Ever increasing horror

[rousseau]

I agree. Give it a few decades and the e-format will become more prominent, but I don't think we're ready to do away with paper yet. The amount of relevant scholarship that doesn't exist in e-format is still pretty enormous.

Or is absurdly expensive for the average person to access that way, $50-60USD to download a journal article, equal pricing for paper/digital textbooks...

That too. Some of the books I've read from Western are so rare that the price really creeps up for a physical copy as well, some approaching 200 CDN.

 

[Treedbear]

I watch a lot of CSPAN, and I find that now that everyone is zooming from their homes rather than meeting together in Congress, various institutes, and Book Festivals, etc, it's obvious that the people who are considered the opinion experts read a great deal. Before, when the pc was the symbol of erudition, there would always be a pc monitor somewhere in the background. Now of course people are facing the pc. But the background of choice is almost always a massive array of packed bookcases. I'm not sure what that implies, but books are certainly gaining status, if only as a symbol.

 

[Politesse]

I watch a lot of CSPAN, and I find that now that everyone is zooming from their homes rather than meeting together in Congress, various institutes, and Book Festivals, etc, it's obvious that the people who are considered the opinion experts read a great deal. Before, when the pc was the symbol of erudition, there would always be a pc monitor somewhere in the background. Now of course people are facing the pc. But the background of choice is almost always a massive array of packed bookcases. I'm not sure what that implies, but books are certainly gaining status, if only as a symbol.

Ha, I love playing sherlock on people's reading choices in lieu of listening to whatever nonsense they are saying.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I haven't opened a paper book since the Kindle came out. I read a lot. If I can't find a book in an e-book store I can find it on a pirate site. Project Gutenberg has every classic in the world.

This Christmas I spent a week inside of a lake in a volcano in Nicaragua. While sitting on my ass watching the view, I wanted to read a book. Three clicks later I had the book on my Kindle and I was reading it.

This development isn't going to unwind and stop. It's only an ever accelerating development.

I agree. Give it a few decades and the e-format will become more prominent, but I don't think we're ready to do away with paper yet. The amount of relevant scholarship that doesn't exist in e-format is still pretty enormous.

These days dealing with scanned images is good enough even if it's not as good as something like .epub that can be reformatted on the fly. I expect the switch to e-versions to accelerate.

 

[southernhybrid]

I lost my love of fiction about 20 years ago. Then I went through a period of reading lots of nonfiction books. I rarely finish a book anymore, but I probably have 10 started on my kindle. Just because I don't read books very often doesn't mean that I don't read. I spend hours reading articles in the NYTImes, Business news, world news, US news, Science news, Health news and sometimes silly things like fashion. I look up things on the internet that I'm interested in and sometimes spend hours learning something new. I take my nursing CEUs even though I no longer work, so maybe a lot of us are losing our interest in books, but not losing our interest in reading.

My attention span is too short to sit and read a book for hours. By the time I get a chance to read a book, I usually fall asleep within 30 minutes.

 

[rousseau]

I haven't opened a paper book since the Kindle came out. I read a lot. If I can't find a book in an e-book store I can find it on a pirate site. Project Gutenberg has every classic in the world.

This Christmas I spent a week inside of a lake in a volcano in Nicaragua. While sitting on my ass watching the view, I wanted to read a book. Three clicks later I had the book on my Kindle and I was reading it.

This development isn't going to unwind and stop. It's only an ever accelerating development.

I agree. Give it a few decades and the e-format will become more prominent, but I don't think we're ready to do away with paper yet. The amount of relevant scholarship that doesn't exist in e-format is still pretty enormous.

These days dealing with scanned images is good enough even if it's not as good as something like .epub that can be reformatted on the fly. I expect the switch to e-versions to accelerate.

I haven't seen that myself. Most scanned books I've read are of questionable quality and hard to read. It's ok if the books are free from a source like Gutenberg, but not great for anyone who's serious about the book. It's definitely something, but I wouldn't call it a replacement until the technology is better.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I agree. Give it a few decades and the e-format will become more prominent, but I don't think we're ready to do away with paper yet. The amount of relevant scholarship that doesn't exist in e-format is still pretty enormous.

