"Print is dead."
 

That's what Egon said. And that was 17 years ago. Do you agree? What do you think?

I think he's wrong. I hope he's wrong. Just like radio didn't go away after TV came about... the role simply changed. I expect the same will happen with all of the printed media.

I agree with what you're saying about radio and TV. I do kind of believe that books will live on and that print is not dead.

But who can bet against Egon? He's always right. And he collects spores, moles, and fungus.

Re: "Print is dead."
 

Well I think you answered your own question - he said it 17 years ago and I do believe that book sales have flourished.

A Time magazine article said that there were more books sold in the decade of the 90's than in the 40's, 50's and 60's combined.

Obviously he was wrong. :D

Re: "Print is dead."
 

You've got to remember that Egon reads books like Tobin's Spirit Guide, which hasn't been printed for 300 years. Of course he's going to think print is dead.

Re: Re: "Print is dead."
 

Very good point! :thumbsup: Ah, Tobin's Spirit Guide...

Who is Egon?

With the cost of books rising to ridiculous levels maybe it is time for it to die. Here in Canada it is an illiteracy tax that raises book prices to such high levels that to buy a hardcover book is an investment. No longer is it a simple and enjoyable task to go to a local bookstore and pick out a few. The ability to choose for any reason has been replaced by the need to be careful, so that the money is not wasted. Thye are pricing themselves out of existence and even second hand stores often have only a 50% discount from the original cost.
To buy books is supposed to be a joy. Taking a chance on a writer's name, cover art or just that feeling that this is worth a chance. My expendable income is already eaten up by many other interests. I am tired of buying discount books at Chapters because the sale allows some risks. Instead of buying what is really desired it has to have a giant red sticker on the front marked "Discount". It is often cheap rading that is discounted for that reason. Hardcover books are now often presents on holidays or birthdays. This depresses the hell out of me.

Egon from The Ghostbusters. There's a scene in the film where Janine the secretary is trying to make conversation with Egon the Ghostbuster because she kinda likes him. She asks him if he reads much, and his reply is, "Print is dead."

Even though this is a book forum, it's a book forum in a DVD message board. Never forget that, and you'll do fine. ;)

I only buy books at discount places or flea markets. All my other needs are done by e-books and most of them I can get for free off the Internet.

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

If I want to make a hard copy, I can but I rather just burn it on a CD. I have all the classics on CD.

Great link... THANKS :)

Print isn't really dead, he just changed his name...he's now known as 'The Artist Formerly Known as Print' :D

I know exactly how you feel. I've always been a bookworm and I remember when I was a kid, everytime I went into a bookstore, I would always leave with 5-10 books at a time. Now, I have to choose carefully and lately, I realize after reading through the books at home that I shouldn't have wasted the money.

However, I do hope that print does NOT die. There's nothing like the physicality of the book itself: the feeling of the pages, the cover art (sometimes), the weight of the book in your hands... Also there's nothing like curling up in a huge armchair or in bed or on the sofa with a nice fat wonderful book and losing yourself in it and letting the real world blur out... no phones, no talk, no computer -- just you and a whole new world

Electronic storage of text is great for indexing and researching (and for comminicating, such as Usenet, E-mail, and this) but I don't think very many people will ever care to read for entertainment from a computer screen. Print isn't dying, E-books are. Check out this article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/featur...Dleisure%2Dhed



From the Chicago Tribune


Electronic publishing

E-books solving a problem consumers don't have
By David Streitfeld
Special to the Tribune

August 9, 2001

Richard DeGrandpre wrote "Digitopia" as a warning about the false promises of the wired world. Then it was published as an electronic book, and all his predictions came true.

"Digitopia," issued by Random House in March, was never reviewed or promoted or, it seems, downloaded. "My book is just dead," said DeGrandpre, a psychologist.

So are just about everyone else's e-books. The publishing world's attempts to turn electronic fiction and non-fiction into a lucrative revenue stream have yielded only a trickle of customers.

Flaccid sales aside, publishers face even bigger challenges. Digitizing the printed page has put the very nature of books up for grabs, unleashing heated battles among writers, readers, librarians and technologists over who should control electronic books.

"There's only one place e-books are popular: the courtroom," said publishing consultant Lorraine Shanley.

This week in San Jose, Calif., a judge released on bail the defendant in the most explosive e-book case yet.

