Journal mcgrew's Journal: Are printed books' days numbered? 4
In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.
When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.
And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"
So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.
My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.
Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).
Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".
* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.
Getting Older (Score:2)
I've been finding that reading e-books is *more* popular among the older crowd. The Kindles, Nooks and reading on tablets allows people to adjust font sizes and zoom in ways that making reading pleasurable once again.
Also, try picking up a backpack from a middle schooler when they have it full of their books. They're back breakers. My daughter switched to e-books in college and loves them for the simple fact she isn't going to strain something just to lug them around.
Paper books will survive, but start to g
Re: (Score:2)
I thought having to lug around all those books was just part of "the burden of getting an education, to build strength and character".
One of the good things about electronic books is that, if you can't zoom the font enough to read them, or can barely keep your eyes open after a long day, you can just have them electronically read to you.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, if I were in college I'd certainly only lug one book around -- my notebook computer. I'd keep all the schoolbooks on the computer.
As to elderly eyesight, when I was a kid, all the geezers wore glasses, but few young people. Now all the youngsters have glasses and few geezers do. Why? The young are ruining their eyesight with computers, tablets, and phones much like I ruined mine with books.
But when I was a kid, cataract surgery was still rare. The patent on the CrystaLens should expire around 2023, so