Or is absurdly expensive for the average person to access that way, $50-60USD to download a journal article, equal pricing for paper/digital textbooks...

But that has to do with the system for how universities and research is financed. Everybody understands the article isn't worth that money. But everybody plays along because they realize that this is how the machine keeps spinning.

It will change though. Since the average person is more scientifically litterate than ever before (are are therefore able to read and understand complex papers), and since universities get a lot of state funding, people aren't going to put up with this system. Especially now since even mainstream press is increasingly becoming scientific fake news. It's more important than ever to have cheap access to the source material.

This system has worked for the first 300 years. Time to change it. But it will. I'm not worried. Increasingly publications are becoming free to read. I think that is where we're heading. And universities will find other ways to get financing.

 

[DrZoidberg]

These days dealing with scanned images is good enough even if it's not as good as something like .epub that can be reformatted on the fly. I expect the switch to e-versions to accelerate.

I haven't seen that myself. Most scanned books I've read are of questionable quality and hard to read. It's ok if the books are free from a source like Gutenberg, but not great for anyone who's serious about the book. It's definitely something, but I wouldn't call it a replacement until the technology is better.

Don't you think that has to do with when it was scanned? A lot of books were made into PDF's in the 90'ies and early 00'ies. And they are all shit. It's only very recently scanning technology has reached a standard that can put it straight into plain text (rather than pictures). So while we still have loads of garbage PDF's in the databases, they'll be replaced soon. Now there's cheap machines that can automatically scan a whole book in minutes and put it into raw text. So I'm not worried.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

These days dealing with scanned images is good enough even if it's not as good as something like .epub that can be reformatted on the fly. I expect the switch to e-versions to accelerate.

I haven't seen that myself. Most scanned books I've read are of questionable quality and hard to read. It's ok if the books are free from a source like Gutenberg, but not great for anyone who's serious about the book. It's definitely something, but I wouldn't call it a replacement until the technology is better.

Don't you think that has to do with when it was scanned? A lot of books were made into PDF's in the 90'ies and early 00'ies. And they are all shit. It's only very recently scanning technology has reached a standard that can put it straight into plain text (rather than pictures). So while we still have loads of garbage PDF's in the databases, they'll be replaced soon. Now there's cheap machines that can automatically scan a whole book in minutes and put it into raw text. So I'm not worried.

Exactly. Older scans are shit. 300 dpi is fine. However, simply OCRing it isn't good enough, you get a lot of mistakes.

 

[Toni]

There are a few things going on.

For one, books cost money, time, and energy, things that most of us don't have. Second, they take reasonable literacy skills, which again takes out a chunk of people. And lastly, for many people reading is literally too unexciting for them to enjoy (think about people on the extroverted side of the spectrum).

Like sky-diving, clubbing, or any other hobby, reading is an activity that appeals to a specific segment of any population. And what's more, those who do read are almost universally reading fluffy fiction that's not much different from watching TV.

Don't ask me how I know this .

I understand the reasons people give but I call bullshit on it being too expensive to buy books. FFS when my husbabd was a poor grad student every single pay day we went to a bookstore and bought at least one book for one of us and often a couple fir our toddler. There were no nights that did not include reading to him before bed and no days that did not include reading to him as well. Sure it was often the same book over and over and over again. I can still recite most of Where The Wild Things Are and Alligators All Around without thinking too hard about it and I know a lot more about dinosaurs and fighter planes and various vehicles involved in construction than one would guess.

We did not have screens—didn’t have a television for a while and I think we did not have a color television until the oldest was well into grade school. Only had a television at all because one was given to us.

 

[rousseau]

There are a few things going on.

For one, books cost money, time, and energy, things that most of us don't have. Second, they take reasonable literacy skills, which again takes out a chunk of people. And lastly, for many people reading is literally too unexciting for them to enjoy (think about people on the extroverted side of the spectrum).

Like sky-diving, clubbing, or any other hobby, reading is an activity that appeals to a specific segment of any population. And what's more, those who do read are almost universally reading fluffy fiction that's not much different from watching TV.

Don't ask me how I know this .

