Take a stand for permanent paper in books

June 1, 2010 8:25 PM

Take a stand for permanent paper. "Eight years ago we started to notice the shift in buying patterns from free-sheet Permanent Paper to groundwood paper for hardcover books. Groundwood is the type of paper used in newspapers and mass market paperbacks, and its production is such that it is much lower-quality and degrades more quickly than traditional book publishing paper." What makes a book permanent?

"Many people know about the “acid paper crisis” which got a lot of publicity in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Many authors and other publishing industry notables banded together, and publishers lobbied for paper mills to produce only acid-free paper. After this, people felt comfortable that books would endure because the paper mills began producing only alkaline paper (which allowed the paper to endure much longer.) But as I mentioned, approximately eight years ago we started to notice a shift in order patterns, as more publishers were moving some titles to groundwood.

As the years progressed, more and more titles began to shift from free-sheet Permanent Paper to groundwood, until now, when well over 50% of the New York Times hardcover bestseller list is now printed on groundwood. Someone recently challenged me on this, saying that the New York Times list isn’t necessarily what literary people would consider the most important works of current literature. This degradation in paper quality isn’t only happening to non-literary works—many award-winning works, including many of the 2009 National Book Award nominees and one of the major category winners, are also not printed on free-sheet Permanent Paper.

This has accelerated with the decline in newspaper print sales—the paper mills which used to manufacture newsprint for papers now have a tremendous amount of open capacity that has to go into something, and they’ve shifted to groundwood publishing papers."

posted by stbalbach (56 comments total)

Because what will we do in five hundred years when all the books have decayed?

If only there were some form of electronic storage medium, perhaps involving 1s and 0s...
posted by unSane at 8:33 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

The future of literature - whatever it may be - will consist of electrons, not wood pulp.

I understand the appeal of the physical book. Connoisseurs of that pleasure will always be able to obtain it at market price.

But if it's really the writing that matters, we should celebrate any facilitation of its distribution.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:39 PM on June 1, 2010

Actually, paper lasts a hell of a lot longer than most digital storage mediums. Enough so that some use it as a digital storage medium.
posted by zabuni at 8:40 PM on June 1, 2010 [16 favorites]

I would rather save the trees.
posted by Ardiril at 8:41 PM on June 1, 2010

Dude, could the first two comments on this thread be any more predictable?

Low-tech means of preserving information are often better than high-tech. Writing on sheep's skin has lasted hundreds of years, while that CD in which you've backed up your files won't last 50.
posted by johnasdf at 8:42 PM on June 1, 2010 [12 favorites]

johnasdf: "Low-tech means of preserving information are often better than high-tech. Writing on sheep's skin has lasted hundreds of years, while that CD in which you've backed up your files won't last 50."

But we create backup storage faster than we can create sheep.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:50 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

I've worked for archives doing conservation. (Well, interned. I'm sure there's more than enough people who will arrive soon with far more expertise than me. But I've listened in on them, I guess.) I studied to be an archivist. I work in a used bookstore. This is really, really not a big issue. The return of acidic paper is not a crisis on the scale of Alexandria, or the Byzantine or Viking raids. It is really not. Not everything needs to be preserved – that isn't to say I don't want all the information ever to be preserved, but each individual copy of a Nicholas Sparks novel (or even, I dunno, this early sixties (acidic! perfectly readable!) Faulkner paperback I've got on my desk, if you want something with la-dee-da-literary-merit) in trade paperback is not really worth anything, except maybe that you learn a little about the previous owner from where the spine is cracked worst. So why is there this website telling us about this cris

About Us

Glatfelter has been producing paper for books for more than 140 years. Books are integral to what we do and who we are as a company. That’s why we started the Permanence Matters campaign in 2008, to educate the literary community on a subject about which we are extremely passionate.

Ah.

Paper-si Blue?
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 9:08 PM on June 1, 2010 [12 favorites]

I apologize that was terrible I just couldn't come up with any better pun I'm gonna go eat a popsicle now
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 9:16 PM on June 1, 2010

Ok well then.. take a stand AGAINST taking a stand for permanent books.
posted by stbalbach at 9:17 PM on June 1, 2010

If only there were some form of electronic storage medium, perhaps involving 1s and 0s...

