Tethered Swimming

This article about xkcd releasing an old fashioned book in Monday’s New York Times got me to thinking about something that’s been rattling around my head since that Ars Technica piece about the history of e-books I wrote about a couple of months ago.  Namely, what is the likely future of print books?  The future of physical storage for audio and video looks bleak, Blu-Ray could very likely be the last storage device for movies and television shows ever mass produced.  But books, and the text within them, last a hell of a lot longer than anything that stores audio or video.

Audio and video frequently change formats, from wax cylinders, vinyl records, CDs and now mp3s to Beta, VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray.  Simply possessing the hardware necessary to play things become problematic after awhile to say nothing of the short life span and inherent frailty of the discs/cassettes/things themselves; whereas the basic technology of the book is centuries old.  That lends it an important distinction: it lasts (probably longer than you will).  Provided it’s kept somewhere dry, a mass produced hardcover book can easily last a century or longer (who really knows?); even a cheap paperback, again kept dry, is good for decades.

There is another factor that argues in favor of the survival of books.  A CD, even one loaded with liner notes and music videos, probably doesn’t require more than an hour or two to get through.  Even a feature laden Blu-Ray with all kinds of on-line activities and special features probably won’t require more than a few hours of your time.  But even a short, relatively fluffy novel can take ten hours to read and a thick non-fiction book can take considerably longer.  This may seem like a trivial distinction, but in a world where you can get almost anything free or close to free on-line, getting you to spring for the physical copy means making you feel as though you’ve gotten your money’s worth.  In terms of time spent per dollar spent a book that takes you fifteen hours to read blows away an album on which you may only like a couple of songs or a movie you might end up watching twice.

E-books are still pathetically underdeveloped.  Even Amazon’s vaunted Kindle 2 is suffering at the hands of the foolish emphasis placed on Digital Rights Management, most prominently the text-to-speech function, and the much publicized DRM related disabling of many of it’s features should your Amazon account come under scrutiny, even for non-Kindle related reasons.  Despite those type of first-generation technical problems the future of the e-book seems assured, after all you can carry a whole library under your arm.  But the digitization of content doesn’t spell doom for ink and paper the way it does for audio and video.  Books, after all, are pretty hardy.  It’s probably going to be a niche, but it will survive and the sooner publishers realize that and change their marketing accordingly, the better off they’ll be.