July 23, 2004

• At least two or three times a day I run into that kind of lack of information.
• Exactly. With very few exceptions, for serious work/research the internet isn't merely inadequate, it is unusable. And don't get me started on graduate students who think that a literature search can be done on Google.
• I ♥ Marylaine. I used to get the newsletter before I forgot the password to that email address . . .oh well. Good points all. The greater issue is that I believe humans have an instinctive need to hold paper too. eBooks just plain suck. They're nifty and geeky and the idea is fun but holding plastic is such a different expereince. Sex with a plastic doll instead of a human, say. apologies
• Yes, we still need libraries. I didn't like the idea of her 'blowing a student's mind' with that absurd pie chart, though.
• I was going to disagree with pete, and then realised that if I followed my train of thought I'd end up agreeing with him, at least up to a point. So I would have to say that, yes, the tactile experience of holding a book and turning the pages can make reading a compelling experience. But I don't think that there is any intrinsic reason that technology can't make reading an eBook equally rewarding, if maybe via different means. Case in point - I love comics on the web. I think that people are doing things with the medium which makes reading a comic on a computer (even if it can be a chore occasionally) surprising (albeit somewhat NSFW), interesting and fun. I see no reason why that can't be the case for, say, a physical chemistry textbook too. and the sooner the better too; Atkins has lasted far to long
• comics, yes plug plug, but there are no or few pages to turn (unless you're talking about graphic novels in which case I probably would disagree that they work as well on the web as in hand). A textbook might also be moot re: eBooks since you read them differently than a novel. I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak once and he said that reading a book was exactly equivalent to meditation. I don't see an eBook reader that can replace books for what they do - the tactile sensation is too subtle and too important.
• I think there needs to be a distinction drawn between "the net as a compendium of information" and "the net as a tool to easily organize and find information from other sources". On the whole, I use the internet often on a day to day basis to find information, mostly journal articles and authors. However, the articles that I find, though they could be downloaded from the net, weren't orignally written in html.
• Graphic novels - see Zark (as well as the surprising comic I listed above) for examples. Experience says that once technology gives people an experience they want, they will embrace it. The tactile argument was made for CDs never becoming as popular as vinyl, and we know how that turned out. And from CD so it goes to mp3. I don't know if books will disappear anytime soon, but I don't believe that there are no circumstances under which it couldn't happen. Obviously it isn't an exact analogy, since books aren't performed in the way music is and the output of the written word is so much greater.
• True and we lost cover art and the concept of "album" seems to be on the way out for all practical purposes - And fwiw I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks as I work around the house. Hmm. Well anyway maybe it'll be me and some other curmudgeonly bastards in a low-lit room page-turning and clearing our throats and decrying the new eBook formats someday. damn kids. ;)
• I have to disagree with the idea that ebooks won't replace paper books any time soon. I use my GBAsp as an e-book reader and prefer it over real books for novel reading(textbook reading I'd still prefer having a hardback). It's small enough that I can put it in my pocket and still have room for other stuff, it has its own light so I can read pretty much anytime anywhere, my flashcart has plenty of space so I can carry around many books of any size, it's easier to hold than a book, it never loses my place, and if I get bored of reading I can play some River City Ransom.
• the internet is for porn [mp3] nsfw
• The day e-books are cheap as a hardcover, real easy on the eyes (erm, yes, I squint at those 6-pixel-high fonts on avant-garde webpages... damn old age:) and don't self-destruct if left on a glove compartment or tip over the bathroom night table, publishing houses can start worrying. Granted, I haven't tried out such gizmos as Sony's Librie (which btw seems to have some 'ghosting' problems with pages not properly refreshing... guess the E-Ink technology isn't yet up to par), only crappy readers on Palm devices, but still. The compact factor, which should make it an ejoyable experience, somehow conflicts with what the brain is expecting to be doing. Or Maybe it's just me, expecting the heft and texture of pulp and satring at pixels on a lightweight, small screen. I recall my nephews' reaction to their first visit to a real library: "Don't these people have internet at home?"
• There are two separate issues here. I happen to agree with pete_best that reading a physical book is a superior experience, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that that's due to my age and experience (500 years ago I'd probably have felt the same about manuscripts versus those newfangled printed books); more importantly, it's irrelevant to the issue of what's available to be read. It doesn't matter how glorious they make the experience of reading an e-book -- if the information you need is only available in a dusty 19th-century periodical or an even dustier government archive in Lower Slobovia, you're going to have to get your hands dusty. I recently finished a (brilliant) book called In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861, by W. Bruce Lincoln, and at least half the footnote references were to file so-and-so in such-and-such archives. The internet is in large measure a compilation of the obvious and the useless; to get real information, you have to dig harder.
• But isn't that also a function of the "newness" of the Inferweb? My local government will have eRecords of all the births, marriages, etc. from x Date on in the future . . i would suppose. Cheaper and all that. or an even dustier government archive in Lower Slobovia Hey now, don't be dissin' Lower Slobovia.