So you think people will be able to read today's DRM'd, Kindle-formatted ebooks 100 years from now? Good luck with that.
posted by twirlip at 9:19 PM on June 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

Obviously permanent paper is very important for libraries and archival purposes; however, I kind of like that my mass market and trade paperbacks are aging with me. After all, they only need to live as long as I do. I love peeking inside a person's books and seeing whether he or she writes in the margins. Personally, I cannot bring myself to write in my books. Nope, my margins are clean. If they begin to yellow, or if their spine withers, or if the cheap glue fails, well, so it goes.
posted by Houyhnhnm at 9:27 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Sorry, that was more brusque than it should have been. The point is that digital formats are a lot worse as a preservation medium than physical formats, and stuff like DRM and obsolete formats are going to make preservation even harder. Projects like Google Books are great, but someone will need to keep running the servers basically forever, and there are obvious legal encumbrances (not to mention the questionable quality of some of the book scans). By contrast, a paper book is just there ... until the paper disintegrates because the publisher wanted to cut a few corners.
posted by twirlip at 9:31 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

I can't remember where I heard it or read it, but there was somebody that was talking about digital and physical storage and what they said was the only form of storage that will last is the one man used first, which was paint on a rock wall.

More on topic paperbacks are the best kind of books. With a e-book reader you will never get that musty book smell. I hope that they stay around for a while. I have a couple of books passed down through the generations and if they used this groundwood paper those books probably wouldn't be here.
posted by lilkeith07 at 9:34 PM on June 1, 2010

I agree with The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal... I bind hardback books by hand, and when I do I always use archival-quality paper because I'm a snob. But I also don't really see what the big deal is. Anything that's getting printed on this new crappy paper is going to have multiple digital backups somewhere, so it's not exactly a crisis. And stuff on old crappy paper without digital backups is nothing new.

Plus, yeah, I have some decades-old books printed on crappy paper that are still perfectly readable, so it's not like you're going to buy a new book and have it disintegrate within a timeframe where you'll still care... unless some of that stuff from the Kurzweil thread comes to light.

So you think people will be able to read today's DRM'd, Kindle-formatted ebooks 100 years from now? Good luck with that.

... the publishers have the files in other formats, even before they're DRM'd -- very few people do this stuff on a typewriter and mail it to publishers to be reviewed. And it's not like you can't remove the DRM from something (both legally and illegally) anyway. It's not like you can't convert from one format to another as formats progress. They have the text in a digital form, and the text -- in whatever format -- will persist.

This sounds snarky but I don't mean it to be: What do you imagine they're going to do when the next format comes out? They're not going to stare at the old files in confusion and wonder how they'll ever publish 1984 again because the format du jour has changed. They're not going to go find an old copy of 1984 printed on acid-free paper to scan. They'll copy the digital text over to whatever the new format is.

I'd understand the argument if there were only one copy of these files anywhere, but there are however many copies someone wants there to be. Since publisher's livelihood depends on these things, they're not going to have one copy sitting around that will be lost forever if the harddisk dies, or the server quits running, or what-have-you. Even if a publisher goes out of business the files are still just there, just like paper.
posted by Nattie at 9:40 PM on June 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think we will be able to read .txt files just fine.

I have thousands and thousands of physical books sitting in boxes. They make my heart sink.
posted by unSane at 9:42 PM on June 1, 2010

that CD in which you've backed up your files won't last 50.

A lot of digital media which is even a decade old is no longer useable. Do you still have a 3.5" drive in your computer? Then you can't read any of those discs. ZIP drives? When did you last see one of those?

Hell, even the ubiquitous CD-R... I have a bunch of those from 10 years ago which are bitrotted to the point where I can't read them in even the most robust error-correcting drive I have.

Paper books from 100 years ago are still able to be picked up and read. By anyone, anytime. Even microfilm/fiche can be read without a reader as long as someone has a simple hand-loupe.

