The Death of Print

Originally posted by Grifter42
reply to post by horseplay

 

All the more better, another reader, but something tells me you're in your thirties to early forties. The way you write, maybe. And although Black Beauty is a classic, horses are still incredibly creepy with their bulging eyes and huge teeth and the fact they could kick you to death in an instant if they decided on it... But I digress...

It's the modern generation that there's a problem with. My generation. I'm 20, and nobody I know reads unless they're forced into it, and that's no way to learn about books. TPTB have had to have considered it. B.F. Skinner wrote about positive and negative reinforcement. There's no positive reinforcement in place to teach kids how to read.

Funny Grifter, thank you for the compliment on my age. And I've now owned horses for over 35 years and still enjoy their companionship. I guess you've never had a personal relationship with an equine....

I agree, the modern generation has not enjoyed the simple pleasure of reading a good paper book and it's a shame. I went to school well before the age of computers. Our only escape from reading an entire novel was to buy cliff notes for a test. And you still had to read that.

I will look into B.F. Skinner, I've heard the name but don't know what he is about. And you are right, there is no incentive anymore for the younger generation to read an actual paper book. For people my age and older it's a bit of a novelty anymore which is a shame. But I will adamantly claim that my eyesight did not start failing until I worked with computers. I cannot read my prescription bottles without reading glasses anymore.

I remember the first time I realized that people who didn't read books as children did not fully or, in some cases, even partially, have the ability to "create" a scene in their brains. When we read we create an image, not stare at an image. People who never learned to read did not turn-on the area of the brain which allows them to "see" concepts, alternatives, and potentials as much as those who are drawn to reading.

reply to post by Aleister


People these days have little imagination, it seems. How many remakes or rehashes do you see these days? Too many for comfort. You've got things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Orwell would turn over in his grave reading that prole-feed. And creating a mental image requires a sort of focus and mental power that the powers that be don't want the average person to have. Knowledge is power, and they want to concentrate that power as best as they can.

Books are precious, incredible objects. I only hope that we can somehow instill this into the younger generations. Books cannot be altered to fit the current status quo once you own them in print. The 'cloud' can.

My 7 year old son one day recently asked to borrow one of my books and picked out a 1950's copy of Stuart Little. He has yet to finish it, his biggest problem seems to be the ability to focus for very long. I have seen a drastic difference in his personal ability to focus in direct relation to the use of technology. It can be the TV, or a borrowed game for a brief time (I refuse to allow video games in my house, but occasionally an uncle lets him play angry birds) and his attitude gets whiny and short tempered. When we have been playing outside or reading, together or individually, he is a different child.

I was just reading Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to him the other day, and he was so excited that he could see the picture without a screen. A previous response reminded me of that, and I was floored, we have been reading together since birth, and I had no idea that he was unable to use his imagination that way. He has always had a good one, but that made me wonder where I have gone wrong.

My family has decided to homeschool to prevent the dumbing down of my children. They watch too many videos on the smart board that recognizes him and displays his photo as he approaches. It is a novelty for them to go into the school library once a week. I have been seeing the decline of print as well, and combined with the argument of dumbing us all down, with a young child in the school system (for now) I see that they have already succeeded. My sons love of books stems directly from my own, as for the rest of the children I know, with few exceptions, are disappointed and saddened by being gifted a book. Our society has effectively replaced books with technology in the lives of our children already.

To counter the arguments of e-readers being cheaper and more eco-friendly, I say go to your local thrift store or library sale, you are rescuing the precious paper from going in the trash, as well as buying books for pennies as people have pointed out. One of my favorite finds (until Christmas I guess) was "The Eclectic History of the United States" printed in 1880 and discarded from the library at the University of Virginia. I bought it at a library sale for.....wait for it...... a whopping .25 cents!!!! I have acquired Homers Iliad and Odyssey at my local thrift store for about $5. The fact that not many people even care about the books anymore has turned it into a rescue mission for me. The attitude that I seem to encounter about books sometimes is one of open hostility, I was actually openly mocked about being excited about the Dead Sea Scrolls encyclopedias that I got for Christmas.

Thanks for the thread! More people need to see it happening!S&F

reply to post by woodsmom


Sounds like good parenting. So many kids this generation are warped by overstimulation, both mentally by television and such, physically, and also pharmacologically with all the amphetamine stimulants they prescribe kids who cannot focus. Sure, give the kids speed because they can't pay attention in schools because they've conditioned to do nothing but play Xbox 360 and run over hookers in GTA. That'll turn out great.

Mind you, I don't know if I'd say video games cause violence. There may be a correlation. But I will go as far as to say video games rot your brain and rob you of creativity.