A Russian graduate student named Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested three weeks ago for writing a program that breaks the encryption on e-books. Prosecutors say he was violating copyright law. Sklyarov's defenders say he was merely trying to give owners of e-books some of the same rights that owners of printed volumes have.

The first person to be jailed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Sklyarov could receive a sentence of up to five years.

"Arresting Sklyarov was insane, but there's an increasing tension between people who need and use information and those who want to control it," said Michael Mellin, a consultant who founded Random House's electronic publishing operation.

Strong billing

Two years ago, e-books were heralded as a technology that would make the traditional printed volume obsolete.

Random House, like Time Warner, Simon & Schuster and other major publishers, began developing an e-book line. Enthusiasm was stoked by an Andersen Consulting study done for the Association of American Publishers. It concluded that by 2005, 10 percent of book sales, or $2.3 billion a year, would be electronic.

Another study said 1.7 million specialized devices for reading e-books would be sold by then.

"E-books had a glow about them similar to what music videos had in the mid-1980s," said Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum.

"You weren't cutting edge, you weren't a truly progressive publishing executive, if you didn't see e-books as part of the great future for your imprint."

E-books are downloaded from on-line book sellers such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com to specially designed devices such as Gemstar's REB 1110 or to desktop or hand-held computers equipped with the requisite software made by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.

Worried about being "Napsterized" -- with their books freely distributed in digital form around the globe -- publishers enveloped their e-books with digital locks to prevent transferring, copying and printing.

Sklyarov is accused of figuring out how to pick the lock.

Last summer, Random House, eager to demonstrate it would still be viable in the post-paper world, officially announced its first 20 e-books, a list that included such relatively well-known names as Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham and economics writer Robert Samuelson.

Changing course

But as the stock market drooped and the zeal for all things tech withered last fall, Random House began to hedge its bets. The original low price of $5 for each e-book download was doubled. The publisher also announced that limited print runs would accompany electronic publication.

The result, according to author DeGrandpre, was the worst of both worlds: an e-book that no one cared about and a printed book that no one knew about. The print version of "Digitopia" recently ranked 658,756 on the Amazon.com best-seller list, about as low as it is possible to get.

"I tell people not to buy it," DeGrandpre said.

"If it's going to be a failure, it might as well be a huge failure."

Cameron Dougan, whose "Because She Is Beautiful" was the only novel on the first Random House e-book list, was somewhat more upbeat.

"My experience was bittersweet," he said, noting that "the technology has a lot of catching up to do" but that at least now he is a published novelist. Still, when he's done with his second novel, "I don't believe my agent will be pushing it as an e-book."

While no industrywide statistics are being kept on e-book sales, consultant Jim Lichtenberg said the market is practically nonexistent.

"There's no standardization in technology," he said. "It's all a big mess. This is like having a car in 1905. It breaks down instantly, which means you have to travel with your own mechanic -- and since there are no roads, there's nowhere to go anyway."

Favoring paper

Equally gloomy is a recent study by the research firm Odyssey, which found in a survey of 500 households that 40 percent had a "poor" initial impression of e-books. Three-quarters of the respondents said they didn't care how good the computer screen was, they preferred to read off paper.

"E-books are solving a problem that consumers don't have," said Odyssey analyst Devin McDonell.

One reason for the consumer rejection may be all those strict controls the publishers put on their e-books. The controls are backed up by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress in 1998. The act broadens the rights of the producers of content while restricting those of consumers. It is now a crime not only to violate copyright but to make tools that enable such a violation.

It always would have been a violation of copyright to photocopy dozens of copies of Dougan's novel and sell them on the street. Now, critics argue, it's as if the photocopier itself is illegal.

Doing the impossible

That's the predicament Sklyarov is in. An employee of the Russian company ElcomSoft, he helped develop software that removed certain restrictions that were built into Adobe System's e-book software.

Using ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor, someone could take a text on a computer equipped with Adobe's software and make a backup copy, or transfer it to another computer in his house, or make a copy for a friend -- all things that are supposed to be impossible.

Adobe Systems, which set Sklyarov's arrest in motion and was consequently the subject of demonstrations and a boycott movement, has backed off, saying it doesn't want him jailed. The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."

Allan Adler, a vice president at the Association of American Publishers, said that while publishers are often being portrayed as money-gouging bullies, they're merely trying to stay alive.

If libraries were routinely able to convert their collections to digital formats, and then offer their patrons remote access to that material, they would essentially become and maybe even replace publishers.

Vulnerable position

Publishers, Adler said, "are extremely vulnerable now."