The digital domain is amazing and wonderful, but a simple look back at the past decade of computer technology should be enough to tell anyone that it's not a guarantee of access to the contents.
posted by hippybear at 9:50 PM on June 1, 2010 [8 favorites]

Nattie, someone needs to have the incentive to do the conversion of the whole back catalogue of digitized texts. Managing format conversions, backups, and all that really isn't as trivial as you seem to think, and publishers aren't going to do it unless they can make money at it.

Since publisher's livelihood depends on these things, they're not going to have one copy sitting around that will be lost forever if the harddisk dies, or the server quits running, or what-have-you. Even if a publisher goes out of business the files are still just there, just like paper.

So first off, we are depending on the publisher's IT department to handle backups properly -- not just now but forever. Maybe big corporate publishers have the infrastructure for this; I doubt that's true of small presses. Secondly, no, the files aren't just there. Yes, bits are cheap and easily copied, but digital storage can and does decay, hard drives and backups fail ... and even if you've got the correct sequence of bits, it needs to be in a format you can understand. Most DRM can be broken, but will we remember how to break today's DRM 100 years from now, and will there be geeks dedicated enough to go back and deal with such an obscure, un-sexy problem? Thirdly, what happens when the publisher decides to let a book go out-of-print? Just because they could retain their entire back catalogue in digital format doesn't mean they will. Again, if they aren't making money off it, what incentive do they have?
posted by twirlip at 10:14 PM on June 1, 2010 [4 favorites]

Uh, replace "DRM" with "proprietary file formats" in that last paragraph.
posted by twirlip at 10:16 PM on June 1, 2010

it's not exactly a crisis

It's not a crisis period.

The issue here, as described in the FPP, is that first edition hardcovers are being printed on newspaper and won't last 20 years or so before they get brown and stinky. Maybe you don't care that spending $25.00 for a product that used to last 200 years now only lasts 20, so the publisher can trim 10c in paper cost.

The post previous to this was "My Father's Library". Well, your kids or grandkids may not have a library worth saving.

As for the digital issue, that's discussed in the FPP link here. In short, if you do go ahead and print a book, in particular a first edition hardcover, it should be expected to last.
posted by stbalbach at 10:28 PM on June 1, 2010 [5 favorites]

If only there were some form of electronic storage medium, perhaps involving 1s and 0s...

The future of literature - whatever it may be - will consist of electrons, not wood pulp.

I prefer e-books. Therefore, why does anyone care about the quality of physical books?

I would rather save the trees.

And you can! I don't think it's an either/or kind of thing.

I kind of like that my mass market and trade paperbacks are aging with me.

... I can't really snark on this.

The return of acidic paper is not a crisis on the scale of Alexandria, or the Byzantine or Viking raids.

Noted.

So why is there this website telling us about this cris ... Ah.

Possible conflict of interest -> easy dismissal, based on speculation.

I think we will be able to read .txt files just fine.

Probably. So?

Is it a big deal that groundwood is now being used for hardcover books? I don't know. I just don't see the value of pointing out that you don't care or in pretending that people are hysterical over this.

So, maybe it's not a big deal, but if the following quote is true and not an exaggeration, then I'm thinking that it is:

"Ambient conditions and storage environments play a larger role with these lignin-containing books and documents and may reduce the effective shelf-life to much less than a year in extreme cases, especially if exposed to intense sunlight such as on a bookshelf or desk near a window." (from the second link)
posted by Someday Bum at 10:41 PM on June 1, 2010

Each new member of my Masonic lodge signs onto our bylaws in a notebook that dates to the 1870s. Some of the pages have come loose from the binding, after all these years, but it's faring remarkably well for an ordinary object in regular use. The first sixty-odd names are all in the same hand, presumably that of the secretary when it was new, who would have copied them from slightly older papers. I imagine him riffling the blank pages further on, including the one we're on now, and I wonder if he ever guessed his book would still lie on the desk in the year 2010.

