We’ll Never Survive By Our Wits Alone – a Blast From The Past From May 2011
Three days ago, I took it upon myself to dispute the conclusions of Michael Levin writing in the Forbes blog and prophesying the end of the book. Not just the end of the paper book, or the end of the book as we know it, but the end of the book, period.
He seemed to believe it was at least in part suicide, with the publishers choosing to publish a lot of things that no one really wanted to buy, and – as it were – metaphorically standing at the end of the abyss saying “stop me before I jump.” In this scenario, Amazon came along and gave the final shove.
Perhaps because economics is my hobby, I tend to look at the same scenario – and I’ll admit Michael is right – grosso modo – about the scenario – and see the free market at work. Or perhaps more accurately, the iron law of economics at work: if there is a market that’s being badly served and someone else comes up with a way to serve it better, the model will change and the old way of doing things die out. Or in other words (sorry, writing this late at night after a day spent packing for two weeks abroad) if you build a better mousetrap the manufacturers of inferior mousetraps will go out of business.
So far so good. What I disagreed – and disagree – with is the disappearance of the book as such. Michael, who, it turns out, is a good sport and didn’t even get upset at my calling him Mark – Okay, didn’t get VERY upset – (It’s something I do to Michaels. My friend Michael Kabongo has been for some time “Tony” to our circle of friends. No, he doesn’t like it, so I wouldn’t advise trying it.) but his comment in the “about” section of my blog clarified his argument.
Dear Sarah,
Many thanks for reading and responding so passionately to my piece about publishing in Forbes. The reality is that there are more of them than there are of you and me, in that you and I pay for content and others don’t, or won’t in the future. Maybe I’m as wrong as you say. But my first name is Michael, not Mark, so perhaps we both have a right to be wrong! I enjoyed your piece and am glad that you saw fit to write about it. Warmly, Mark no wait Michael
(I think by “passionately” he means that I’m excitable. That’s fine. I am. My husband says so, and he knows me quite well.)
His next statement however raises eyebrows. For more on this, look at the Baen Free Library. Also, note that Baen has long run its ebook section on low prices and no DRM and far from having a loss continues to thrive.
For yet more corroboration that piracy alone won’t kill an industry, look at music. Yes, it’s completely different from before going electronic, but again, provided the price is reasonable and there’s no DRM you’ve eliminated two reasons to pirate: costs, and because it’s a challenge. Music for money still exists and it still supports artists.
The caveat here is that Michael works, mostly, in non fiction. I’m not sure of the mechanics for non-fiction. I know in fiction, most people have an instinctive understanding that only this writer could produce this work, and if the writer starves in his lonely little attic, you won’t have any more… Honor, or Athena, or Captain Vimes, or…
I’m not sure the same understanding applies to non fiction. It’s entirely possible that people just assume there’s no intrinsic virtue to how-to or non-fic, that the info was there, if anyone else had collected. Non-fic might fall under the misguided apprehension that “data wants to be free.”
Also, because some non fic, at least (school books) is unlikely to crawl out from under the thumb of the big houses any time soon, it will probably be overpriced and DRMed to the gills.
So Michael might be right. It might be the end of a TYPE of book. I don’t think so, but I’ll concede the point that on THAT I have no other proof than a gut feeling that once people realize the stuff you can get for free is worth what you pay for it, they will realize non-fic writers need to live also.
However, as I told Michael Levin, in my answer to his comment, the future is notoriously hard to make predictions about, particularly when it hasn’t happened, yet. I will admit for non-fic he might very well be right, which means the market will transmute to another media. I’m going to guess specialized how-to and non-fic blogs, probably supported by contributions.
UPDATE FROM 2023: Ah. I was right. Books have no gone away. Not fiction and not non-fiction. In fact, I’ve recently found it hard to figure out if a well researched book on, say the revolutionary war, is traditional or indy. And indy tends to have the lead. Why? because people write these non-fiction books about their passion: something they’ve been working on their whole lives.
Now I grant you this might be harder to make a living from — I don’t know. I imagine no one ever made a living from the incredibly specialized books I tend to buy or want as reference for writing. I mean one of the biographies of Marlowe I bought way back cost me $250 because it had a print run of 80. No. I’m no missing a zero. 80. — and that if you really want to write about the plight of the inhabitants of some small village in Greece it will be hard to raise the money to travel there. Then again if it’s an interesting enough book, you can fund it with your future readers. I’ve seen people do it.
So, just for the record:
How it started: “ZOMG the book will stop existing.”
How it’s going: Not even remotely so. People do pay for the books they want, because pirating is hazardous and whatever you download is probably infected, but mostly it’s not convenient to go hopping trying to find it for “free.”
It might be sometimes you pay for the convenience of having the book available and appear on your device immediately, but you still pay.
And most of the time, it’s worth the cost.
According To Hoyt 
Just as a note for future reference, my wife Carol was saying that sometime when you’re doing a Blast from the Past, she’d really like to see the material on solar physics and its effects on terrestrial climate again.
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Do not forget Axial Progression in any climate figuring. The Earth wobbles on it’s Axis, which takes roughly 26,000 years to complete a wobble cycle. That moves the poles away and closer to the sun. Which increases and decreases the angle the sun light strikes the Earth. Combine that with the natural sun cycles and walla you have a planet that warms and cools all by itself.
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That is my view.
Yes. Climate is warming, or not. No. We humans do not have a significant effect no matter what we do. OTOH I do not want water, soil, or air, or whatever environment we depend on, *poisonous to me, mine, or anything. In that respect I am an environmentalist. But resources are ours to use responsibly. A case in point. Leaving, non-wilderness burnt and dead sticks standing and not harvesting everything viable until no longer viable (don’t know what that point is anymore) is criminally stupid. Drop the existing harvest plans in areas not burned in 2020, 2021, 2022, etc., and harvest the burned areas. Note, that is exactly what the commercial private timberland owners have done. Scrapped their established harvest plans, then went in and harvested everything viable on the lands that have burned. Then they will replant. We might have driven the area affected by the Holiday fire yesterday. Also drove through National Parks both Canada and US of areas affected by wildfire. Letting those areas naturally recover is the correct action. The governmental non-wilderness areas, letting them stand fallow to recover naturally, is a travesty.
