Future of books

[pier4r]

I am really pro both to be honest. Digital and paper.

Why paper? Because it is much more persistent, we had the discussion already. Without proper maintenance and moving data from format A to format B ; from device C to device D (yes, devices die); the digital data can disappear in an instant.

Fire? Burns paper, but also digital media.
Water? Destroys paper, but also digital media.
And so on.

So paper is for posterity. I can still find books from the 1968 printed in the DDR and read them. If I find a usb disk or a CD from 2008, assuming it is still working, it may contain data that I cannot read or it is partially corrupted or the format is difficult to open or I may not have anymore any port or device to read the thing.

Digital is too quickly changing as well. Protocols, connections (physical and what not), file formats, etc.. Accessing the internal memory of an ebook reader from 2010 may become soon hard (source: I have ebook readers from the 2010s).

Until we discover digital data that requires little maintenance over decaded, paper (or the like) wins.

For quick access and portability in the short term, though, digital is great. I can bring with me 100 books in a ebook reader, I won't do the same with 100 physical books.

While I read gladly ebooks that I can read sequentially (fiction), with technical things where I need to consult stuff on different pages at the same time it is not so easy. The ebook readers aren't that much better now in 2022 as they were in 2010 (when I first tried them). For scrolling back and forth or let alone having multiple pages open at the same time on the same book, it is a pain.

Tablets, in 2010 or also now, are much better to handle technical stuff that should be opened in multiple places at the same time. Anyway they have the drawback that their screen produces eye fatigue (at least when one is not anymore so young) because it is not e-ink based. Further they are of limited size.

Yes I have multiple tabs but on a thing that is 8 inches or 10 or maybe 12 (I don't consider laptops or monitors because the idea here is that I am reading while taking notes and I don't want to move my head up and down continously), but those cannot be compared to spreading pages around and check all of them at glance (especially if I print the chapters I am focusing on), as if I would have multiple tablets around me with the same document open.

Last but not least notes. Yes there is the surface Pro or the samsung table or the iPad that allow me to take handwritten notes on the ebook (or the remarkable), but nothing is close to take notes on the back of the paper if I printed the pages of the chapters I want.(yet, maybe in the future it would be different, but we have ebooks since 2 decades or more already)

A human hand is a great printer (as long as it works). I can write text, formulas or diagrams on the fly, with more precision than with the current digital technology and with lower budget.

If the devices will improve so that I can write digital notes on ebooks as if I would on paper, without quirks and too high expenses, and if the screens start to use more eink technology, then the paper advantages will shrink only to "persistence". But I don't see that the market will develop such technologies soon. Since the first generation of ebook readers, a decade passed and no big changes happened simply because there is no demand.

People prefer to hear podcasts or watch videos, or read short articles, than taking notes or reading ebooks (at times I do exactly this too). Therefore there is not a big incentive to improve the digital paper also because paper still exists and it is still cheap and ubiquitous (further, I have to say for myself, it is sometimes relaxing to write, as a sort of crafting). Therefore I don't see paper and books (at least technical ones) go down before some decades, unless the market changes.