On the other hand, I've been computing since my parents bought our first computer in 1986, yet scarcely anything of mine survives from before 2004: A few documents that got printed, certain postings online, perhaps a user directory copied from an ancient minitower into my parents' laptop and then placed in a desk drawer as a lonely hard drive when the laptop's main board fried. (Man, I hope those files still exist. I want my Fractint creations back.) But on the whole, three quarters of my digital life have disappeared.

Yeah, paper's worth paying attention to.
posted by eritain at 10:42 PM on June 1, 2010 [6 favorites]

Well eritain, that is all about habits though. I have pretty much every digital file, email, etc I've ever created, going back to the mid 80's [and almost nothing in paper form has survived repeated purges]. And now I have each copy of that on 2 hard drives at home, plus remote storage. It's still possible a catastrophic occurrence could wipe it out, but this is just a random person. The large digital archives are even more resistant to failure than this (think Google/MSFT/Amazon datacenters, where every file is backed up in multiple locations across the world through multiple revisions). That kind of backup is getting increasingly cheap and available for home users (stuff like Moxy), and certainly publishers _can_ do it easily. Whether they do or not is another matter, and it's certainly true that simply being in digital doesn't make something last. But the fact that you can effortlessly create copies makes having many redundant backups a trivial task with digital files, which is the key to longevity (doesnt matter if some HDDs fail, you're constantly rebalancing/moving/copying to new/additional drives, so you've got a rolling storage medium that never wears out --- unless you stop doing all this, which is the main danger of such a system).
posted by wildcrdj at 11:19 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

That's the difference between having one copy of something and having tens of thousands. If you just want to ensure a popular work isn't lost, most any storage method will do
posted by smackfu at 11:25 PM on June 1, 2010

To me, this is a shame. I believe a book is more than just the text.

I guess I read as much online as the next person, and I love the convenience of searchable digital texts when looking very specific things up, but I can't bring myself to read anything longer than a magazine article on an electronic medium. I guess I have hundreds of books in my library, with numerous favorite sectioins marked with bookdarts so that when I'm in the mood (which is often) I can just grab one and flip it open and instantly return to a passage I KNOW I will find fascinating. I always have around a dozen books laying around that I haven't even read yet; I find myself perpetually looking forward to finding the right time for reading them, and the experience of running into these by chance is always a pleasure. The physicality and permanence of books is very much a part of these experiences, and I don't think anyone will deny that it is a very different thing to possess an entire collection of texts compressed into one battery-powered device, worse in some ways and better in others... But the more I think about why I love my paper books, the more reasons I find that the shift to low-quality paper is a bad thing.

It saddens me to think that when I pass on my books someone won't have the benefit of inheriting my library in as good condition as I have tried to preserve it in, or that instead of giving a kid the very copy of a novel I read as a teenager I might be sending them a file of some sort (who would blame them if they just filed it away and never got around to reading it?). It bothers me as much to think that there might be a day when some of my books will have deteriorated to the point where I myself will find them less than what I remembered. A big part of a owning a book I think is that it doesn't change though you do. How depressing it would be to find in advancing age that your favorite book fell apart before its time! And if you had to go online and replace it with a new edition, maybe with a cover promoting some tacky Hollywood adaptation...

Unfortunately, I doubt there is much to be accomplished by taking a stand. What stand could you take, really, unless you are a publisher or an author? My guess is that permanent paper books will become the vinyl records of the publishing industry. It's too bad, because even if the books that people really care about are preserved in permanent paper, there's the chance that something valuable but unpopular could be overlooked, perhaps lost in the digital archive or not even recorded at all.
posted by millions at 11:41 PM on June 1, 2010

Well, your kids or grandkids may not have a library worth saving.

Just to point out, in a couple of generations the concept of reading a physical book made of pieces of dead trees imprinted with ink and glued together is going to positively archaic to most kids. Sure, some people will still collect and read paper books in 2050, but they'll be akin to people today who listen to 8-track records or watch movies on VHS tapes. And then there's the likely reality that even owning a paper book will be expensive enough that only the wealthier folks with a lot of disposable income would even consider a physical library in their home.
posted by mstefan at 2:36 AM on June 2, 2010

So you think people will be able to read today's DRM'd, Kindle-formatted ebooks 100 years from now? Good luck with that.