It might be easy parenting to plop a kid down in front of a TV and have him play a video game for hours without interruption. Hey, keeps the kids out of the parent's hair. But just for a second, think about what it's doing to the kid. And for that matter, one's wallet! The system itself costs several hundred dollars, the games, sixty bucks a pop, and all the time you're playing it, you're running up the electric bill.

Or you could just go with a good book. Second hand, it'd cost practically nothing, maybe a buck, at the library, they're free to check out, and with books, you'll never have to worry about not paying the reading bill and having your literacy turned off.

I must confess to being a recent convert to eBook readers. I would now be lost without access to my kindle library. The great thing is I can access this library from my phone when travelling, from my laptop when lazing around the house, from my work computer when things are slow, and from my kindle when at the beach or lying in bed. If my kindle breaks big deal they cost less than £70 and it gives me access to literally thousands of books.

Admittedly looking at the Amazon top seller list will begin to make you lose faith in humanity with 90% of the books being of the "steamy" bodice ripper variety Fifty Shades fo grey bleh. But if you go to an ebook site like Project Gutenburg the top (free) down loads are the likes of Ulysses, Great expectations, Beowulf and The Adventures of Hucklebury Fin. and this site has over 40,000 free books available..

I have read books voraciously my whole life, but have always read SF, horror, fantasy or action books (Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher! WTF) But since getting my first Kindle I have read hundreds of classics that I would never have considered before, simply because they are there at my fingertips.

Will this be the death of print? I don't think so, if some one loves a specific book they will want to have a hard copy. Will this enable that evil shadow government to alter our literature to it's own evil purpose? I doubt it. I can guarantee you, change the wording in the classics and some one will be all over it right quick. Was reading the original (eBook)version of Dr Doolittle to my daughter yesterday, when the Parrot Polynesia started going on about those N***rs back in Africa, so while I don't know about the NWO changing the text I know I sure did when reading it..

And there are now so many self publishing authors out there that any government sponsored hype is easily drowned out by the waves of pulp..But the great thing is among those waves many pearls do shine through that would never have seen the light of day without eBooks.

And for the older of us out there you can't beat adjustable font sizes!

Now back to the Life of Pi. great movie, better book! ebook that is..

CTH

reply to post by CthulhuRising


What are you gonna do when the grid collapses, oil runs out, and there's no more electricity? That fancy collection of a thousand books on your Kindle is gonna be nothing more than a paper weight. Where as a collection of a thousand books horded all together is a good asset in a post-oil world. You've got reading material, you've got better kindling than a Kindle, you've got toilet paper if you're desperate, and probably a bunch of other uses. Electronics is unreliable.

reply to post by Grifter42


IF it all collapses and TSHF the greater population of Malta would be dust within weeks! I somehow doubt a hoard of a coupe thousand paper books would be that great and assest compared to the need to find fresh food and water.This place is an isolated rock in the middle on nowhere. Until such time as the need to fight off the zombie apocolypse comes I will be happily reading as many books as my internet searching can find..While I agree when it all come down to it a kindle will be pretty useless. but trust me so will a tonne of paper books if you have to make a run for it..Can't carry that library with you..

CTH

Try to cook your road warrior food without kindling. It's gonna be hard work, and if the nuclear fires have already burnt up all the trees into ashes, who's gonna be laughing then?
You folks will all be eating cold long pork while I'll at least be able to cook my few remaining meals before the radiation or mutants kill me.
And, in the mean time, I'd be able to read and pass the time.

In the really olden days, there were no books.
Everything was transmiitted and received, whether via word or by demonstrative action.

Now we are emerging from the book age.
No secrets in the future.
Even your thoughts one day will be read and archived.
And then we will know of hell on Earth.
The Jackboot that stomps your face forever.
Facism,,communism, the evil one.

I have been thinking for a while that these e books were "evil" so to speak. I had to look twice at the name when I saw Amazon's reader was called "Kindle". I suppose you could interpret that in different ways but the first thing that popped into my head was turning paper books into kindling. Or, burning books, essentially.

Real books are solid. They're not going anywhere. You put one on a shelf and come back in 20 years and if nothing bad has happened to it, it will still say exactly the same thing it did when you put it there. An electronic "book"? I wonder just what kind of tampering TPTB could do with these if they wanted to change the contents of the books?

Paranoid? Maybe. But we all know how easy it is to edit a file. It would be very difficult for Big Brother to reach out and destroy all copies of banned books if they were real books stored on shelves in people's homes. Maybe not quite so difficult if they're e books in an age where all buying and selling is tracked and records are kept.

