At the risk of sounding sappy, there has always been something mystical and sacred for me in turning the pages of a book, so I doubt I will ever abandon the medium unless forced.
I am, however, deeply disturbed at the decline in literacy over the past several decades, and therefore support any medium which can induce forthcoming generations to read.
Even though I love real books, browsing in book stores, my lovely overpopulated bookshelves, etc. I also love my Kindle (for all the reasons that has been mentioned on this forum a million times, so I won't repeat them). My last read was in paperback form and I really missed the dictionary lookup function. Obviously I can still look up words in a dicitionary, but because English is not my first language, I look up so many words it becomes very time consuming to flip through the dictionary every time I want to know the definition.
Also, I love being able to carry around a library in my handbag
About the video thing:
Unless you have played the tape too much so it is scratched to high heaven, worn and stretched or just broken in two (you can probably repair that though), you can still after twenty years put it in the machine and watch it.
Try that with a CD or DVD. If you have the machine to do it as it is not broken (purchasing a new one will be out of the question probably), the CD and DVD will have deteriorated. The tape or old fashioned film roll will happily provide you with more mirth and not even be too damaged colour-wise (it depends how you stored it). There are still colour films available from pre-WWII. I don't think much will be available from the digital era in 60-70 years.
Of course it will depend on how you stored it, but a CD that's twenty years old is detriorating.
Because of the more authentic sound quality, certain bands and music groups are now releasing vinyl records again and the record player is coming back into fashion amongst young fanatics.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
That does worry me - I've glanced at some online and have not been overly impressed. If you can get properly edited Wordsworth classics, with notes, for £1.99, why bother with a Kindle? Also, I can give them to others after I've read them.Originally Posted by Charles Darnay
That assumes Amazon will survive fifty years! Or, what's to stop them deleting books or charging a "holding fee"?
An interesting article on the point
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/s...-2012051427055
Want to know what I think about books? Check out https://biisbooks.wordpress.com/
Just download a free dictionary app on your cell phone; it's much easier . . . unless you don't have or don't use a cell phone that can do this, of course.
What ISO standard are you referring to here? Is this for "permanent" or "archival" paper, or some lesser standard?
Sorry to get geeky, I've just been reading the Wikipedia page on acid-free paper
Just glancing at my bookshelf, the one's that are lasting as well as me (or better) say "printed on acid free paper" on the copyright page - usually hardbacks and university presses, not always much more expensive than paperbacks (e.g my Modern Library hardback "Basic Writings of Nietzsche" is lasting very well. Everyman hardbacks are also superb on price & quality.)
Penguin and Oxford World Classics paperbacks have always been notorious, because they have never been acid free. They have always faded quickly. I don't think the new ones are any better than the old (they couldn't be worse.) I sell them on as soon as I finish reading them, so I can still call them "Very Good" with a straight face...
So, what happens if the paper isn't "Acid Free," or low quality like the Penguin and Oxford World Classics (both of which I own for several)? Does it just turn yellow? That fine for me, honestly . . . I kind of like yellowed paper in old books.. My copy of The Illustrated Man from the 50s is pretty much canary.
Also, are all paperbacks made with non-acid free paper?
I think it's the acid free paper that detriorates more quickly, even in dry conditions. Although saying that that is taking into account the vast amount of years that non-acid free paper can exist (which is very very long).
I believe they have only introduced this in an industrial manner for the last 20-30 years.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
Right now I'd say my reading is about 80/20 Books/eBooks. The biggest problem with e-readers still are:
1. Formatting -- This is especially noticeable in poetry where often the line breaks and spacing are completely screwed up. I've practically given up on downloading and reading poetry. But there's also a problem with footnotes working right for many books. Penguin, eg, has been terrible about formatting properly, but Oxford has been better.
2. Availability -- When it comes to classics, especially, what version of a work you get (especially with translation, but also for scholarship and editing) is a major decision, and not all versions are available as e-books. Making it worse is that, on Amazon, especially, a lot of times very different versions are all shoved on the same page.
3. Price -- Why is it that most e-books are as expensive as their dead tree counterparts? If I have to pay several hundred dollars for the device, it seems silly then to pay the same for books that it cost no money for publishers to physically make.
As someone with about 6TB of music and about 3000 CDs, I find that quite strange! I vastly prefer digital music to physical CDs as it's so much easier to search, find, play, replay, adjust, and the sound quality is better by virtue of not having to worry about distortion, noise, and jitter from the spinning discs.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
To give you an idea about the sterility of ebooks (which is 80% of my book comsumption) I recently downloaded about 8,000 books of every kind - current, classic, biography, autobiographies on an on... and it was very anti-climatic. I felt virtually nothing. Odd. But techically speaking I now own a small town library. It should have made me happy for longer than 4 minutes.
Well, if I had 3000 CDs I'd probably feel the same.
But, wait a second, 6 terabytes of music? How much music do you have? 33 GB gives me about 4600 songs, and a lot of that is music isn't even mine, it's my dad's. I have a lot of long songs, so let's say 33 gigs get ones about 5500 songs . . . so that would be like a 100,000 songs. How can one even listen to all that? Plus, where do you get a computer with 6 TB of storage? You must have external hard drives coming out the whazoo.
Well I won't be here in fifty years so...It really doesn't bother me though because I'm going to re-read 1% if that.
The thing with the kindle is it solves my piles problem. (Sorry I 've used that joke before).
I'm reading 3 books at the minute, two on the Kindle and one real book, with various ones in piles in the house in various stages of read-ness. The thing is, the piles have been getting bigger for years, and I have to keep shovelling the books into a charity bag and lug them down the town to get rid of of them.
I'd love to have the space and time to store and read and re-read, but:
always at my back I hear,
time's winged chariot hurrying near.
Plus my wife doesn't like my hoarding. She was the one who bought me the kindle.
Real books are fighting back though. Have you noticed the plush covers on the classics in the bookshops? Their anti-ebook strategy will be a winner, if you've got the cash. The books look great though.
I see I got the concept right, but applied it the other way round.
Since paper has come into use for printing books, it was mostly made of cotton rags. So copies of Swift for example last up to 500 years no problem. And that is in normal conditions. When books started to become a mass product (the early 19th (?) century), they started to look for alternatives and started to print on wood pulp. It's those that deteriorate faster than the cotton rag and the acid free.
First stage is they turn yellow and then it's all the way down to just falling apart.
In my defence, I am no physicist...
It probably got muddled in my brain by my father in the nineties going on abou the fact that books wouldn't last anymore... silly me...
@PaulC:
I can imagine that some people have an advantage with an ereader. I try to keep my piles problem under control by not reading too much at the same time. Thankfully my piles are located only in our library. (sounds posh, doesn't it
)
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
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