Unless our civilization goes kaput, in which case we'll have other problems, yes, there will be someone who will develop/use a way to read DRM'd, Kindle-formatted ebooks, or as others have noted, the same works will be available in other formats.

I agree that a lot of digital copies of things have not fared nearly as well as paper; what seems to be forgotten is that all those ancient sheepskins and whatnot are the exceptions; the vast majority of ancient paper documents disintegrated or were lost. Rats, mold, weather, fire, bugs are not kind to vast paper libraries.

Thinking of anything electronic as a permanent storage medium presupposes a functioning civilization in perpetuity, without crashes/Dark Ages, which would be a new thing in our history, but considering we'd probably off ourselves permanently if we let it happen again, I'm not sure if Paper Survives The Apocalpyse Better is a good argument for it.
posted by emjaybee at 6:00 AM on June 2, 2010

This kind of paper doesn't stand up to much reading. So, your local public library is having to buy more copies of books that cost more than ever in order to provide the same number of reads.

So, a larger percentage of the (probably very minimal) taxes you pay (in the US) for your local public library are ending up as profits for publishers.
posted by QIbHom at 6:11 AM on June 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

Book & document conservator here - I had to weigh in on this.

I've worked on actual books which are more than a thousand years old. And individual document pages older than that.

You know what period of books and documents are in the worst shape? Post Civil War (US) items.

I have paper I like to hand around when I do presentations - looks as fresh and new as though it was made last week. That paper is over 500 years old. People are always astonished that it is in such good condition. That's because we have been conditioned by experience to think that "old books/paper" means that it is fragile, breaking down.

What happened at the time of the Civil War? Paper making technology changed. Actually, it started to change before the war, but didn't become widespread until after. I have worked on books which contained both the old stock and the new - and those parts of the book printed on the new stock are in horrible shape, right next to sections of the book which are almost pristine.

The technology change was to using woodpulp-based paper. Which is processed using an acid bath to remove non-cellulose material. The residual acid (and the lignin in paper which isn't processed as much) breaks down the cellulose structures, making the fiber length shorter and more fragile.

This process wasn't understood until the 1950s. Once acid was identified as a culprit, more effort was made to change the technology of papermaking again, switching over to an alkali based method. This left residual alkali in the paper, which buffered against lignin breakdown (which causes secondary acid contamination) and environmental contaminants.

It looked in the 70's and 80's like we had beat the problem. By the 90's most of the paper made in North America was based on alkali-based technology. Curiously, this was also good for the environment, because the effluent from those plants was easier to clean up as well.

This shift back to woodpulp, acidic paper is not a good move. Except for future conservators. For them, it is job security. I doubt they will appreciate the effort.
posted by Shadan7 at 6:18 AM on June 2, 2010 [12 favorites]

Sure, some people will still collect and read paper books in 2050, but they'll be akin to people today who listen to 8-track records or watch movies on VHS tapes.

I prefer to think that future physical book readers will be like vinyl/LP collectors today-connoisseurs of the medium who appreciate its best possible form.
posted by Go Banana at 6:24 AM on June 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

Quadraphonic records can be reissued as DVD-Audio, but even a 7.1 Blu-Ray remaster cannot do justice to an 8-track record.
posted by box at 7:05 AM on June 2, 2010

Nattie: the publishers have the files in other formats, even before they're DRM'd

Sure, but that doesn't help me today when the book I want is out of print, and the available legal eBook formats provide me with no convenient way to share it liberally with family and friends.

It's not the format of electronic publishing that bothers me. I have a whole CD of literature pulled from fulltext research journals. It's the process, legalities, and complete lack of social nuance. I was turned on to many of my favorite authors from editions borrowed from family and friends. The idea that I can't pass my beloved copies of Tolkien or Gaiman to someone else, only an Amazon gift card deeply disturbs me.

