Books: the Ancient and Ultimate Document Viewer?

[lpetrich]

quotes - Quotation about the future of technology being paper - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange

Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay called "The Ancient and the Ultimate", collected in "The Tragedy of the Moon" and "Asimov on Science". He wrote it in response to the notion that video cassettes might someday replace books. He considers what might be the ultimate cassette system.

You’ll have to admit that such a cassette would be a perfect futuristic dream: self-contained, mobile, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private, and largely under the control of the will.

Ah, but dreams are cheap so let’s get practical. Can such a cassette possibly exist? To this, my answer is Yes, of course. The next question is: How many years will we have to wait for such a deliriously perfect cassette?

I have an answer for that, too, and a quite definite one. We will have it in minus five thousand years–because what I have been describing… is a book!

Post-Kindle:

What goes around, comes around. There's a 1968 Isaac Asimov story called "The Holmes-Ginsbook Device", set in a world of advanced digital reading technology. The title's two innovators devise an ingenious system of printing page images and assembling them into a kind of codex, a physical entity that needs only hands and eyes to read. Of course the inventors are unfairly forgotten when the device bearing their names is shortened by popular usage to "book". Oh, sorry, was that a spoiler?

Except that a book requires something outside of its user. Light.

Furthermore, books do not have built-in searchability, and that has been a part of computer text editors for almost as long as such software has existed.

 Text editor has a history of this kind of software, and the first sort of text editor was the  Line editor. This kind of editor operates in pure command-line fashion, and it can be used on typewriter terminals. One of the first was  Colossal Typewriter in 1960, and a successor,  Expensive Typewriter in 1962. Neither could do searching for text, as far as I can tell. But in 1964, an interactive version of  TECO (text editor) was released, and in 1966,  QED (text editor) was released, and both of them could do searches. That capability has been a part of every text editor that I have ever used. Also those super text editors called word processors.

It is not just text editors that are searchable. Spreadsheets and document viewers like PDF viewers and e-book software and web browsers are also searchable. The Unix command-line utility "find" looks through a filesystem to find files, and "grep" looks for files with certain content. Both utilities date from the 1970's. More recently, several GUIfied desktop-computer search engines have become available, like Spotlight for OSX. Server software can also be searchable, like messageboard software. Finally, there are Internet search engines, like Google's.

So not having a search function is a great deficiency.

 

[bilby]

I rarely if ever use the search function on my Kindle.

The thing that makes my Kindle preferable to traditional books is portability and ease of purchase.

I travel from Australia to the UK and back every couple of years. It's about a two day journey, after allowing time to travel to and from airports, security checks and mandatory check-in times, customs and immigration clearances, etc. Of that, about 25-30 hours is spent actually flying, depending on the route chosen; Typically either as three legs of 8+ hours, or two unequal legs of 8+ and 16+ hours each. I can either take my Kindle, which has several hundred books on it, and from which I can purchase pretty much any new book I want from anywhere with a cell phone service or wifi availability; Or I could lug a bag with a half dozen books in it, and have to find a bookstore (possibly in a strange town), should I wish to add to my reading material while away.

In the bad old days, I used to seek out large pulp novels, preferably with a picture of a burning or exploding airliner on the cover. If the story turned out to be boring or poorly written, I was stuck with it. Now I can carry a much smaller mass and volume, while having access to a small library of titles, some of which I will be happy to re-read if my newer purchases are found to be sub-par. And I can buy several new books in a short stopover at a major international airport such as Changi, Dubai or Frankfurt, without having to waste time seeking (and getting to and from) the airport bookshop, with its very limited stock, all the while worrying about missing my connection.

I have never exhausted the battery, so I don't know how often it needs charging - certainly it lasts well in excess of three days, and an overnight charge after that length of time is adequate to fully restore the battery life. Most aircraft now have a USB charging port and/or mains voltage power at the seat, and if seated on a plane, there's no particular inconvenience in having the power lead plugged in and charging the device while you fly.

For me, the advantages of the Kindle are clear and compelling.

Also, it fits into a standard sandwich sized ziploc bag, and can then be read in the bath - where I can "turn the pages" without getting it wet. Try doing that with a paper book.

I just downloaded the complete set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall free of charge too (I lost my paper copy years ago, and it was four fairly large volumes). Lots of out of copyright works are available for nothing. That's a difficult price for a bookstore - even a second hand store - to compete with.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I rarely if ever use the search function on my Kindle.

The thing that makes my Kindle preferable to traditional books is portability and ease of purchase.

I travel from Australia to the UK and back every couple of years. It's about a two day journey, after allowing time to travel to and from airports, security checks and mandatory check-in times, customs and immigration clearances, etc. Of that, about 25-30 hours is spent actually flying, depending on the route chosen; Typically either as three legs of 8+ hours, or two unequal legs of 8+ and 16+ hours each. I can either take my Kindle, which has several hundred books on it, and from which I can purchase pretty much any new book I want from anywhere with a cell phone service or wifi availability; Or I could lug a bag with a half dozen books in it, and have to find a bookstore (possibly in a strange town), should I wish to add to my reading material while away.