That's why Random House is continuing its fight against RosettaBooks, a small New York electronic publisher. Rosetta acquired from three Random authors the rights to digitally distribute their novels.

Random is afraid that it will have to renegotiate the electronic rights to its entire backlist of thousands of classics. These are books it signed up long before any publisher knew to ask writers for digital rights.

A New York judge denied Random's request for a preliminary injunction that would stop Rosetta from selling the novels by Robert Parker, William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut. Random is now appealing.

"The lawsuit is all about the future, and the potential for e-books that has yet to be realized," said Random spokesman Applebaum.

At least one of the writers whose work is being fought over doesn't believe that potential will ever come to pass.

"The e-book is a ridiculous idea," said Vonnegut, who hasn't read his work on a computer and never intends to.

"The printed book is so satisfactory, so responsive to our fingertips. So much of this new stuff is utterly unneeded."

By David Streitfeld is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper.


Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune

Ebooks are mostly being killed by the confusing different formats, Orwellian encryption schemes, and lack of support from the Publishers. Many Publishers will be happy to see ebooks die.

They will not truly die though, just probably stay out of the main stream. Places like Peanut Press are doing a good job at building up a following for the Palm and Pocket PC (the best devices for ebooks to succeed on do to the millions of devices already in the market). Also free ebooks will always be available from places like Project Gutenburg to supply us with the ever growing list of public domain titles.

I for one fully support the handheld ebook market and will do so as long as possible. However, I don't support the PC based readers and their crazy encryption schemes.

Print will rule probably forever, but I think there may still be a small nitch for those of us that enjoy the flexibility and ease of ebooks.

<small></small>That final sentence of Vonnegut's sums it up for me. Of course, I've for some years said that if someone can develop a form of electonic paper/papyrus things <i>might</i> be different. :) And I understand that some inventors are now coming round to my way of thinking!

(I'd keep all my old books though! Just like I won't eschew CDs for MP3 or a similar "electronic" alternative).

Perhaps "print" will get its real competition once eBooks are not easily copied for free. The problem is that the PC (operating system, hard drive, cdrom, motherboard) components do not obey copyright principles first and foremost. Because of that, the users take advantage of the eBook medium and refuse to pay for something that they use.

That may change if certain laws pass. The proposed NEW law (SSSCA) will probably pass, but in an amended edited form. It relies on breaking your anonymity and privacy, but of course, you will be using XP by then (which assigns a unique ID code to each machine that is verified thru communication and can be re-polled as needed). Along with the existing DMCA and the approved UCITA, they would form a powerful triad once XP and .NET got going. In many ways, .NET needs SSSCA and UCITA to succeed in compelling people to pay for their software (programs, music, and ebooks).

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,46655,00.html

As before, I address those people who say the laws cannot be enforced because they can't catch everyone. Well, I say that the law doesn't have to catch even a significant fraction of the violators. All the law has to do is catch 0.00000000000001% of the violators and turn those people into examples. Then, 99% of the copying will stop out of fear for losing their jobs or from being exposed to the effects of the draconian law. Running to Linux isn't an escape since the law applies to that as well. Besides, most of the commercial software runs in the mainstream windows environment anyways.

Note that the EU is already getting ready to enact their version of DMCA as well as other countries which will follow suit after the EU does. So, it seems the world governments have recognized digital and are doing something about it. So, this is the golden age of "free copying" before the law finally catches up to the rapid advance of technology's abilities to empower us to do whatever we want to do. The last thing will be the internet tax standardization.

From cradle to grave. We will be regulated, given unique IDs, and taxed. The wild and wooly frontier of the internet won't be a frontier but for a few years more. Enjoy it whilst you can.

With all this concern over piracy why don't they just shut down usenet. Without the binary groups most people won't have access to illegal books. There was all this effort to stop Napster and now Morpheus has already replaced it. It seems to me stopping this piracy could be done easily and at least driven way to the underground where most people could never find it.

As far as XP taking away your privacy, I expect there will be a way through software to stop it from working. I for one refuse to be tracked that way. There are already ways to work around Office XP and its polling. I have no problem buying all my books and software, but I still don't want it made that easy for outsiders to see everything I have installed on my PC and what websites I visit.

BTW I think its very ironic that the very music industry thats been cheating us for years with overpriced music CDs are the ones who are upset about people cheating them. How about a government bill that mandates at least two good songs on a CD before I drop $16 on it. The poor quality of todays music is much more responsible for their sluggish sales than people downloading MP3s.

