Dead Tree Books

I want to have the option to own my book in dead tree form someday. Books printed on paper, in other words; you know, that thing we used to use back in grade school to write reports and sometimes print out in TPS reports (with cover sheets!) and other fun stuff like that. Currently, this is the format that books are made into. Format may not be the correct word. Let's call it a medium.

The problem is, I want to walk into a brick and mortar store and buy a dead tree book some day, and yet the world seems to think that both of these things are archaic and doomed to be as relevant as horseshoes and blacksmiths are in today's world. Everything is going to be e-books and blogs and whatever, which makes it somewhat amusing to me that I'm pondering the very subject on a blog.

It's possible that I'm more sensitive to this particular discussion since I work in a public library and it seems that not a week goes by that I don't read something somewhere talking about how libraries are fighting to stay relevant in today's modern cyber-times or that this, THIS is the year that e-books will obliviate all other books and make them explode, or else turn dead tree books into an instant relic that people remember with a fond passing nostalgia and a cantankerous old man style anecdote: "Back in my day, books came on paper! And we read them uphill, in the snow, both ways!"

And I just think that the world in which e-readers or Kindles or Nooks or iPads or whatever your platform of choice is manage to cause the complete and utter end of physical books is a fantasy world that will probably never exist.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love me some technology. I use technology all the time and I secretly hope that someday, I'll get to be some sort of cool cyborg, with synthetic robot-muscles so that I don't have to put in two hours a day lifting heavy things and then spend two days groaning and wincing every time I lift my arm to brush my teeth. I think that our ability to create newer and better technology is our single greatest strength and it will be through better technology that we solve the majority of the world's problems. Creativity, ingenuity and trial-and-error will make a better tomorrow. Or at least, it will make a tomorrow in which we solved all of today's problems and managed to create a bunch of new ones, like the robot uprising of 2080.

Anyway, going back to books. I've been told more than once to let go of the dream to have a physical copy of my own book, that e-publishing is the future, etc. etc. I've heard it often enough that it's begun to seriously annoy me and prompt a response to those who believe that we're going to see the death of physical reading mediums in the next ten years. Also, and this is important, I'm not talking about news media; frankly, digital does news better than physical print, since it's faster, and speed is everything in news. We're only talking about books here. Hell, I'll narrow it down even further: we're only talking about fiction books.

I believe that there is one milestone that e-books will need to reach in order to overtake physical books: e-books will need to become a single platform, with universal compatibility and functionality. The e-readers will need to become priced in such a way that it makes their purchase a no-brainer. The books will need to be priced in such a way that it wouldn't make sense to buy them any other way. There will need to be a form of DRM that manages to prevent piracy from devouring sales, without punishing law-abiding users who just want the loan the book to a friend or want to know that they actually own their copy of the book.

Does that sound like a lot to you? Does that sound unrealistic?

How many new technologies have we seen fail to take hold over the past decade? How much market share does blu-ray have? How many people are jumping into the 3D revolution for movies and televisions and phones and video game systems? It seems like for every "revolutionary" new thing, there's something else that promises to be revolutionary and fails to latch on. Maybe it's predecessor is too well established. Maybe it's not revolutionary enough to catch on. Maybe it's too expensive. Or maybe it's gimmicky. It doesn't matter.

The point is, people don't like to be hassled. They don't like to have to fight with their technology. We like things simple and functional and right now, the e-reader market is something of a nightmare, because as far as I'm aware, the devices don't all play nicely with one another. What works for one thing won't necessarily work for another.

PC gaming is a world that demonstrates the problems of ownership. I don't buy PC games too often any more because the draconian DRM policies that exist these days make the entire process a nightmare and you can't really be certain that you're actually getting your own copy of the game you just spent sixty bucks on. I bought StarCraft back in the early 2000s and I've lost track of the number of computers I installed that copy onto. Can you say the same for today's PC games, or is it more likely that you'll have a "five install limit" or something equally irritating?

Dead tree books are cheap. They're ease to replace. They're ease to use, to own, to loan. They're hard to pirate and duplicate. They've been around forever. Most importantly, they're simple.

We like simple as a species, as a general rule of thumb.

And that is why I just shrug whenever I hear about the e-reader revolution, because I remember all the other revolutions, all the other new formats. Newer doesn't always take root. For every newfangled iPod, which did change the way we listen to music, there's blu-ray, which is a technology that's had plenty of time to permeate the market and still hasn't managed to dethrone dvds.

I think that e-readers are a very neat toy. I think that they'll probably be around and hopefully create some very slick new functions and interactivity.

I think that they will never manage to drive physical books into oblivion. The dead tree book just has too much going for it on the consumer's side of things.

And that's why I continue to look forward to the day that I'll own my own book in convenient dead tree format.