And given that only print editions allow me to liberally share and talk about good books in the current publishing environment, what's the problem with wanting a high degree of quality in those editions?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:08 AM on June 2, 2010

So why is there this website telling us about this cris

About Us

Glatfelter has been producing paper for books for more than 140 years. Books are integral to what we do and who we are as a company. That’s why we started the Permanence Matters campaign in 2008, to educate the literary community on a subject about which we are extremely passionate.

Ah.

Paper-si Blue?
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 12:08 AM on June 2


Glatfelter, formerly known as P. H. Glatfelter is the reason I got involved in local environmental stuff. That company has been polluting the creek that runs through the center of York, PA for a very very long time. It has gotten better in the past decade (as in you can see the bottom of the creek now), but for a long time, there was actually a place where you could see the outflow from the plant and the clear water from the creek as two distinct parts of the creek. By the time it reached downtown, it was smelly, brown, and often had large parts that were sudsy. In fact, when I was growing up, I often heard it referred to as the Inky, Stinky, Codorus Creek. Everyone took it for granted that that's what the creek would look like forever.

Starting back in the 1800s, people sued the plant for destroying the water in the Codorus and surrounding waterways. The plant was always charged a nominal "fine" that was cheaper than changing its practices.

They did move to an oxygen bleaching system a while back and that has helped with not releasing so many tannins into the creek, helping the discoloration. I beleive that they have/were looking at using a cold water process also in order to reduce the amount of hotwater they put into the creek, which also adversely affects the watershed ecology.

I will admit that I am out of the loop these days on what they're doing, but when our group started up, one of the VPs came to our meeting and offered to pay for our rent for an office and allow us to use their labs for any of water quality testing. We declined their very generous offer. They did however, always pick the largest sponsorship level for any event we had and always, always, sent people out to our creek cleanups, including the guy picutred on the About Us, George Glatfelter himself, who brought his own waders, being an avid fisherman.

They're not all bad and they are trying to change their practices, but the mention of Glatfelter still rankles me. The effects of what they were doing were pretty damn obvious to anyone with a nose and eyes. I don't want to keep hatin' when I know they are trying very hard to become more environmentally responsible, but it's hard to not be all grrrrrr Glatfelter.

I just still can't believe that they are one of the major paper manufacturers in the world and they are from little, tiny, we-only-got-a-traffic-light-recently Spring Grove. But of course, if you're a big smelly paper plant, who's gonna wanna be near you?
posted by sio42 at 7:21 AM on June 2, 2010 [5 favorites]

i mean lignin not tannin. or maybe both. it's been a while since i've gotten preachy about it and my issue specific vocab has been lost.
posted by sio42 at 7:23 AM on June 2, 2010

Sure, some people will still collect and read paper books in 2050, but they'll be akin to people today who listen to 8-track records or watch movies on VHS tapes.

And some of us will act as Bradbury's "Old Man" (To the Chicago Abyss) and remember the 8-track tapes and the Clark Bar wrappers, and the trashy pulp paper novels against the society that purports to only have room for the excellent and no room for the mediocre.

"Oh, once I would have raved. Only the best is best. Only quality is true. But roses grow from blood manure, and mediocre must be so that most excellent vine can bloom. And I shall be the best mediocre there is. And I'll fight all those who say "slide back," "slip under," "dust wallow," "let brambles scurry over your living grave." No, no, I shall protest."
posted by beelzbubba at 8:15 AM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Of course, Google has already created the digital Alexandria, having surreptitiously scanned the contents of every major library they could get access to in order to create Google Books. So long as Google exists or passes the care of Google Books on to other entities, we have a very good record of... Well, I don't even know the full extent of what they have.