(*) Direct experience of ash and smoke in the air as growing up, every fall. As reminded over the last few years with wildfires. Only before deliberate burning, both timber logging slash, and harvested grass fields. The rest experienced as news: burning rivers, and current water contamination problems in other areas.
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Until the last 30 years or so, conservation included the idea of “wise use.” As the father of American Forestry, Gifford Pinchot, explained, it is like a family having lamb leg on Sunday, lamb hash on Monday, and then making broth with the remains still on the bone. That’s conserving. Which is what we should be doing with the environment, including NOT suppressing burns unless the danger to people is too great. There is no “wilderness” forest that wasn’t managed by Native Americans prior to the coming of Europeans, unless it was so far up the mountain, or in a swamp and so didn’t/couldn’t burn.
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Agree. My complaint is what happens in specific areas that do burn, after the burn. We still need wood.
100%. Of coarse in my neck of the woods those not burned by the natives were the mountains. But then natural lightening process took care of that. Oregon State Forestry has research that shows there is now more timberland (in Oregon specifically) than there was when the first European settlers migrated to the west coast, explicitly because of modern forestry practices (which includes suppressing and stopping the big wildfires like Tilamook and Oxbow fires of the early 1900’s).
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One of the things that stuck me when we were last in Europe, every single stand of trees we saw while we were there were in grids. Some were hexagonal, some were square, but there was always an angle where you could see they were in rows, and it didn’t matter how tall the trees were.
Don’t know if it was all like that,, it everything we saw there was.
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Yeah, well that was a result of some decisions about forests that were — counterproductive.
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There are managed forests, like the ones you saw, and others that have been allowed to revert to mixed stands. There is some private forest that was never under “scientific forestry” like the rows on rows on rows of similar aged trees, mostly in France and areas outside the 1871 borders of Germany.
In fact, when the Prussians were given the Rhineland after Napoleon’s defeat, they cut down as many of the leafy trees as they could find, because oaks, beeches, and so on were “wasteful” or inefficient. They planted pine and other commercial stands instead. Then they ran out the people who had used the forests. Guess who was the first to go when the 1848 Revolution came? You got it. The Prussian forest rangers.
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For some reason, that appears to be cross-cultural; ask Robin of Locksley his opinion of forest laws and those who enforce them… 8-)
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Might be an inaccurate impression, but the one I get of the Prussians is…not cool. That is not a culture I would’ve got along with, and I suspect few people who came in contact with them would disagree.
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The bureaucracy and military (but I repeat myself) were rough on the neighbors. Why Prussia went that way has generated more argument than you want to wade through, in German and English (and Polish I suspect). Several groups blame the Thirty Years War and the decision by the Great Elector (Fredrick the Great’s Grandfather) to ensure that it never happened again. His solution was to 1) make government service a requirement for staying in the nobility and 2) to set up an army with a country attached. Toss in some odd interpretations of Lutheranism, and a defensive mindset that came from being a frontier for ever and ever, and … I’m not sure if they are right. I pretty much ignore the history of that part of the world from the end of the Northern Crusades to 1800.
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I think part of the “special quality” of the Prussians came from the Order of Teutonic Knights. These were once one of several crusading orders of soldier-monks, all of them among the best soldiers that ever lived, but either dour sexless fanatics in reality, or required to act like dour sexless fanatics whenever a superior might be looking. Most of these orders were either dissolved like the Templars as the crusades ended, or turned into sad remnants like the Hospitallers hanging on in Malta.
The Teutonic Knights didn’t let their crusade fade away. It was not in the Middle East, but eastward from Germany. They helped defeat the Mongols, preserve Poland and Lithuania, and free the northern Rus towns from the Golden Horde so they could grow into Russia. But they attacked whoever held land they wanted, whether pagan, non-Roman Christians, and probably even Roman Catholic Poles and Lithuanians. They became the rulers of Prussia proper, that is, an area between Poland and Lithuania, probably also including land carved out of both these nations. They lasted right through the Renaissance, ending only when the last Grand Master converted to Lutheran and turned the order’s holdings over to his Hohenzollern kin, the Elector of Brandenburg. The Teutonic Knights that were willing to convert with him became the core of the Prussian Army. These knightly former monks swore allegiance to Brandenburg/Prussia, were granted feudal estates and titles, married, and bred a noble hereditary officer corps that carried on the monk-soldiers’ military traditions.
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A pair of world wars essentially stripped regions of trees. Either by cutting for use or blasting with explosives.
The pre fossil fuel Era essentially deforested the place through overharvest. At the end of the age of sail, British warships were of weak splinter-prone pine, that being what grew fast enough for their shipbuilding.
Our late-sail warships were mostly made of local oak, including the effectively-armor Live Oak of our South. Thus USS Constitution mostly shrugging off even Carronade fire.
Some countries went on a tree planting bender in the 20th century. Thus the rows you saw.
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Joachim Radkau, Wood: A History and Oliver Rackham’s books about forests and timer in England tell a slightly different story about the Royal Navy and wood, ditto Europe. The long version is that the “wood famine” wasn’t quite what later people thought. Forestry management for different uses goes back to the Middle Ages, and in some ways, modern “scientific forestry” messed up the system, more so in Europe than in England. After WWI? Oh lordy, do not ask a Scottish conservationist about the pine farms unless you want to learn some new invective.
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Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman.
With its inaccurate subtitle. In England, coal was used as the primary fuel instead of wood for everyone except the very rich (and solely the adults among the rich) starting in Elizabethan times.
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notes down your books and Mary’s Don’t mind me, just farming for sources. lurks
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who, me? recommend a book because you might like to read it? me?
