Printed books have a few years yet
By Kas Thomas
29 April 2001
Editor's Note: This column is a response to a piece we published by Ted Padova on the future of eBooks.
As a PDF visionary (and friend), Ted's viewpoints are always refreshing to hear. But I think he may have ever-so-slightly overstated the case for ebooks, or should I say, the case against a future for paper. Printed works are in no danger of extinction, any more than the invention of plastic portended the demise of glass bottles. True, you can't buy Coca-Cola in those precious six-and-a-half-ounce glass bottles any more (although in reality, there is a Coke franchisee in Florida that still bottles Coke in glass), but this just means plastic has displaced glass in selected applications. It doesn't mean glass is extinct or will be extinct any time soon.
Paper ranks with fire, the wheel, and (for that matter) glass as one of mankind's great inventions. History has shown that no truly great invention ever becomes extinct. Printed books certainly won't become extinct. Displaced? Maybe. Extinct, no.
What makes Ted's position especially ironic (and I'm sure he knows this) is that the first thing most people do after they've bought or stolen a PDF e-book is print it out on paper! This phenomenon (of printing out electronic documents) is responsible for the widely acknowledged "paper explosion" that has been triggered by computers. There is more paper now than ever before. And there's a reason for it. Works represented by electrons are ethereal. They demand instantiation in palpable form. (I regularly carry one of these instantiations to bed with me at night.)
Like many people, I relish the experiential splendor of book ownership: The feel and texture of the paper, the smell of the ink, the general heft of the book in one's hand. I revel in the random-access ease of flipping pages or cracking open a book to its center. A keyword search in Acrobat is plenty fast, but maybe too fast, too efficient. When I search for some key passage in a printed book (with or without the aid of the index or TOC), I savor the many small detours that I invariably take en route to the goal. When I happen onto a chance passage that relates (or doesn't relate!) to what I'm looking for, I am the richer for it. These chance detours are lost if I merely hit "OK" on a dialog.
Books are every bit as interactive (more so, even) than a PDF file. I can annotate a book in countless ways (that are merely emulated in Acrobat's GUI) and I can tell by looking at a book edge-on just which sections were most useful or entertaining to me (because of the dirt on the pages). The text on a printed page is crisp and clear; it is not in need of antialiasing. If a page is ripped or a spine kinked, the damage is a reminder of a past incident of some kind. The book's tatters bear witness to the events of my life.
Many of the books I own are autographed by the authors. I don't want these people writing on the plastic case of my laptop.
One more thing: Printed books are durable. E-book devices have fragile screens and batteries that run down.
Books are manufactured from a renewable resource. Computers are not. The ecological winner is clear: We can always grow more trees. We can't always grow more petroleum from which to make plastic circuitboards, tower cases, wire insulation, monitor housings, etc., not to mention the amount of energy it takes to smelt bauxite to make the aluminum.
When it comes to e-books vs. printed books, the only technology with an unproven future is e-books. The e-book fad has yet to even leave the starting gate, let alone provide evidence of an ability to overtake paper. Let's give it a few more years before we pass judgment.
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
