Will Physical Books be Gone in Five Years?

While ever there are egos there will be books.

How can you impress people with how learned you are by waving an ebook at them?

It's no where near as impressive as a bookshelf that covers a wall filled with books.

While the various technologies to distribute literature and make it more available to the "common man" is good for overall education. I still prefer to pick up and read a book over an e reader, turning a page is not that hard and I don't have to worry if I've charged the batteries.

I remember someone mentioning a paperless office.

My professional library certianly wont be disappearing.

Searchable documents can be very handy but you lose that serendipitous learning that comes from flicking through a book when you are looking for something.

Horses for courses.

You're right, Chris. My library contains many (like in the hundreds) books and periodicals whose content is simply not available anywhere in electronic form. Maybe best seller books and wide circulation periodicals will no longer be available in hard copy form unless you special order your own individual copy.

But there will still be a wide range of real books available to fill countless special interest niches. Indeed, that may be the only way we can successfully preserve much of our current knowledge as well as knowledge gained in past times. I suspect that the half life of current knowledge in electronic form may well be less than the time it takes to produce the next generation of humanity.

That's scary......... I get to wondering what is the minimum number of hard copies of any book that must remain in existance to insure a reasonable probability that the knowledge they contain will not be lost to humanity. We still seem to be lacking any electronic form in which to copy books where the ability to retrieve the information they contain will be guaranteed for centuries instead of a generation or two.

I have this 65 year old book found on ebay some years back. It is full of phase diagrams of a wide number of tertiary aluminum alloys. Sometimes I wonder just how many other copies of this book may still exist.

Ed Weldon

Maybe if my reference library was 'on line' I might part with the paper version - but so far only one has made it to electronic and frankly it's still quicker to use the hard copy than mess with the acrobat BS - (though I do have it loaded - in case).

Thing is with books, they are competently peer reviewed, so as right as knowledge permits. Whereas in the E-world, any fool can put up anything and there is no way of knowing (short of access to a reference book) if it's correct or bent.

Sure such as Wiki is great, but each time you see [citation needed] it translates to 'we don't quite believe this yet".

The other thing about Wiki is any 3 reviewers can control content of an entry. Meaning 1 person with the right information can be 'edited out' by 3 with less, or no knowledge, or an agenda to preserve their obsolete version as dominant.

Don't laugh - plenty of instances of 'ignorant editing' exist and about an equal number of 'bogus pages' by jokers are editor missed.

For example look at "atmospheric CO2 capture" or a litany of "green solution schemes", on Wiki or the web as a whole, and virtually all is predicated on some over unity assumption, or is simply a 'paste up' of patently erroneous information.

On average I would say 20% of the links offered on CR4 as 'proof of argument', have proved incompetent, seriously flawed, or just plain wrong. Given that is just the ones I recognize in my areas of expertise - overall it must be a huge figure.

The internet has a shit load to get even vaguely right before "book's days are numbered".

More like "knowledge's days are numbered".

Until and unless e-books get display screens with VASTLY improved resolution, the printed book will live on. While it is true that you could show an overall view, and then zoom in to provide adequate resolution within a small region, that's hardly the same as having the entire picture available at once in full color and resolution. Many so-called coffee-table books would have no market as e-books; ones with fold-out pages further compound the difficulty of properly displaying their content. That's just one category . . .

A previous post mentions the serendipitous finding of information while leafing through books, and I fully agree [a columnist used to periodically run "Things I Learned While Trying to Look Up Something Else"]. Yes, sometimes you Stumble Upon [deliberate!] something interesting online that wasn't what you searched for - and there's an entire system devoted to this - but I have yet to match what I've found in books.

Another aspect of a physical book is that you may recall only that something of interest was "about this far in", or "only a few pages after the continuation of the article on X", or "about there on the right-hand page with a picture in the upper corner", or "in the first green book on the left on the upper shelf", and that's good enough to re-acquire the information quickly, even if you can't recall the topic itself. Such recollections-by-location cannot happen with any form of navigation of website or e-book-like presentations that I've ever encountered; much less can the memory be used to help find something. For those who depend upon visual and spatial memory, this represents a significant loss.

Only if Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 fire crew comes around....

Not unless there is another Spanish Inquisition, or the new world leader goes on a rampage.

Please. How naive. Even if book production stopped this instant where do you think all the books in print would end up? Unless there are/were mass book burnings, physical books will be around for a long time.