the instruction manual to fix the burnt out internet router or turbine at the hydroelectric dam. But then back a century we're screwed if things fall apart where paper books aren't relevant (the printing press is managed by an unknown group and we can't get out the news about the new junta government staging purges. Every technology has its questionable gains that ruin the previous less advanced technology, and it also has its crutches that we'll sorely miss if they're every gone (going backwards).
Postscript
Other people can read on a tablet or even a phone. It's really hard for me. I really prefer to have the book in my hands.
And more importantly for the cognitive experience of reading that paper object, as software, it is universes beyond some dumb stack of paper. The character refers to something they said the day before? No need to reread three chapters, just search for it.
So we lose the physicality in an electronic book. All the current tricks to make an electronic book feel like a 'real' book, simulating a page leaf turning over, placing icons of books on a picture of a bookcase...they seem so...juvenile, so derivative, so ... last century.
Yes, there'll be no more 'memory palace', arbitrary connections to arbitrary referents that connect the narrative in a long fluent pathway. I'm at this part of the river with the island with no trees...I'm at the next part of the river with the house on one side and cliff on the other... None of that.
Hey. I love books. I love everything about them. All that nostalgia, that's me.
But it's all going away. Electronic is better.
"Oh telling stories around the tribal fire is so much better intellectually than this paper thing. You're training your memory much better when you're forced to remember."
We're also very dependent on whatever technology is producing this stuff. What if the power grid goes out? We're screwed to the point where ebooks aren't relevant. We won't have the instruction manual to fix the burnt out internet router or turbine at the hydroelectric dam. But then back a century we're screwed if things fall apart where paper books aren't relevant (the printing press is managed by an unknown group and we can't get out the news about the new junta government staging purges. Every technology has its questionable gains that ruin the previous less advanced technology, and it also has its crutches that we'll sorely miss if they're every gone (going backwards).
Postscript
Other people can read on a tablet or even a phone. It's really hard for me. I really prefer to have the book in my hands.
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