8 years ago
1
Will digital books ever replace print?
Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. Where do we go from here? From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were changing...
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I read a lot of science fiction on my phone, and take any moment to share the fact that some are publishing their ebook copy under a creative commons license, like Stross' Accelerando, it feels natural, and it saves weight, and space while travelling. However, years ago, we already got House of Leaves, which as a book, pushed the boundaries on formatting, no matter your opinion on the work itself, and would be weird to read electronically. Same thing with tomes like Infinite Jest. Or even textbooks where highlighting, and making notes in the margin are extremely useful. It is why even printing out physical copies of electronic textbooks from a site like the hacker's shelf can be useful. And even with youtube, soundcloud, bandcamp, spotify, and all the streaming of music, people still go out of their way to get physical copies of albums. Physical books are a little bit more guaranteed to always have a presence, as libraries are a cultural institution, and while there have always been worthy attempts to spread technology devices, books just simply do not need to be powered, and are simply more versatile in the long run. And so, while I read a lot electronically especially to save on weight/space while travelling, there is no way they could replace print completely. Especially as there is a lot of people who just prefer reading a physical book.