Christmas is almost here again, which in my family means the writing of ‘Christmas Lists.’ In an effort to make the season as straightforward as possible for our close relatives without being so crass as to give money, we all publish lists of the presents we'd like to receive. Nobody is forced to stick to the list in the event of a sudden moment of inspired shopping synchronicity, but neither is anyone considered unimaginative for sticking to the script.
What has struck me over the last few years is how much of all our lists have always been taken up by IP: CDs (once cassette tapes), DVDs (once VHS tapes, now Blu-Ray) and books. Which makes me wonder what we are going to do for physical gifts ten years from now? What happens to Christmas when buying a CD, DVD or a book in physical form is just so twentieth century1?
CDs are already on their way out. I still buy them, but only for two reasons2:
- Compact discs have no DRM, and thus will continue to function even if the manufacturer goes out of business or chooses not to support them any more.
- Digital files are a lot easier to lose than shiny plastic discs, and despite keeping careful, permanent track of your purchases, download services such as iTunes mysteriously lack the option to re-download stuff you've already bought.
Both these problems are temporary: the first because music publishers are realising that either you sell without DRM or you hand Apple absolute control of your industry, the second because backing up data is becoming a lot easier, and backing up your important stuff to the cloud will hit the mainstream any day now. So we'll give the CD 5-10 Christmases to fade away.
The DVD isn't going to fare much better. The Internet is eating video even faster than it is eating recorded music. Blu-Ray is fighting back the tide, but it can not last for long. The difference in quality between an HD show from a Blu-Ray disc and one downloaded onto an AppleTV is so slight that you would only care about it in the most visually spectacular shows, and there is no reason not to assume that bandwidth and compresion technologies will both advance sufficiently over the next few years to render BD's advantage non-existent.
Which leaves the oldest of all the technologies, the book.
Christmas also means it's about time for my annual argument with my mother and brother about the future of the book as a physical medium. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge books have a lot of advantages:
- You don't have to charge them or replace their batteries
- You can lend someone a book without worrying about the copyright implications
- It doesn't matter too much if you get sand in them on the beach, or spill some of the recipe on the page of your cookery book
- Reading a book is still easier on the eyes than any digital alternative
- You can scribble in the margins, or if you're lucky have the author scribble on the title page
- Many people are emotionally attached to the book as a medium. (Or to be a little less charitable, people fetishise the printed word)
Books are by no means perfect, though:
- Printing a book and shipping it to its destination is expensive, and is only getting more so
- At any one time, the vast majority of books are out of print.
- Books are heavy
- Even an occasional reader such as myself ends up devoting a ridiculous amount of living space to the storage of books
Ebook technology is getting better. The devices we have today are still not going to convince anyone but the hyper-enthusiastic early adopters, but technology has a habit of accelerating dramatically once there is just a little demonstration of demand. At the same time, the population of book-fetishists will start falling into the same niche as people who buy CDs because they like having the liner-notes.
It'll hang on longer than the rest, but I'm giving the book twenty years.
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1 the question of what happens to record and book stores is possibly a more serious one, but really isn't my problem. So far, record stores attempts to "go digital" by installing mp3 kiosks, or putting little cards in the CD racks to represent digital albums are little more than cute ways of rearranging the deckchairs
2 To answer the unspoken question: “3. Because I feel that paying for music is the right thing to do.”
It's probably more interesting to consider the death of books by genre, since genre partially determines how other technologies will replace them.
For example, technical references on computer topics are usually out of date before they hit the shelves, and they're easily replaced by online e-books, wikis, etc, a technology with which their audience is already familiar. So I would imagine they've only got another year or two left in them. (cf computer magazines).
Cookery books might last a bit longer, but the push for e-recipe-books and recipe kiosks has been going a while (Gates pushed hard for them in "The Road Ahead" even) so I wouldn't expect them to last much longer either.
What genre will be the mainstay hold-out against new-fangled technology? It would have to be a topic that doesn't change very often and have a primary audience that are last-adopters.
Hey, don't dismiss us fetishists lightly. Frankly, reading for entertainment is a niche industry already; it seems like a large portion of people can't read properly these days (as in: take in a large block of words - longer than your typical magazine article or blog posting - and read it), and even more people don't. A typical "best seller" sells something like 5000-10000 copies a week, and might be a best sell for a few months. Hitting the "million copies sold" mark is a huge achievement for a book. I once read an article which stated (admittedly without assertion) that the entire publishing industry, excluding magazines & newspapers, was sustained by about 10% of the population - and that the largest section in that was the "Mills & Boon" segment. :(
So books are already largely aimed at fetishists anyway. And we fetishists like the form factor that we already have. Books will have a physical form for a long time.