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I’d include clear cutting; harvesting what’s harvestable (Grounding everything else as future fertilizer.) as a conversation tool.
Not applicable everywhere but here atop the world for example; our cycle is grasses and sedges, followed by willow, birch and poplar, with spruce as the climax forest. Plenty of food and habitat for wild critters until the spruce take over, then it’s mostly squirrel country. Then of course, followed by a burn and it starts again
If I had my druthers, I’d much prefer a clear cutter harvesting the spruce near and on my property, than a lighting strike, uncontrolled campfire or controlled (Hopefully not by the Women-in-Fire Training Exchange that were down at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.) burn to clear the spruce, which, since it’s a cycle, is, sooner or later, inevitable.
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Jasper is one “Oh-S*” lightening strike away from disaster. Between the spruce and the lodge pole pine beetle kill. It was bad in 2019. It is worse now. Dodged it in 2022 with a lightening strike in east side of the park. Prevailing winds took the fire east. Lost infrastructure as their power comes from that direction. But the town was spared. Now a strike on the west side of the park, and they are in trouble.
Waterton had a major fire in 2017. Started with an evening lightening strike in BC wilderness just to the west. By the time the fire was noticed it was already racing to Waterton. Town evacuated, and many ranches to the east. They got lucky. Town was spared, did stop at the prairie rather than race across that. Took out most trees west of the town. Brush/prairie is coming back along the Red Rock Canyon road (where we saw the black bear sow and her cub). But the other major road up a very steep canyon is not recovering as well. Thin soil on rock.
FWIW (which is nothing) agree. Clear cuts, at least in the PNW mountains) act as natural small fires did historically. While conditions can, and did even then, overwhelm and the small clearings won’t stop wildfire, in general the clearings do, whether created “naturally” or because clear cutting.
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“not harvesting everything viable until no longer viable (don’t know what that point is anymore)”
I think it’s about 2 to 3 years before the fire-killed timber is completely useless.
So not very long.
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What I remember. (It has been 44 year since school and never practiced.) The dead standing burnt timber becomes a mecca for bug hunters (like woodpeckers). Timber off of St. Helen damaged by the blast, that was about 18 months. But it wasn’t just burned, it was blasted and cooked.
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The “environmentalists” fought salvage logging in the 2002 Biscuit fire (200,000 acres) near Brookings at the SW Oregon until the timber was useless. Seems they pulled the Spotted Owl trick and did every bit of lawfare they could until the logging outfits gave up.
A few years ago, one of the biggerfires near Brookings (also 200,000 acres) was burning in the Biscuit’s dead-tree zone. The locals Are Not Happy with the owl-huggers. OTOH, I suspect it’s not safe for for a lone USFS weenie to show his face there at night. “We’ll watch your house during the fire.” (later: “It burned quite nicely. You’re welcome.”) The NIMO team that was there accumulated enough of those that people got right pissed.
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Also precession of earth’s tilt, thus its seasons.
Currently, northern hemisphere summer occurs while earth is further away from the sun, and winter while closer. This moderates significantly the severity of Northern hemisphere seasons. Since the majority of land is in that hemisphere, this significantly moderates glaciation.
Somewhat balancing this is having the continent of Antarctica sitting on the south pole, facilitating its ice cap. The isthmus of Panama blocked a previous ocean mixing, which removed a thermal moderator. This land layout net helps ice sheets.
When the axial tilt precesses to the reverse condition, that land arrangement becomes rather unbalanced in favor of ice caps at both ends. That is a positive feedback for cold.
The above mentioned axial wobble adds severity to some of those situations with greater tilt.
Combined with long term solar variability and volcanic variability for the occasional deep freeze.
We are coming due on rather cold snap, sometime between 10k years and soon.
Oh, and not serving our collectivist masters while shivering in the dark and starving, of course, overrides all of that.
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Oooh… I love solar physics! And orbital mechanics.
And the fun but weird stuff that happens when you have a sun that’s generating a magnetic pull, and planets doing the same, and all of these giant magnets are interacting with each other… and JUST that magnetic interaction has a heating effect!
I keep thinking that we need to be explaining all of this in much better ways to kids. If we make it exciting enough, the climate change alarmists’ delusions of grandeur would die a sudden and totally unmourned death, and we might actually take our government back in the next 10-20 years instead of having to wait more than 70 like the Russians did.
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We are actually one of the only species on Earth to try and clean up after ourselves, mainly because we can. Even bacteria if allowed to grow unimpeded will poison their own environment to the point it is unlivable. During the seventies it was not uncommon to see polluted rivers back east and in the rust belt catch on fire. So we as a species cleaned up after ourselves. It ain’t pristine but it is a whole hell of a lot better. We also saw that after the iron curtain fell that the Socialists were among the worst polluters on the planet. It has become quite apparent that socialists have taken over the movement to instill socialism, not clean up the planet. Which given Socialism’s track record will only increase pollution. Greta and all her ilk can burn in hell, the planets is fine, we as a species right now is crazy.
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Also, technology allowed us to find uses for what we’d been dumping, and to stop manufacturing certain things all together. A lot of states were doing environmental regulation and clean up before 1970, when the feds stomped in.
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The catchphrase and the assumption that we need to “save the planet…” Don’t get me started. (Nope, too late, I’ve already started.) :)
THE PLANET DOESN’T CARE. It will almost certainly kill us at some point if we don’t get off it, because that’s what it does (dinosaurs, etc., etc.), but we CANNOT kill it. Aren’t capable, probably never will be. It’s been through geological upheavals brutal enough to kill almost all forms of life (extreme volcanism, snowball planet, anaerobic atmosphere, oxygen-rich, ocean acidification, on and on) and then redeveloped various forms of life several times, all without our “help.” Even if we were capable of changing the global climate (which we’re probably not), the planet will be fine. Life will adapt and everything will go along here on planet Earth just dandy in the long run, with or without us.
