What will we put on our bookshelves when we no longer buy paper books?
It’s a question I’ve been asking my friends lately, and they all seem to think that books will be around for a long time. Their arguments seem to center around, “Books are useful.”
Yeah, sure they are. But it’s hard to carry them all with you, unless you have an ebook reader, like an Amazon Kindle.
Oh, okay, fine, it’s difficult to imagine ebooks replacing paper. I understand, I do.
But I also remember when I used to buy music on CD. I even remember counting the number of CDs I’d purchased and comparing myself to my friends based on how many disks I had — yeah, I know, lame.
I also recall, in 1997, my ex-roommate, Toren, who was working at a lab in the Computer Sciences department at school, introducing me to mp3 audio. He’d downloaded a bootleg mp3 copy of the unreleased Anything Box CD, which was, as I recall, not coming out due to some kind of contract issue.
Afterwards, I saw mp3s as an interesting curiosity, but not practically useful. The Internet was mostly dial-up, Napster didn’t exist, and it took hours to rip and compress a single CD to mp3. That was a long time, even in 1997. Besides, my stereo had a new 5-disk CD changer and my computer was in the kitchen. My music was just meant to be on CD.
But I was also working at my first job out of school as a newly minted Software Engineer hacking out firmware for 3D graphics accelerators (ask me about fixed-point math and perspective correct texture mapping sometime) and was spending about half my time at the office and half at home.
Taking CDs back and forth between home and work wasn’t as satisfying as I liked, so, after some thought and research, I decided to go mp3. I bought a big hard disk and portable hard disk enclosure — you know, the kind where you can slide the disk in-and-out of a computer — and a high-speed Plextor CD ROM drive, which was known for ripping accurately at high-speeds.
And then I started ripping and compressing.
Most days, I’d return home, and while reading a computer book, rip three CDs to 1.8 Gigabytes of my 2 Gigabyte hard disk and then let the compressor run for about 20 hours (yes, for just 3 CDs of music). After about three months, I had everything ripped.
Hard for me to believe I was spending my time doing that 12 years ago.
Today, now that mp3 music has neutron bombed the music industry into producing nothing I actually want to buy, I haven’t bought a CD in three years and the CDs I did buy are stuck rotting in a drawer below my expensive and gorgeous Shanling CD T-100 tube-amplified CD Player. And I look at my bookshelf and wonder what we’re going to do when our books are all ebooks. Because I can see exactly the same thing happening there.
Luckily for all of us, the publishing industry — probably because of some combination of better margins by going digital, better technology that protects their copyrighted material, and utter fright at what happened to the music industry — is actually making ebooks that can be purchased online.
Which makes me hopeful that in a decade we will be able to read all the world’s books (and lots of great new books) from the convenience of an ebook reader and no longer need to purchase these inconvenient, tree-destroying paper books.
Which brings me back to the question of the shelves. What are we going to do?