Format creep is a huge problem. For digitally stored works, I expect that it becomes the problem of the archivist to move the collection to easily readable media every few-to-twenty years... I personally kinda hope that in the long run formats for basic stuff like books will settle down as a) the algorithms for storage and retrieval of information get fully optimized, and b) the expected abilities of the hardware involved settles down. Storage formats (like .txt or .pdf) were designed with particular abilities and constraints of hardware in mind. Ascii text files are very economical, perfect for computers that have next-to-no memory. Pdf's allow greater control of typeface, presentation, inclusion of tables and figures, and on and on, things that we simply wouldn't be able to reasonably use on a day-to-day basis on a computer from, say, 1990. The development of computer hardware has settled down a _lot_ in the last ten years. Ebooks are still very much in a magmic state, and I expect they will settle down as well within the next ten years. I expect that formats will change more slowly as time goes on.

But I would still be very cautious about viewing digital storage as archival right now. I think we may get there eventually, but certainly haven't yet.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:36 AM on June 2, 2010

hippybear: Even microfilm/fiche can be read without a reader as long as someone has a simple hand-loupe.

Microfilm also has a lifetime of hundreds of years, if done right -- which is why people who scan things digitally eventually write the images to microfilm for long-life archiving.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:38 AM on June 2, 2010

And this thread has brought to mind, for obvious reasons, A Canticle For Leibowitz.
posted by hippybear at 9:58 AM on June 2, 2010

If only there were some form of electronic storage medium, perhaps involving 1s and 0s...


I love Metafilter. In every thread about ebooks, within the first four or five comments there's always one that reads "If only there were some form of lightweight device that could store and display text without the need of batteries or electronic displays..."
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:15 AM on June 2, 2010

I only buy mass market paperbacks any way, so I presume this doesn't apply to me? :)
posted by antifuse at 12:09 PM on June 2, 2010

Sure, some people will still collect and read paper books in 2050, but they'll be akin to people today who listen to 8-track records or watch movies on VHS tapes.

See, I think this is crazy talk. I have no doubt that ebooks will take over a big part of the reading market, but to think that traditional books will be reduced to this level or irrelevancy is almost absurd. Books have been an integral part of human culture and intellectual life for 500 years. How long were 8tracks and VHS tapes primarily used? 10 years?
posted by Justinian at 1:00 PM on June 2, 2010

For what its worth, I buy a LOT of hardcover books. Like, A LOT. But I've decided not to purchase any American hardcovers not printed on acid-neutral paper. If I'm going to shell out $20 for a book I am not buying one that is going to look and feel like crap in 20 years. I'm also going to write to any publishers whose books I have ceased buying in hardcover and telling them why.

U.K. publishers generally aren't affected, unfortunately, as they have been printing their books on special SUPER DELUXE NOW WITH EXTRA ACID paper forever. U.K. hardcovers are shit.
posted by Justinian at 1:03 PM on June 2, 2010

Shadan7's comment had me wondering what paper was made from before the civil war. Looks like it was a recycling industry for linen and cotton rags.
posted by aniola at 1:15 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Horses and other beasts of burden were an integral part of human culture for maybe 10,000 years, yet that didn't stop cars and tractors from replacing them in a matter of decades.
posted by Pyry at 2:16 PM on June 2, 2010

The advantages of a car over a horse for the average citizen are vastly greater than the advantages of an e-book over a regular book. An ebook has some advantages over a paper book and some disadvantages. A car has virtually nothing but advantages, and those advantages are huge.
posted by Justinian at 3:16 PM on June 2, 2010

Dude, when the apocalypse hits, it will be hard to pick which books to bring with me as I head off into the woods to survive as long as possible before the marauding hordes pick me off...But luckily I won't have to rely on batteries or book servers to ensure I can read some inspiring words one last time. I have to question the imagination of those who say, "just use digital." Am I the only person who thinks that relying on digital media, or even electricity, is a complacency built on ignoring the inevitable end of society as we know it?
posted by agregoli at 6:54 PM on June 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

(Also, I hate what was mentioned above how you can't share e-books the same as a book you physically have - everything is moving towards "buy it to enjoy it." Which is yuck. And format changes in digital are scary too - when it's only profitable to save what's popular, how will anyone ever find those gems of STRANGE thought and fiction?)
posted by agregoli at 7:07 PM on June 2, 2010

I have fond memories of when I was a young boy, listening to my 8-track records on a record-player (we called them "Victrola"s then) that was almost a meter square and had a tone-arm heavy as a brick, which almost crushed the playback head. These memories are always associated with the smell of onions, for some reason.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 7:23 PM on June 2, 2010

And this thread has brought to mind, for obvious reasons, A Canticle For Leibowitz.