The bizarre, monumental levels of combined hubris and self-loathing it takes to perpetuate the climate change disaster cult just boggle my mind.
Oh yeah…I also realized after reading a series of articles a few years ago that while absolutely VAST amounts of carbon have been sequestered by various organisms over the life of the planet, to the point where the holocene is almost bizarrely carbon-poor compared to previous geological eras, only one species has ever evolved to be capable of releasing mass amounts of it back into circulation: Humans.
So if there’s any guiding hand to life on this planet, or if Earth is some kind of super-organism within which we’re some kind of organelle or functional piece, we’re probably not a detrimental microbe equivalent making the planet sick, like the global warmist alarmists say. We’re more likely to have evolved/been put here to ensure that life as it has existed for the last billion-plus years continues to be viable (not that I think this is the case, but…)
/rant
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We are actually one of the only species on Earth to try and clean up after ourselves, mainly because we can.
A fun thing is getting folks to say how they think this si happening, minus humans.
…it goes kaboom.
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In some future, temporarily sane society, today’s wind “farms” and solar “farms” will appear in the same standard slideshow about the environmental horrors of socialism.
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The same standard slideshow along with the poisoned Soviet lakes.
What I get for trying to post on the way out the door for a grocery run…
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Agreed, although it won’t be 70 years. 10-20 at most. We don’t have anyone to prop us up the way we propped yp the USSR for 65 of the 70 years.
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THIS.
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Ummm…the Russians are still ‘waiting to take their government back’. One repressive totalitarian regime collapsed, and another one took its place, only with Moar Kakistocracy. Russian ballots have even less effect than American ballots.
———————————
Grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.
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Yeah, I just knew someone was going to point that out… LOL Well, I keep hoping they’ll get to release their freedom ducks to quack madly all over the place, but–I expect it will have to wait until the current regime loses its clutch-fist hold on their government.
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Do the Russians even have any Freedom Ducks? Russians expect their government to suck, because it always has. If the Russian government didn’t suck, the people wouldn’t know what to do. :-P
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THIS THIS THIS THIS. D*MN IT THIS.
They equate good government with stronk leader, keeps foot on neck.
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HOWEVER please keep in mind that RUSSIANS don’t have a culture of liberty. never did, it’s a question if they CAN.
CULTURE MAKES A DIFFERENCE.
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Going to echo what Imaginos and our hostess have said. The Russians don’t think the way we do. They are very fatalistic, all the way back through their history. The Soviets accentuated this and brought it forth to full blown cultural depression, but they just finished the work of the Tsars on that.
“Long ago, when the Tsar lived in Kiev.” This is their ‘once upon a time’ or was from about the time of Ivan the Terrible. (And the KGB goes back in a direct line to his Operchiniks.)
What is more likely to happen is we will go back to ‘all the Russias’. The Rus are not a unified people. They function, psychologically, around one Great Leader, and everyone else is fungible. It’s Head of House and then Tsar, everyone else is interchangeable in their structure. (gave the nobles of Ivan the Terrible’s time absolute fits.) Putin has no heir. None of the folk Putin’s trusted are strong enough, in and of themselves, to actually hold things together or he’d have offed them. Russia will go back to taking care of their House. And we’ll have Russian Semi-city states. Like in the time of Alesander Nevsky. A hundred countries calling them Russia.
If I’m wrong and there IS someone strong enough to hold things together, they’re like to have the same kind of issues they had after Stalin died. Rapid change over of many leaders until someone strong enough emerges. And this is what the people EXPECT. It doesn’t occur to them to try a completely different system. And after the Soviets they’re likely to just go back to open Tsars and have done with it.
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Add to that …
Our core is oversized. Thus it has a strong magnetic field, and it will take a very long time for the core to cool off enough to solidify the outer liquid core and shut off the dynamo that creates that shielding magnetic field.
The core of Mars went solid long ago, and shut down. Thus Mars lost most of its atmosphere to solar wind.
Also helping earth, our large core appears to contain significant quantities of Uranium. (A little goes a long way) At the super dense and hot conditions there, natural fission contributes a small amount of heat to keep things going.
A working hypothesis is that a major body collision near the end of the early acreation period formed a wobbling hot mess. The moon formed from the light end of the wobbler spinning off, thus it had almost no dense core material. Earth got the bulk of the dense stuff.
Thus, “just right” long enough for us to show up, with a lengthy potential future residency.
When our core finally solidifies, and the magnetic field fades to what remains of permanently magnetized iron, we lose most our atmosphere in about a millennium. But that is a very long way off.
The sun will be much hotter by then, so we will probably long previously have moved on.
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Dense metallic core, and billions of volts of electricity/energy coming in through the north pole from the sun. We see it by the charged particles interacting with the magnetic fields as the aurora borealis, and what happens when electricity travels through a conductor? You get current flow, a magnetic field is formed, and heat is produced. That is also added to by the magnetic field produced by this energy flow traveling through the magnetic field of the sun itself. The mathematics involved in just one nano second of the earth just existing as a magnetic chunk of rock in space is truly mind boggling.
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I’d have to ask Steph to run it again. I don’t like doing guest posts as BFP without permission.
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Oh, sure. That’s completely fair. I don’t think she was asking you to run it again immediately, right now. She just was hoping you might be able to make arrangements to do so sometime, whenever you have enough time and free brain cells to arrange it.
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We’re going to be…. a-traveling in what Dan calls the grand tour — annoying but unavoidable — for two weeks at the end of July. I might do it then, because posts will be weird due to internet issues.
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Often, pirates worst enemies were other pirates. Which is why went you go hunting for pirated copies of e-books, there should be a big splash page on the search engine saying, “HERE BE MONSTERS!”
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I’m forbidden from going on the torrents.
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I’m grateful for Gutenberg. Downloaded the remaining Lensman books and now happily rereading Masters of the Vortex. (Wherein you discover the Patrol actually has female officers, at least as scientific specialists).