In the bad old days, I used to seek out large pulp novels, preferably with a picture of a burning or exploding airliner on the cover. If the story turned out to be boring or poorly written, I was stuck with it. Now I can carry a much smaller mass and volume, while having access to a small library of titles, some of which I will be happy to re-read if my newer purchases are found to be sub-par. And I can buy several new books in a short stopover at a major international airport such as Changi, Dubai or Frankfurt, without having to waste time seeking (and getting to and from) the airport bookshop, with its very limited stock, all the while worrying about missing my connection.

Yup. The thing Asimov really missed is capacity. I do use the search capability now and then--generally to find a book I misplaced given the number I have on it.

I have never exhausted the battery, so I don't know how often it needs charging - certainly it lasts well in excess of three days, and an overnight charge after that length of time is adequate to fully restore the battery life. Most aircraft now have a USB charging port and/or mains voltage power at the seat, and if seated on a plane, there's no particular inconvenience in having the power lead plugged in and charging the device while you fly.

Just keep the transmitter off. I killed mine in a single day once with hardly using it--but much of the day was spent in marginal cell territory.

For me, the advantages of the Kindle are clear and compelling.

Although these days I make a lot more use of the Kindle app on my phone than my actual Kindle.

As for the bath--there's a company that sells a waterproofed version of the Kindle (they buy actual Kindles and waterproof them.) No need for a bag with those. Not to mention the Oasis.

 

[bilby]

Yup. The thing Asimov really missed is capacity. I do use the search capability now and then--generally to find a book I misplaced given the number I have on it.



Just keep the transmitter off. I killed mine in a single day once with hardly using it--but much of the day was spent in marginal cell territory.

For me, the advantages of the Kindle are clear and compelling.

Although these days I make a lot more use of the Kindle app on my phone than my actual Kindle.

As for the bath--there's a company that sells a waterproofed version of the Kindle (they buy actual Kindles and waterproof them.) No need for a bag with those. Not to mention the Oasis.

I bet the price difference would buy an awful lot of ziploc sandwich bags

 

[lpetrich]

Isaac Asimov himself has written about how difficult it can be to search for information.

In 1955, he wrote "The Sound of Panting" (in "Only a Trillion"). The panting that he described was for him as he tried to keep up with the biochemistry literature.

Asimov Suggests Science of Data | News | The Harvard Crimson

Science's rapid accumulation of data, Asimov said, has created the need for a new branch of science, information retrieval. The new field, he said, should attempt to make the data scientists need available to them simply "by pushing the right button."

Regaling his audience with a Jackie Masonesque style, Asimov then launched into a lengthy example of how Mendel's theories of heredity were overlooked for a generation, the delay producing misconceptions that may ultimately have led to two world wars.

He also wrote about that in one of his science essays.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) became a monk because it helped pay for his education. He entered St Thomas's Abbey in Brünn, Austria, now Brno, Czechia, and he started research on heredity there. He first wanted to crossbreed mice, but the abbot there didn't like researching animal sex. So he crossbred plants instead, and from crossbreeding pea plants, he discovered his famous laws of heredity. In 1865, presented his findings in two meetings of a local natural-history society, but it did not get much of a response. In 1866, he published his work in the "Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn", but it did not get much notice either. He had a correspondence with eminent Swiss biologist Carl Nägeli over 1866 - 1873, but CN did not mention GM's work in any of his books, even where he discussed heredity. CN was very good at observation, but his theories were another story. He believed in orthogenesis, the theory that evolution is driven by internal mechanisms, like what CN called an "inner perfecting principle".

Some decades later, four biologists rediscovered GM's laws of heredity and published on them almost simultaneously. Dutch Hugo de Vries, German Carl Correns, and Austrian Erich von Tschermak in 1900, and American William Jasper Spillman in 1901. The first two also acknowledged GM's priority.


What Isaac Asimov had proposed has now become commonplace, with computerized search systems ranging from in-app searching to Internet-wide searching. Not surprisingly, there are search engines that cater to scientists, like PubMed and Google Scholar. Preprint archives like arxiv are, of course, searchable, as are journal sites.

 

[lpetrich]

I'd been referring to physical books as just plain books, but I have decided on that qualifier to distinguish them from files in computers. Physical books have been made from a variety of materials, and I like the nickname dead-tree books for those made from wood-pulp paper. This suggests similar sorts of names: dead reeds (papyrus), dead leaves (palm leaves), dead sheep (parchment), and dead mountains (clay tablets).

So far, we have presented several difficulties with physical books. There is another one: difficulty of copying. One either has to do it by hand, or else use a machine that does printing or copying. But copying computer files is so easy that it threatens the business model of selling copies. That is why some companies have DRM -- Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management.


So physical books have these deficiencies:

• Needs external light
• Not searchable other than by reading it
• Not very compact or lightweight
• Difficult to copy

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So physical books have these deficiencies:

• Needs external light
• Not searchable other than by reading it
• Not very compact or lightweight
• Difficult to copy

Old books can be allergy issues for some people.

And related to your 4th point--totally impractical to back up.

If something happens to my Kindle all I've lost is the hardware, I still have all the books.