Deo gratias! ... Deo Gratias!
posted by Crabby Appleton at 7:32 PM on June 2, 2010

Pdf's allow greater control of typeface, presentation, inclusion of tables and figures, and on and on, things that we simply wouldn't be able to reasonably use on a day-to-day basis on a computer from, say, 1990.

The Xerox Alto had that stuff (wysiwyg word processing and, an 80 ppm laser printer that used a forerunner of PostScript) in the 1970s.

How do I know? I wrote my first letter home from graduate school on that set-up.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 7:56 PM on June 2, 2010

The advantages of a car over a horse for the average citizen are vastly greater than the advantages of an e-book over a regular book.

Maybe, but [ebooks are not superior to paper books] is a different argument altogether from [books are too entrenched in human culture to be quickly replaced (by 2050)]. And it's not like the early cars (loud, unreliable, expensive, unfamiliar) were better than horses in every way. By 2050 the advantages of an ebook over a paper one might be as overwhelming as those of a car against a horse.
posted by Pyry at 8:37 PM on June 2, 2010

But in what way will making books not as nice as they once were play into that rejection of books in 2050? I would say a lot.
posted by agregoli at 8:50 PM on June 2, 2010

aniola: "Shadan7's comment had me wondering what paper was made from before the civil war. Looks like it was a recycling industry for linen and cotton rags."

Cotton-based paper is now readily available and not too exspensive.

Justinian: " Books have been an integral part of human culture and intellectual life for 500 years."

Pundits have been predicting the death of the book for a long time. With every new technology, the books demise was close at hand. This excerpt is a genealogy of "death of the book" crazy talk, with specific predictions, dates, people, quotes.
posted by stbalbach at 9:41 PM on June 2, 2010

Well you know, I doubt we'd be having this conversation if we were talking instead about other obsolete things that seem to be cherished on Metafilter: Moleskin notebooks, straight and safety razors, or fountain pens.

Urgh! A Music War and the re-release of Lathe of Heaven should be cautionary tales about the viability of digital media. In both cases, the original works are legally banished to obsolete media because you can't make the transition to new media without renegotiating the price of everything. I'll say it's probably going to take until 2050 for the legal issues to be ironed out.

To my knowledge, automobiles were never burdened with a legal environment where Henry Ford owned all the cars and reserved the right to recall them if you let your uncle drive it into town.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:58 PM on June 2, 2010

Maybe, but [ebooks are not superior to paper books] is a different argument altogether from [books are too entrenched in human culture to be quickly replaced (by 2050)].

True, although I would submit they are not completely unrelated. I think we could probably agree that the more entrenched something is in human culture, the greater the advantages a potential replacement has to have in order to quickly supplant it. So the argument would be that because books are so entrenched in human culture, the advantages that ebooks possess are not great enough to quickly replace paper books.

So I don't think the arguments are quite as separate as you suggest.

It's also true that horses were part of human culture for a very long time. But I don't think it is true that cars "replaced" horses for the vast majority of people. Most people didn't have horses for personal transportation. They were far too expensive and high maintenance. So cars didn't replace horses for most people, they filled the niche that horses would have filled if they were affordable. But they weren't. This isn't the case for books; ebooks aren't intended for people who can't read or afford books, they are intended to replace books for people who are already big readers. Or at least casual readers.
posted by Justinian at 8:47 AM on June 3, 2010

Funny - I just picked up Canticle For Leibowitz the other day, and it's finally made its way to the top of my editing queue.
posted by antifuse at 6:40 AM on June 4, 2010

And by editing queue, I of course mean reading queue. Stupid work brain interfering with slacking brain.
posted by antifuse at 6:50 AM on June 4, 2010