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Wasn’t Clarrissa MacDougal in the Patrol when she was serving as a nurse? Dr. Lacy certainly seems to have been, and she largely worked for him.
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I believe so.
Of course, Clarrissa was the first woman to have a Lens.
On the other hand, Doc Smith was reported to have said that he should have had other female Lensmen before her.
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Well, he did justify the sexual bias for lenses on men and women being wired differently, in all species. Logically, there would be some overlap in the two populations from a biological and morphological/developmental standpoint; but when you throw the ethical/moral requirements in, that would pretty much rule out any women other than sports like Clarissa, or her daughters.
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I came up with another reason for the ban on females: potential female Lensmen would be likely to be valuable in the breeding program, therefore keeping them out of chronic danger (and exposure to radiation) was logical.
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Ooo. Good point! Excessive radiation exposure would have complicated the Arisians genetic manipulation programs and schedules. Not that radiation doesn’t effect men too. After all, our genetic storage units (is that tactful enough?) are more exposed without a couple of inches of protecting tissue around them.
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On the other other hand, she was in the nursing corps of the Galactic Patrol, and that was before she got her Lens. The Galactic Patrol had at least that role for women.
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And of course after Clarissa (and Kim) there are 4 female “Lensman”, their daughters. Of course they didnt go through the Galactic Patrols academy like Kim or Kit, but they are L3 lensman able to manifest lenses at need, and extremely powerful.
To be honest that there were no female Lensman which is essentially a military/police function in its initial phases is unsurprising given when it was written (1938-1950 for the main story, 1960). Compare with Heinleins Starship troopers where there are no women in the MI (though they serve in Naval capacities) or with Dickinsons Dorsai where the mercenary Dorsai are all male (although the planet of Dorsai is attacked and an army of Women, oldsters and children rout the attackers at one point).
I’ve always thought that if one wanted to bring Lensman to the screen a couple tweeks would be needed to make it palatable to modern tastes. Just please don’t do a current take and swap a strong Female lead for Kimball Kinisson and gingericide Clarissa :-) .
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Alas, the textbook market had gotten even worse since 2011. Finding a print edition of a relatively current textbook is … very difficult. One major publisher has gone 100% electronic. I pointed out to their rep that some students don’t have full-time internet access, and others have great difficulty reading on screen, and that the regional electrical grid can be wonky at times. After some blinking, the suggestion was provide laptops to the students and set up public hot spots. Facepaw
Oh, yeah. The kids read print for fun, because so stinkin’ many now associate “on screen” with work.
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The younger generations’ perception of paper mail switched away from “probably junk” to “might be interesting” quite some time ago. When we wanted to wow ’em in the college recruitment world, we did up a really spiffy paper piece (and coupled it with digital communications too, of course).
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I echo your facepaw, and add a resounding “Rrrrrargh!”
I do not learn well from books-on-screen. The computer hum is too distracting! Dead tree books are the absolute best for reading, re-reading, and cogitating on a Difficult Subject.
…Also just a heck of a lot easier to have several open to different pages at once when you’re trying to chase a particular subject from different POVs.
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My daughter, 12 going on 20 (aaaahhhhh, the tween/teen years), prefers her fun reading on paper. Almost all of her school work is on a tablet. You want to see an example of how the public schools system isn’t actually about education? All of the studies I’m aware of say that too much screen time is bad for your health and causes issues with a good night’s sleep. But that’s where all the schools, at least around here, are pushing kids to “learn” from.
Myself, reading for entertainment is done on an eReader (currently a Kindle Paperwhite, but I still have my old Nook Simple Touch that works just as well), while anything I’m doing for learning is done on paper (Hello Thomas Sowell).
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Twenty plus years ago, Pop self published a nonfic in his area of expertise. He sold out his first printing of 6000, although it took years.
Despite being an IT geek in a bleeding-edge tech firm, I still prefer book in hand to screenscrolling. I tend to buy hardbacks.
Books ain’t goin away anytime this century.
Now if they would quit using that sh!tty acid paper…. Never ceases to p!ss me off to pull a treasured volume off the shelf only to see it is browning like toast.
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Books have a big advantage in viewable real estate. It is extremely easy to flip between two or three pages at opposite ends of the thing if that’s where the info you need it. Ebooks, that is much harder to do.
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Not on the kindle. BUT I like research on paper for some reason.
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@ Sarah > ” I like research on paper for some reason”
Making notes in the margins, not always complimentary to the author — or is that just me?
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LOL. Dad trained me so hard never to write in a book, that I make my notes in sticky notes, but yes.
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I was also trained to never write in a book. I didn’t even use a highlighter in my college textbooks.
My wife finds it weird that I don’t have any of my bible all marked up like hers.
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Maps. Even with hot-linked things in the Kindle, trying to go back and forth between maps and text is very difficult. It’s better than it was, but still not great. I like paper for things with maps. Also, some charts and tables don’t translate well into e-books (pagination where it should not be, and so on.)
Footnotes/endnotes as well, but I’m Odd and academic about that.
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Someone once observed that with ebooks we reverted from the codex to the scroll.
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Yes. One of the more frustrating parts of the auto-dictionary in the Kindle is the fact that it’s not easy* to look up a different word than the one that got me to the dictionary.
(*) I might have misspelled “freaking near impossible”.
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I find myself preferring fiction in ebook, largely because I ran out of room for hardbacks. I gave away some boxes of books to the local library, where some might have worked into the stacks, while others would go for the rummage sales. (The local branch doesn’t have a lot of money. Nor space, but they do OK with what they have.)
OTOH, for non-fiction, I usually prefer paper. The Good Idea Fairy visited and recommended that I re-order the music on the thumb drives for the vehicles, and after diving into the rabbit hole, I realized I needed to use a language I hadn’t programmed in for over 20 years. Hard copy to the rescue. Thank you, O’Reilly for the Camel book. And, my 1996 edition is still filled with white pages.