Forget piracy, the issue is that people want real books. Staring at a screen, burning electricity and having to be careful with an e-book reader (PDA or PC) will keep it from ever catching on.

Because whoever the 'they' are you refer to have no authority to shut down anything on usenet. There is no able comparison between usenet and Napster. Napster was a program and service for the sole purpose of passing around music. Usenet is basically a messaging protocol that has over 35,000 different message groups, of which only a very small percentage is actually moderated, and none of which are actually owned.

Some countries have laws that block some usenet groups from their servers, but most don't. Even if the US decided illegally to block all the binary servers, and all US ISP's struck them from their databases, all someone would have to do to access them is use a different server in a different country. There have been previous attempts at what you are suggesting, but what ends up is prosecutors quickly find out they are hunting ghosts on a virutal landscape. Enterprises quickly see that the money saved on legal fees generally more than pays for what they think they've lost.

When you put something on usenet, it's there for the entire world, at least for a few days before it gets bumped and overwritten by other messages. If it can be traced to you then you may indeed get contacted by the copyright holder. TSR used to go after people regularly who posted their gaming materials illegally. The same with movies, music, programs, etc. However, it's extremely easy to be anonymous on usenet and only an idiot would post something from a non-anonymous account.

As for 'driving it underground' the usenet pretty much is the Internet underground. While it is the oldest branch of the Internet, it has no pretty interface or easy to use buttons, and most people don't know that it exists or how to use them. From working at various ISP's for a few years in the past, I can tell you that very few customers actually access them.

To a large extent, I agree. There is nothing like holding a book in your hand and looking at the printed word on paper. I don't see a future where everything is electronic based and nothing is paper anymore. However, I'm one of those that don't mind reading on a PDA. That's one of the reasons I got one. I can't stand reading from a monitor, but carrying around my Visor with a few good books on it helps pass the time during the work day when a book would otherwise be unaccessible or out of the question.

The LED screens are a lot more suited to reading than a CRT screen.

Thanks for the nice usenet summary. Anyway I think the piracy issue is being very overblown for books. Next they will be closing down the public libraries to keep them from cutting into sales.

As far as paper I don't miss it. I use my Ipaq for reading and there is nothing like a compact device that can hold hundreds of books and be used easily in the dark. However, I agree that reading on a PC is never going to work. The screens are just not good on the eyes. With Microsoft Reader now fully functional on Pocket PC 2002 systems maybe the ebook format will get a boost. Now all books bought for the Reader will work on Pocket PCs and I know that was a problem in the past. Palms and Pocket PCs will be the only chance ebooks have to survive. I for one love having my entire library fit on one CD-R. :)

It seemed appropriate to mention....
 

.... a <b>non</b>-piracy thread from the beginning of August: <A HREF="http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=126709" target="_blank">E books and how to get them for FREE</a>

Also, you need to be able to have some sort of control over MOVING the ebook. If I have a computer, I should be able to transfer it to another computer or be able to reinstall the ebook for free.

After all, if I move house, I don't have to leave my books behind - why should I be restricted because I reformat my hard disk? Also, what happens if you do have a hard disk crash and you don't have a backup (a ghost style backup will still work anyway, so there are ways around copy protection if you're desperate to do so).

I am all for this protection, but there should be some way of being able to at least make it reasonably functional for the user. Even if the EBook had a MOVE media function, you could still lend it to friends like you can do a normal book without having to resort to illegal copying.

I think this is truly a big problem and it is being addressed. Palm Reader books can be moved freely since they are based on credit card number and not PC. Adobe is making it easier to move around books and lend or give them away. They are also letting you reset your account if you have a crash. Microsoft Reader is also supposed to be increasing the number of computers or devices that can hold a single book from 2 to 4. I think publishers are starting to understand the wants of ebook buyers, but it will probably take time for the perfect balance to be struck between security and convenience.

As long as it does - this is by far the biggest thing stopping me from ebooking, and until it does, I'll never pay for it.

Yes - I like the book on my library shelf (predominantly buy HB anyway);
Yes - I like the feel of a book
Yes - I can lend the book to a friend or borrow one myself

but more importantly, I want a book I buy to be there in ten or fifteen years. I won't buy ebooks until I have a guarantee that the product I purchase lasts forever (or at least a good part of my life). Having it "disappear" in a GPF is not my idea of a good investment. :)