I understand the reasons people give but I call bullshit on it being too expensive to buy books. FFS when my husbabd was a poor grad student every single pay day we went to a bookstore and bought at least one book for one of us and often a couple fir our toddler. There were no nights that did not include reading to him before bed and no days that did not include reading to him as well. Sure it was often the same book over and over and over again. I can still recite most of Where The Wild Things Are and Alligators All Around without thinking too hard about it and I know a lot more about dinosaurs and fighter planes and various vehicles involved in construction than one would guess.

We did not have screens—didn’t have a television for a while and I think we did not have a color television until the oldest was well into grade school. Only had a television at all because one was given to us.

I don't think it's a binary - too expensive or not too expensive. A great deal of people live in extreme poverty and have no retirement savings or prospect of ever having any - how many books are they buying? Some people have modest finances and can afford some books. Those who are the wealthiest can afford the most books, and the highest quality.

I think it should be remembered too that the cost of books isn't just financial, it's energy as well. Reading is more of a physical thing then is usually given credit for. If people are barely eating, something like TV might be a better option than reading because it's more passive.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Gore Vidal predicted the demise of linear type back in the 80s. But several people in this thread have mentioned the voluminous reading of texts online, and I think that's true. I think it's also true that the popularity of dense texts -- i.e., 19th century novels -- is a hard sell for Gen X, Y, whatever has come since. A while back I was in our town library, looking in amazement at the rows and rows of James Patterson novels (that is his name, right?), thinking, Jesus, this guy drops books the way a mama guinea pig drops litters of little guinea piggies. I picked up one of his books, opened it to the middle, and was struck by the brevity of his paragraphs. Some of them were two sentences long. (Some were a single sentence.) Some pages seemed to contain 8 or 10 paragraphs. I thought, no one who is attracted to this kind of writing would get past chapter one of Martin Chuzzlewit. In fact, they'd crack that book open, look at one of Dickens' pages, and quickly reshelve it.
I still meet young readers who are not put off by quality literature that requires an engaged reader who craves detailed, integrated writing. But the trend seems to lean toward the Patterson style, of what cereal boxes call bite-size chunks.
I really don't care that much. There will always be some readers who want to explore the heights of literature. There will be fewer of us, but sometimes that enhances the experience. I love being on the cultural fringe and reading books that are maybe 323,709 in Amazon's sales ranking. If I stuck with the top 20 in sales ranks I'd probably be bored stiff.

 

[rousseau]

Gore Vidal predicted the demise of linear type back in the 80s. But several people in this thread have mentioned the voluminous reading of texts online, and I think that's true. I think it's also true that the popularity of dense texts -- i.e., 19th century novels -- is a hard sell for Gen X, Y, whatever has come since. A while back I was in our town library, looking in amazement at the rows and rows of James Patterson novels (that is his name, right?), thinking, Jesus, this guy drops books the way a mama guinea pig drops litters of little guinea piggies. I picked up one of his books, opened it to the middle, and was struck by the brevity of his paragraphs. Some of them were two sentences long. (Some were a single sentence.) Some pages seemed to contain 8 or 10 paragraphs. I thought, no one who is attracted to this kind of writing would get past chapter one of Martin Chuzzlewit. In fact, they'd crack that book open, look at one of Dickens' pages, and quickly reshelve it.
I still meet young readers who are not put off by quality literature that requires an engaged reader who craves detailed, integrated writing. But the trend seems to lean toward the Patterson style, of what cereal boxes call bite-size chunks.
I really don't care that much. There will always be some readers who want to explore the heights of literature. There will be fewer of us, but sometimes that enhances the experience. I love being on the cultural fringe and reading books that are maybe 323,709 in Amazon's sales ranking. If I stuck with the top 20 in sales ranks I'd probably be bored stiff.

It'd be interesting to see some numbers on what people have been reading through the last century. My guess is that there aren't fewer people reading quality writing by proportion, but by total. There are way more options for entertainment these days, so people spend less time in total reading books.

But I can tell you, my grandmother born in the 1920s read some pretty awful fiction throughout her life. My guess is that people like you who go for the rare, hard stuff have always been uncommon.

But at the same time it does seem like there has been a real decline in our average attention spans, so those who do read decent books likely gravitate to more palatable popular books, rather than the densest stuff.