For ebooks, I use the Kindle. It’s very difficult for me to use a laptop or desktop to read an ebook. Not sure just why, but those are good for blogs, but not books. (I’ll go through ACOUP articles which touch the limits of my sitting time, but I haven’t bothered to put a decent web browser in the 2014 era Kindle.)
(Makes mental note to look into tablets that can be upgraded to a Linux distro.)
(OK, WordPress, why the random avatar cartoons? Ever hear of consistancy?)
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I use my Andorid phone for ebooks both Nook and Kindle. Also use a small screen computer (MS Surface). One thing that has helped with the computer reading is something Costco calls “Blue” something. Developed explicitly to reduce stress from using computer/phone screens for reading.
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Hm. Would that “random” drive folks to sign up to get a permanent?
Once isn’t necessarily happenstance.
(Grin)
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For research, I prefer book in hand. For pleasure I use the kindle. It’s kinder on old eyes. (Kindle e-ink, not fire.)
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I don’t read books on my phone, ever, not solely because of small print, but because when I read, I’m taking in a sentence on the context of the whole page. Having my field of view trimmed down to just a couple of sentences is like being allowed to look at The School of Athens or Starry Night one two-inch square of paint at a time. I don’t even like to read on a tablet sized screen. When I read e-books, I usually do it sitting at my desk with a 27-inch screen to work with. And that’s just as important for fiction as for nonfiction.
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I also don’t read on my phone. My husband does. i don’t even understand it. would drive me nuts. I read too fast for that.
BUT the Kindle Oasis works well for me.
And btw I figured out what they think they’re doing — it’s stupid, but honestly stupid –w ith their drm bs. Again, it’s stupid,a nd could be solved by hiring people instead of robots.
I probably SHOULD write on it.
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I would find it annoying to read on my phone if I had to tap the screen to turn the page. But since both my preferred ePub reader and the Kindle app have “press the volume keys to go forward or back one page”, I can just hold the phone with my finger on the volume key and it feels smooth. I just apply the tiniest bit of pressure with my finger every half a minute, and new words keep appearing on the screen. (I also turned off that dumb “page turn” animation so that the new words appear instantly instead of after a three-second delay). Makes a world of difference, let me tell you.
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I also pay for the convenience of having authors write books in the future too.
Fine words and high praise is nice, but they’re kind of hard to make a good lunch out of.
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THIS
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A possible source of noise in the analysis may be how purchasing habits change during a person’s lifetime, combining with the demographic changes we’ve seen over the past few decades. 20+ years ago, our family didn’t have a lot of uncommitted money in the budget, and I purchase fewer books than I do now (for example, I would read 5 or 6 authors from the Baen Free but only follow up buying from 1). Nowadays, I can afford to pay (vs. pirating or depending on a library) and I choose to pass my money to the authors I like.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the trends from the past decade strengthen – more e-publishing, more indi, much less traditional publishing & marketing. We may be working our way back to a much more ‘pure’ capitalist model — authors who write what enough people want to read will flourish, authors who don’t connect will wither.
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We keep prophesying an end to certain types of media, and it keeps not happening. Motion pictures and later television “should have” wiped out the stage play. It’s still around, not exactly the way it was in 1900 but wholly recognizable. Broadway won’t be going dark for a while. Likewise, television was supposed to wipe out the movies, but movies adjusted and remained nearly as strong as ever for a couple generations.
(Movies and network television are having a period of crisis right now, which one might attribute to the rise of streaming and YouTube and gargantuan home screens and such. The doubleplusgood duckspeakers cannot imagine that it might be their doubleplusgood duckspeak causing problems, and I don’t think we’ll be arguing them around any time soon. Nevertheless, they will merely diminish, not vanish.)
You can make a case for television wiping out the radio series by co-opting it: Jack Benny and “Gunsmoke” and “Dragnet” making the leap to the visual medium. This didn’t wipe out radio, but merely changed it to the music and talk emphasis it bears today. Likewise, much as newspapers and magazines seem on the edge of vanishing (at least from paper format), they will stick around, with some shifts in emphasis, at least under those owners savvy enough to adapt well.
Certain hardware may go away, sure. The old vacuum-tube radios of the 1930’s gave way to little boxes on our nightstands and in our pockets. Eight-track tapes died out, but we still have physical media with recorded music. Heck, the record player was dead, buried, and forgotten — and then it was back. (Show me an SF author who predicted that reverse.)
Somebody thinking books would go away, after several millennia and after weathering every recent challenge from motion pictures to the Internet? That’s just silly. Not even e-books have posed a fundamental challenge: if anything, it’s made the concept of the book that much more resilient.
Pfui. And again, pfui.
= = =
(This additional beg may safely be skipped. Sorry, Sarah. I’ll keep it short.)
I was on target to attend LibertyCon later this month, but have fetched up hard against economics. Rates for hotels anywhere near the convention center are, I have found, ludicrous, especially for a single occupant. As it stands, I can’t justify the expense.
Is there anyone here attending LibertyCon who could use a male roommate defraying half his rental costs? My e-mail address is attached somewhere, so you can reach me that way. You’ll find me flexible, and grateful. (I just realized how that sounds, but I can’t stop to clean it up right now.)
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Heck, the record player was dead, buried, and forgotten — and then it was back. (Show me an SF author who predicted that reverse.)
Nods. A particularly elegant victory in Chesterton’s game of Cheat the Prophet.
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I wish for an easy, good-quality convert your albums to digital player. My beloved gave me a turntable years ago for this, and when I read the instructions they worked out to, “Here’s how to convert your albums to ITunes format and if you don’t use ITunes, download this clunky program with opaque instructions. You’re on your own, baby.”
I have a fair number of jazz albums I’d like to have on my tablet/phone.
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There is no “easy” way to do it yourself because at the very least one must deal with flipping and changing the records, which means pausing and restarting on the digital side. The only easy solution is to pay someone else to do it.