I have two types of books - ones I read for pleasure and ones I read to be informed.

The ones just for pleasure usually are purchased as ebooks (saves me from adding to my library too fast - the wife is already upset at all the books I keep around). On the other hand, the informational books are all bounded print with some of them also being duplicated in ebook format (case I need to read on the go or something)

My paper books can be highlighted in, I can scribble notes in the margins, and best of all I can turn right to the part I need to read when I need to look something up. The biggest thing stopping me from going 100% digital is the last. Although I might be able to annotate, highlight and cross reference something in an ebook. I have yet been able to just "jump" to where I know I need to look - sure I might be able to search, but if I need to look up a particular passage I don't remember exactly what page number it was on and I don't particularly remember the wording of the passage I need to look for. I only know, generally, where it was in the book when I was reading it.

Here is the tactile experience: I know I the thing I need to look up was in the first half of the book. I flip through a handful of pages and start to recognize where I am IRT the passage I am seeking. Eventually I remember the page before or page after the one I am looking for and - magically - I appear at the point in the book I was looking for. If you could replicate that capacity on an ereader I'd go 100% digital - God knows I don't need another large oak bookshelf. But until I can get just as comfortable with that flipping, I'm sticking with my important pieces in paper.

The biggest problem is that you will soon have little choice in the matter although new advances may even cure the printing problem.

The old printing empires are dying as we speak. New Authors cannot get a foot in the door of the big Publishers. Many printed books are pulped because it is easier for big stores like Walmart to simply throw out whatever is on the shelf and reorder what is trending. They often re-order books they have just trashed. From the Publisher to the retailer, the whole train is one of profits above all else. Take a risk? Not often!

Indie Publishing is where it is all at and most of that begins with e-books. If a book is successful as an e-book, the large publishers may pick it up. However the other option for indie authors is the print on demand production.

With these models, the author makes more than half of the money, they all get to publish and the public decide if a book is good or bad. It seems to be the way of the future. Under this model, if you want a paperback, you pay the extra. In the end, the people win. Books are far cheaper as e-books and about what they are now for paperbacks.

P

I don't think books will completely die out in our lifetime. There are a lot of people, including me, that enjoy flipping the pages instead of staring into the glow of a screen. If they do stop printing books, there are already a million books out there already and the classics are better than anything they write now.

oops, double post

reply to post by Sunglower


There are a million vinyl albums out, and vinyl's a great storage medium, but if you don't have a record player, you can't enjoy them. Likewise, if you've had literacy marginalized into a sort of 1984 meets Idiocracy serf language, you're not gonna be doing much reading. Ads, simplified things the government will want you to understand, and so on. You know, Newspeak. I think Orwell was very prophetic about that.

When Rome was sacked they burned all the books. 500 years of knowledge gone. How much further along would civilization be if those books had not been burned? If most of the knowledge we have today relied purely on computers/electricity think of how far back civilization will be thrust if the unthinkable happens. Putting our knowledge on paper must continue if only to save it for future generations.

I have an insane amount books, and no room left anymore. I was going to the library multiple times a week. I loved joining book challenge groups. One was to read 100 books in a year. I made it to 140. All with books from the library.

But this past summer, I used birthday money from family and some savings bonds I had from a long time ago, and bought myself an iPad. I bought it mainly because I don't have a cell phone, nor can pay for the monthly bill, but with the iPad I can text people and call people for free over wi-fi which really comes in handy when I'm out somewhere (Along with many other reasons I love it so much). I didn't think I would like reading books on it so much, but I do. I love it. I have 300+ books on it right now, that I can carry around anywhere. So whatever I am in the mood for, there it is! Again, it's just so convenient. I still have regular paper books I buy sometimes, especially the few that haven't come out in an ebook format yet.

I like to read while taking a nice bath, and I'm too paranoid about bringing my iPad in the bath tub because of how much money that thing cost. So that's the only downside. I still think that nothing beats the feel, look and that smell of a paper book I love that smell of a new book!

I'm cursed. I have a hard time getting through a whole book because I have this problem where I keep getting "stuck" on a paragraph or sentence and I keep having to read it over and over again before it makes sense. Because of this, I'd say it takes me much longer to read a book than it takes the average person.

It's not that I don't understand what I'm reading. My mind just wanders or something.

When I was young, I had that problem. I solved it for myself by using a card, or a book mark, or something like that, to just cover everything but the line I was reading and move it down gradually as I read the page. But eventually, I trained myself out of it, But bookmarks are still handy. Can't dogear library books. It's not good form. I'm guilty of it though, I dog ear my own books to hell and back. Gotta keep track of em somehow.