Oh, and to prove I'm not bigoted against other media, here's a TV quote: "Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is, uh, it... has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be... smelly." - Rupert Giles, BtVS.
Reading Moby Dick on my HTC Hermes was not a terrible chore, although it took a while to get the settings right - colours, font, orientation, scroll speed.
The main advantages were that I could read anywhere I went because I always had my phone, and I could use a dictionary (loaded on the phone) to look up any obscure nautical terms I came across.
On my 320x240 screen I've had some trouble attempting to read more technical books, but with the iPhone and its successors this should be less of a problem.
Leading Australian publishers are now releasing all their titles as both paper and e-books. One such publisher told me that he reckons the paper book will last his lifetime - which just about agrees with Fishbowl's estimate of 20 years. What WILL survive is the human need for stories; for the ability to transport oneself from the real to the imaginary. The means of transmission is largely irrelevant as long as we continue to use our imagination and discover new worlds.
Hmmm... comments on both sides:
* Books do have one significant difference from music/video. You've always needed additional equipment to watch a movie or listen to music; even sheet music needs an instrument. :) Books have always been stand-alone objects, until the advent of the e-book. I think this is a significant hurdle for e-book adoption; people have always had to buy a turntable, a radio, a Walkman, etc. etc., but "Now I've got to buy an e-book reader just to read?"
* On the flip side, there's an awful lot to like about e-books. My favorite is the convenience factor in reading on my iPhone (and before then my Nokia N800, and my various Palm models). It's smaller and pocketable in a way that even paperbacks just aren't, so I've got it with me in a lot of places where paper books would be just plain awkward. Even better, I can load dozens of books on it, so I've got a huge library to choose from; the icing on the cake is the way some systems let you browse, buy and read anywhere with a cell/WiFi connection. (Kindle's the obvious one, but there's a couple of readers for the iPhone that will download books from online stores, after you buy them from the store's webpage - fortunately, also accessible via iPhone.) And it's just plain easier to hold and use in a lot of situations - you can hold it and page-turn with one hand, so it's great for things like standing in the check-in line at the airport.
I suspect printed books will last longer than you estimate, although 20 years is not an unreasonable estimate. But your comparison objects are not directly relevant - specifically:
Music via CD's: Music has been around for thousands of years. Most of that time, live performances were all that was available. It is only in the last hundred years, with records, then CD's, and now mp3's, have allowed music to be storable, and replayable on demand. Yet live performances still exist. While CD's are probably on the way out in favor of mp3's, don't underestimate the need for backups - which CD's have effectively become. The quality of music from a CD, with an appropriate speaker system, rivals concert hall quality - they did a very good job with the original CD spec, and it shows!
Performances via DVD/Blu-Ray: Like music, live performances have been in existence for thousands of years. Movies have only been available for the last 100, and they have transitioned from film to tape to disc to digital. Nonetheless, playhouses do a robust business, if nowhere near as large in volume (by money or audience) as movies. DVD's will probably fade a little later than CD's - bandwidth and backups stand in their way. A movie is substantially different than a live performance, yet the increasing quality of video suggests that in less than 20 years, digital video files will be sufficient for the most demanding audiences.
Reading books: Thousands of years, and the manner of reading a book has not changed significantly in that time. Books are portable, relatively indestructable (compared to digital data), need no external machinery or power to render properly, and most importantly: the dpi of the printed word is typically 10 times that of a screen (1200 dpi vs. 125 dpi for the best notebooks). I notice the difference when reading - while electronic books are great for quick reference or fast searches, for in depth reading over hours, books are incomparible. After 8 hours reading screens, my eyes are very tired - 8 hours reading a book, and I feel fine. In short, a book provides a far better reading experience than a Kindlesque device currently does. What is interesting is that screen dpi has not increased substantially over the last 20 years - it's still floating around 100 dpi or so, whereas the printed word has been around 1000 dpi or so for a long time. The highest resolution monitor that I am aware of was produced by IBM back in the early 2000's - the T220/T221, with a 204 dpi resolution - still 1/5 that of a decently printed book. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors - it appears this monitor was a commerical failure, possibly because it cost 10x more than similar sized monitors with normal dpi's of 100.
This could be a technology issue, too. Give me a screen with 600 dpi resolution, and a reader that is lighter than a book, doesn't mind drops too much, and doesn't need a charge for an entire day of reading, and books will probably be gone, too. Assuming we solve the DRM and backup problems! But I find it interesting that we have really not increased the dpi of our screens in a long, long time. Until we do, I'd say the humble printed book has some legs on it, and it's not clear whether it will ever be cheap to manufacture high dpi monitors...