ebooks

TRX
October 10, 2013
97:
> What do you think books will look like in 2033?

Electronic formats will be popular. Paper will still be around.

People look at the convenience of "ebooks" now, but my first encounters were with restrictions and DRM in the automotive industry. Some automakers no longer publish service manuals, everything is online on terminals at each service bay. Which would be fine, except some of them no longer make this information available to their customers. They used to make a pretty penny from it; a set of manuals for some cars was over $500. Now, they're keeping the information on closed systems, and using copy protection and dongles to make sure it doesn't escape.

A friend bought a new Audi. Audi USA offloaded its documentation to a New York publishing house. Which makes the manual set for his car available only in electronic format. It uses not one, not two, but three authentication systems, and can only be installed three times, each with two new keys from the publisher. And it only ran on Windows XP. He sold the car about the time he bought a new laptop that didn't have XP.

I had needled him about what he would do when XP was no longer supported, but to him all versions of Windows were the same, and he'd never seen a personal computer that wasn't running Windows. The idea that Windows would eventually go away Did Not Compute. To those of us who've been around long enough to see more than one OS and hardware platform come and go, software senescence is a reality.

Sure, someone would probably make an XP emulator that would run his protected software on a new ZippyOS-2030 machine, but that's asking a lot of a typical user.

Ebooks have a vastly greater data density than paper, which is nice. But the cost is that the data may be lost more easily than data on paper.

I imagine the clay tablet guys said the same thing when people switched to that newfangled "paper" stuff. Yeah, it had a higher data density, but get it wet, and what do you have? And insects can gnaw on it. And it turns brown and crackly over time. Baked clay, that's *real* data that's not going anywhere...