When one starts talking about bit rates, noise suppression, and all the other analog-to-digital settings, it gets complicated, quickly. I would think most such programs have defaults, however.
I tried to do this with video tapes and just gave up – and one doesn’t need to flip those in the middle.
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I have done it with cassette tapes, but again auto reverse handles swapping sides.
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I have a widget (Behringer) that’s awaiting free time to play with. It takes line input from a Tape-Out source and converts it to MP3. Converting that to song files is supposed to be straight forward. I might (maybe?) have the software as part of my Linux distribution.
Can’t use a turntable in the house, since the floor is a bit bouncy, so I’ll need time to set up in the shop (concrete floor and overbuilt benches for the win). Have to set up the turntable and see what needs to be replaced/tuned up. It’s only been 20 years…
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Have you tried Audacity?
http://www.audacityteam.org/download/
Handles 20 or more audio formats, plus automatically extracts audio from video. Just drop a video on the Audacity window.
Using the program seemed pretty straightforward to me. Then again, I’ve been monkeying with sound and recording since the early 70’s.
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Audacity was the clunky program they recommended downloading. At that time, the directions for Audacity assumed you knew how to do A, B and C to set up, because, “everybody knows how to do that!” Ah, no, I didn’t.
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VLC can do format conversion, too. Use ‘Convert/Stream’ in the ‘File’ menu.
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Message me directly- I have sone this several times.
Matthew Amsel on Facebook
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Nostalgia is a thing.
So is new tech is a trade off.
Some great guitarists won’t use anything but analog and tube amps.
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Shane, you might want to post this in the diner on Facebook. Or someone who is on facebook might.
Yes, hotels are prohibitive.
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Sarah, I’ve never signed up for social media. Had an aversion, as it struck me as something between a time sink and a fever swamp. Accurate enough, but awkward in current circumstances.
Yes, hotels are literally prohibitive in this case.
If someone does copy my plea over there, I should give my address, which I expect wouldn’t be copied from the link here. It is:
firstname
at
shanetourtellotte
dotcom
Thanks for trying to help. If it works, I’ll thank you in person for that.
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My big problem is I’m banned from facebook groups. Let me see what I can do
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I don’t buy much non-fiction, but that’s a function of price, not desire. And the price is coming from the publisher, not the author. Not only will I not pay $40 for an ebook, I won’t pay the publishing house $40. If it were all going to author, and the topic were sufficiently obscure that $40/book is justified (e.g. Underwater Basket Weaving in the Late Roman Empire), I’d at least think two or three times before walking away. I might buy.
I think there is a market for indie non-fiction, but discovery is a huge problem.
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I check out the sales at Libraries. They always have texts books and other books for sale, most often quite cheaply. They have to make room for new books so they often sell off the old ones.
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Also many libraries will give you electronic loans that you can then read on your Kindle for a limited time (2-3 weeks). My wife has done it to borrow various Agatha Christie books that she wanted.
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Never forget your local Library, they often sell off the older books to make room for new ones. They are looking to open up shelf space not turn a profit. You can generally find wonderful text and non-fiction at dirt prices. You also find older gems by the greats. Picked up a hard back copy of ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ that way.
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I have a first edition of “The Rolling Stones” I got that way from a local library system that was clearing things out. It still had the library card in it, I got it in 2010 or so and the last stamp on the card was 1998 so it wasn’t circulating much any more.
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I agree, library and charity book sales are marvelous. Here is a book sale finder site: https://booksalefinder.com/index.html
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“Why? because people write these non-fiction books about their passion: something they’ve been working on their whole lives.”
I’m seeing a little bit of this in the museum I volunteer for. I’m working on setting up their library, cataloging the books in their collection. Several of the books fall in to this category – for instance, documenting and printing a photograph of every gas-powered model airplane engine produced between 1946 and 1959. I think the author at least made his expenses back, since he also produced several other, similar, books, but I doubt he made a living at it. But, it was important to him, and presumably to enough other people to sell enough copies to cover expenses.
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My aunt produced Grandma’s book (after editing) after grandma died, with financial assistance from older sister. Has gone on to write her own non-fiction and self published it. While neither book sold enough to live on, both reportedly sold enough to pay for the hard printing and PDF version creation. Despite the fact that at least 2+ dozen copies of each were distributed free to all siblings, and grandchildren/great-grandchildren, (grandma’s book), and extended family (her book, given it was on a common ancestor). Both labor of love and passion to do after retiring (from teaching, which she did not start until after the death of youngest child when she was in her 40’s).
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Was Grandma’s book a geneology/family history? It sounds familiar. We had a person from Western Canada show up at a family reunion with a book called Gandma’s book seeking our family history. Our people came down from Canada in the 1800s. This was many years ago.
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“Annie’s Story” by Anna Lovelace (3/1908 – 12/1987) produced by Leta (Lovelace) Neiderheizer and Denise (Lovelace) Kellenbeck.
What I found interesting was the cover. They used a picture that had grandma holding her youngest, with her with her SIL (brother’s wife), and DIL (mom), with a picture of grandma at age 12, or so. A picture that, except for the hair style and clothing, was at first glance “Why did the use ‘cousin’ (Denise’s oldest daughter) picture?”
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A friend who regularly has this kind of luck went to the Univ of Kentucky annual library sale to look at their $1 hardbacks, and found, leatherbound over boards, a 1565 medical text in Latin and a 1585 history / political analysis book in vulgate Italian. He bought them for two dollars.
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Dear Lord. Someone in the Special Collections really, really [messed] up on that one. When I was at Flat State, grad students were often asked to report unusual finds in the stacks or the donation boxes. We never found anything that choice, but one of my study-buddies found a pre-1900 sci-fi book that got whisked over to Special Collections, then traded to a different university that had a specific strength in Old Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Flat State got back a really important book about farming that filled a vital research hole in the collection.
