I know which I prefer

democracystreet.blogspot.com/2011/06/macedon.html

 

June 2011: I read many texts on the internet, I buy most of my books off the internet, but I do like the heft of a book, the smell and touch of paper. I often read text on my laptop screen but I don't think I'll buy an e-book reader. I had a chat on Facebook about the future of books and book-selling with my niece after she'd written a piece in the Spectator www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/6968643/a-daunting-future-...

 

...Anna, I agree with you, but I strive to build evidence based arguments that demonstrate the market failure of turbo-charged capitalism where it pushes the 'logic' of terminator seeds, 8000 cow dairy parlours, and the rationale of intensified food production. Next time you write throw in a seed of hope that some trends aren't inevitable, and I don't mean wishing for a new ice age. Uncle S XXX

01 June at 08:04 · Like ·

 

Anna Baddeley haha yes it was a little pessimistic. Sadly though I do think this one is inevitable, in the longer term at least. Waterstone's may survive in some shape or form but not without closing a lot of shops — there just isn't a big enough market for full-price literary fiction & non-fiction.

01 June at 11:53 · Like

 

Simon Baddeley www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/ebooks-not-there-yet/2/ ..doesn't mean the way is clear for e-books tho' S X

Yesterday at 01:26 · Like

 

Anna Baddeley thanks Simon that's interesting. He makes some good points among the silly ones, eg would def make sense to get an e-book with your print edition. They are about to take off in a big way though, the new kindle is really good.

 

Simon Baddeley ‎"About to take off " but we're still on the apron. Kindle's good for book business, critics and judges. I'm less sure about readers. A bound book, sentiment aside, is nothing if not ergonomic. See archivists too on anxieties about long term digital storage. Paper even parchment seems to last better than rejigged ways of story zeros and ones (e.g. binary) - or do you know something I don't...as someone who's enjoyed reading handwriting in archives I suspect we lose something with the loss of pen to paper, as we do with digital drawing and painting. I'm saying William Morris has a point.

 

Anna Baddeley Yes definitely, although whether a 608 page hardback is more ergonomic than an ebook is debatable! Don't think books are in danger of dying out anytime soon, but I am seeing more and more people with kindles & ebook sales have now outstripped hardbacks on amazon. Interesting times! x

 

Simon: I'm also impressed with a piece in the NYRB www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/11/publishing-... Publishing: The Revolutionary Future by Jason Epstein who while confessing to inhabiting a study of loved wall-to-wall books writes: The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.....

 

So will I get my paper books via an Espresso machine? Will I come to reading books out of sentiment as I might refuse to use the engine on my sailing boat, or cycle rather than climb into a car, or dig ground for my vegetables rather than buying them over the counter, will I prefer wood joinery to cheaper synthetic construction? What are the questions here? My great grandmother, Lucy Halkett, who died at 99 in 1969 taught me to read when I was very young and taught me, too, to look after a book... “never turn down a page to keep your place; never turn back the spines on themselves; never write in a book.” I've disobeyed her, but even now as I jot in a margin, underline a phrase, fold the tip of a page, stain a book with jam or gravy or wine, leave it in the sand on a beach, push it doubled up into a baggy jacket pocket, I note her advice, prepare my excuses. I think she'd have been fascinated by an e-book, as she wondered at and used the phone and taught me about listening to her valve-powered radio in the 1940s that used to take a minute to warm up, as she flew - in her 80s - to see her family stationed in Hong Kong, and enjoyed watching the television...and got worried, in her 90s, her mind was going because it was taking her nearly an hour to do the Times Crossword.

 

 

democracystreet.blogspot.com/2010/09/good-perch.html

Sept 2010: LCD screens abhor the sun. Can you read a netbook by the pool or on the beach? It’s a small itch of mine that books will soon go, but for people who collect them for their own sake or their value on the market. Even older library books will have been scanned for researchers to study them on screen – convenient and safer for the original. I’m seeing these devices around – capable of storing a home library in a slice of bread, searching, annotatable, download War and Peace in three languages via WiFi wherever. Someone who is no Luddite and loves reading books wrote a piece in the NYRB on the demise of the book, partly because publishers can’t afford the floorspace to store their current publications, let alone back-lists. I can see the use of these things - Amazon's Kindle, Sony's ebook. Could I have one and make it look dog eared with attention, risk slitting the spine, keep my place turning down corners, spill things on it, press flowers and notes to discover years later? There’s a £20 note slipped in to my 1911 Britannica at home in case one of our children needed it while we were away. With over a thousand wafer thin pages in each of twenty nine volumes that’d be a devil to find without the name of the entry. I’m not sure I can remember it either. But how much easier it will be to keep and circulate books in those places where books are burned, their readers arrested, if texts can be kept on a postage stamp, a canon in a flashdrive, a library on an ipod. All the same a paperbook book is a most ergonomically satisfying technology for reading, even as new dexterities help new readers to flick through and make notes and links on web books. No doubt there’ll be specialist second hand bookstores – though at the moment lack of customers and rising rents has them falling like nine pins, Hay-on-Wye notwithstanding. I believe the new way to get a book on paper with a spine and cover will involve pressing a virtual option button for a hard copy – simple or deluxe with choice of bindings - when ordering on the web, or over a counter at a privatized library or coffee shop with books – beside the Gaggia an impressive web linked combine printer binder – short, tall, grande, venti? At present a hard copy is the default purchase and the option a web copy to download to your gadget. This will be reversed. (see Espresso Book Machine www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4 )

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