• Except, languagehat, for a lot of material the internet is making it so that you don't have to dig as hard as you used to. The OCLC mentioned in the article now lists 54 million catalogued items. This report (pdf) shows that there is a substantial effort underway to digitise material, which is good, but that money available to buy physical books is going way way down over the last couple of years. So, if you know how to look and your library has a subscription, you can get a lot of material via interlibrary loan. So I think that the first half of the message "Because of the inordinate cost of digitizing, lack of interest, and copyright issues, most of the world's information will NEVER be on the internet" is less of an issue than the second half "or at least not for free." I don't know what to make of these trends in the context of this discussion, though I think it lends weight to TractorInc's comment, that the net is becoming an index to what's around. Meh, I dunno. Libraries are where people (to draw on a sample size of one) first learn to browse, and fall in love with meandering across topics. And I think that that is the basis of good scholarship, a willingness to go wandering around just looking at things. If libraries aren't staying up to date, if new acquisitions are going down, then maybe people will start to lose interest in browsing. And what are the alternatives. The web used to be a great place to stumble over curious material. If anything, the web is worse now for that sort of thing than it used to be. Google is nowhere near as spookily good at finding relevant material as it used to be, and I don't find that people leave piles of interesting links lying around on their web pages the way they used to only a couple of years ago (ironically because Google used to be so good). And, dammit, tactility _is_ important. Here is a link to the Quaker tapestry at Kendal. Not very inspiring is it, on the screen. But go and see it in person and it is a quite wonderful experience. Because it is so much more tactile.
• My local government will have eRecords of all the births, marriages, etc. from x Date on in the future Very likely. But it's not going to put all those things from X date back into antiquity online, unless it's a lot richer than most local governments I know of. And anyone who thinks "it's just a matter of time": I don't think you have a real conception of how much stuff there is out there and what condition it's in. If you ever get the chance to visit an archive (preferably a provincial one, where they don't get many visitors), wander around the back rooms, pull out items at random, marvel at the sheer amount of stuff that's been recorded about citizens over the centuries (the New York Times has a good op-ed piece on the subject today), and try to imagine circumstances under which it could possibly be worth someone's while to painstakingly exhume all those bits of paper, unfold them or piece them together as the case may be (while taking care to preserve them for future use), and digitize them one by one. Ain't gonna happen. If you're only interested in 21st-century statistics, sure, you're in hog heaven (unless of course your field of research is, say, Zaire or Bhutan), but if you have any interest in history before the end of the last century the internet doesn't do you all that much good. And it never will. Hey now, don't be dissin' Lower Slobovia. Are you kidding? I love Lower Slobovia! They've got better things to do than dust their archives, let me tell you. Ever been there for the Potrzebie Festival? Hoo boy! *smiles reminiscently*
• On the subject of e-books... society will probably never escape the trend toward using computers and active systems for as much as possible, whether or not it makes any sense. Kids seems to be growing up thinking the Internet is the library. For these reasons, I think that soon enough, e-books will be to paper books as MP3 players now are to CD's. You'll always have your old music collection sitting around, but the huge portion of your music listening occurs in the digital domain; I see no reason why this won't also happen with "textual" material. (Heck, most computer end users I've seen are content to press a 10x10 pixel "scroll down" arrow a hundred times to move through a document, a line at a time. This says a lot for technology adoption in general; these are not the people who will have anything to say against e-books!)
• In the course of completing two higher degrees, I have learned that for the topics which (then) interested me, (tired now!), information on intarweb = very thin.
• I agree that the info on the internet is still pretty thin. Wikis are good, but they don't go down to the nitty gritty in most cases. Sometimes you can find an obsessed blogger who can give you more information. And, there are journals out there that give you relatively recent articles when you're doing reseach. But we still need really good libraries. Plus, books are printed so that I can read them easily when I take them out into the world. I'm not sure how one could bear to read a book on those silly little thingies so many people are so fond of. And, if I download an ebook, I'm stuck to my chair in from of the computer, which means I can't read myself to sleep, as I so love to do. (My only experience with an ebook turned out to be a 600 page Iraqi cookbook in pdf format, There was no info on its size before the download.) Ok, it was really cheap, but there's no way I can find a recipe I really want to try since I don't know the recipe names. I guess I could print it off, but 600 pages? I have to think I'd have been better off buying the print version.) I've read/seen some wonderful, serious stuff on the web, but having changed computers several times in the last 5 years, I've lost any bookmarks and history that would have allowed me to reread it. So, yes, libraries still have a big edge.
• I study videogames and videogame players and, not surprizingly, other people who do that sort of thing are typically pretty tech savy. For my research that means that, since the field is really new, there is a good chance that it is either on the web or it doesn't exist. (Of course I also spend a good deal of time in the library, much of it fruitless, but I do look!) As far as ebooks go, I've said before, but I can't wait for them. Certainly for non-leisure reading they would be a godsend for researchers. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing that the book you read three months ago mentioned something specific that would be a great quote, but the words that jumped out at you aren't in the index. Honestly, every time I go to cite and article, I spend a great deal of time (which is probably really just procrastination!) searching to see if it is online so I can cut and paste quotes from it rather than type them out. I really wish they would come out with a ebook format that really used the ptential of them. No crippling DRM, ability to take notes, cut and paste, keyword search, basically all the things you can do with a normal word processing document.
• Until they can reproduce the smell of a new book, or the scent of books which are very old, like in an antique bookshop, you'll find me in the corner or under my doona with a "real" book. You just can't curl up around a PDA like you can around a decent novel. I tend to print out lengthier PDF or even HTML stuff to take to bed to read. JCCalhoun's point about being able to cut and paste and so on is a good one, but I guess some authors and/or publishers are so scared of their IP or copyright being violated that they don't or won't make full use of the technology. Wasn't there a movie about the future where the main character was given a book, and it was of exceptional value, because books were (are?) rare in that time? I would hate to think that would be the case for the future, because I love to read and curl up with a good book. Maybe think of all the trees we'd save by not publishing on paper.
• well in Orwell's 1984 books were illegal. Maybe that's what you were thinking of? *looks around for homunculus* what it will take for an eBooks to finally compete with dead tree publishing. and a rebuttal: Ebook column that gets it all wrong