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I was gifted “From the Earth to The Moon”
Very early one.
(Grin)
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Yeah, I think that somebody messed up, but that kind of thing happens to him.
One year, on his way beck from mining garnet crystals in the Appalachians, he did his usual stops at small town antique stores. In one, he was offered a “book of pictures of the Civil War” for a good price. It was a book of war photos published during the Civil War. He bought it and went down the road to another town where he found a book published in Elizabethan England that he had searched for for years, but at a price of thousands that reflected its’ rarity.
He asked the owner if there was anything he might trade for it. The owner answered that he wanted a copy of the Civil War photo book. They made the trade.
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@ John in Indy > I don’t have your friend’s luck, but I did get a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (all the volumes) for $5 in Cody WY. Goes with my 1911 Webster’s Dictionary, to which I resort when the modern ones no longer contain the words I encounter in my reading or remember from the past (true story – I KNEW that word existed and meant what I thought it meant!); I’ve also noticed that newer encyclopedias are not nearly as “dense” as the old ones.
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I went to a charity “yard sale” in Newport, Rhode Island years ago. The people who now owned the mansions had no context for the mansion libraries and all sorts of valuable books were being sold for a dollar. No incunabula, alas, they were careless not stupid, but I picked up quite a few really nice bindings for very little.
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I never expected that I would mostly switch to e-books for fiction reading, but I have (I’m out of room for hardcopy). However, there has also a trend toward audiobooks, podcasts, and and videos as methods of presentation ad instruction. For me, those are not going to replace the printed word. Why? Because, for me, speech is SSLLOOWW and I can’t skim and speed through it. I also can’t easily go back and forth for reference and comprehension. If you want me to learn something, give me a well-written book.
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I switched back in 2011 with a third generation Kindle. Wife and Daughters bought it for me. These days its descendant a high end Kindle paperwhite replaces it. I find reading on the paperwhite quite pleasant. It is lighter than even a paperback (old typist wrists, verging on carpal tunnel), the font can be set to something other than the 8-10pt paperbacks use, and the new one is backlit with lighting that can be changed to a less blue intense color better for the eyes and for reading before sleep.
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Three days ago, I took it upon myself to dispute the conclusions of Michael Levin writing in the Forbes blog and prophesying the end of the book. Not just the end of the paper book, or the end of the book as we know it, but the end of the book, period.
:sudden flash:
A friend recently shared an article about someone saying fanfic is doomed because they’ll make bots that let you chat with characters instead….
“tell me you don’t X without telling me X”…..
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Was watching a Youtube video the other day where someone took Skyrim, and added three mods to it. A voice-to-text mod so you could talk to the characters, a text-to-speech mod so they could talk back, and a ChatGPT-based mod (but running on your computer’s GPU, not the cloud) so they could talk about things not programmed into the game. The chat mod trained its knowledge base on the character’s own lines, so that when they did talk it tended to be “in character” — and if ChatGPT occasionally made things up, well, in this context it actually adds to the immersion, because people will lie to you sometimes.
Worked really, really well. The only immersion-breaking thing was the 6-7 second pause between you saying something and the character responding, and I expect future generations of video cards may be able to get that pause down to 1-2 seconds. At some point, some clever developer is going to use that sort of thing in their game (as in, part of the canonical game experience rather than a third-party addon), with pre-programmed responses for plot-important dialogue (to make sure the clues you get are real) and ChatGPT-like responses for everything else. That’ll make for a very interesting game experience.
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That is awesome– and also, maps to “real translation:so you have to finish a statement before translation.
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Didn’t think of that, but that’s an awesome idea. So if I were a game dev wanting to use a GPT chat AI in a game right now, I’d make it so that you’re running around in a foreign country with an interpreter following you. You speak, the game plays several seconds of foreign-sounding babble (think Simlish) as the interpreter talks to the other person, the other person says something you don’t understand, and then the interpreter says, in English, whatever text the AI came up with in those 10-12 seconds. Covers for the immersion-breaking pause.
Now, that effect might get annoying if it’s used throughout the game, so maybe that’s best left until a few years from now when graphics cards have quadrupled (yet again) the number of GPU cores on them. But I certainly like that idea as one way to cover for that gap in-game.
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Annoying, yes, but REALISTIC.
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Long as they don’t use Furbish for the filler babble. :-D
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I ‘m not even sure how that’s supposed to work. How would being able to chat with the characters change my desire for a story about Hogwarts during WWI? Or Dean Thomas attending art school? Or the history of the Bevelle-Zanarkand war from Final Fantasy X?
I guess there may be one specific type of story that chat bots might affect: the story of “What was character X thinking during event Y?” But even there, I wouldn’t guarantee it. After all, fanfiction is not just about people wanting to read it but also wanting to write it, and even if a bot could give you the official answer to “what was Hermione thinking during the ride of the Hippogriff?” I doubt it would affect anyone’s desire to write their own version.
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The dynamics are different, but no less complex, coming from a guy that writes both non-fiction — I have an educational book on screen-readers under revision — and fiction — a science-fiction doing the rejection rounds. When going for trad publishing, non-fiction is more concerned with how you know what you know, first, then how you tell it.
I’d argue that that is the main difference, although in non-fiction you have to worry about both educating/ informing your audience, as well as keeping them interested with the work, where as while fiction is usually benifited with a certain level of informational/ educational dynamic — guy that reads for the visual experience he cannot have, and will never completely understand — the absence of this dynamic from fiction doesn’t necessarily kill the work. We can all point to fiction works that were popular despite being full of flaws, non-fiction has the best chance of getting away with this, if its a textbook, but otherwise not as much.
In a nutshell that is the biggest difference, although there are others.
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The publishers, of course, aren’t the only ones that should be scared. Two words that are appropriate these days –
Tucker Carlson
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Tucker is awesome. I look forward to watching him get his own back, the way James O’Keefe is also getting his own back.
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