Will books and physical movies die out?

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Will books and physical movies (DVDs, Blu-Rays or whatever form they're in) die out?

probably, at one point or another,

in some ways it is a good thing and others not,

leaving behind the physical one doesnt have to waste resources on something that in many cases is temporary fun to begin with.
it also makes the final product cheaper to produce so it can be sold cheaper, it is also easier to produce and sell so a single person at home can do what billion dollar companies had to do a decade or so ago.

Hopefully.

Books are a waste of paper. They should only print about 100 copies of a good book and leave them in refrigerated museums throughout the world, just in case civilization crashes and all our computer grid dies, so that their information can be recovered by future civilizations. But the consumer books should be 100% computerized.

trees grow abundantly. Also computers are depleting the Earth's crust of readily available rare-earth elements. Paper can be recycled by pulping, dyeing and remaking, so the drain on the forests is not all that great. Paper is handy. It can be used for margin notes and underlining. It is also cheaper, much cheaper than electronics. And they require no electric current source, either battery or generated. Paper is on of the greatest advance made in human technology. Acid free paper will also last a very long time in a sufficiently humid atmosphere.

A hundred years from now the encoding schemes for visual presentation of pages may be lost through either destruction of civilization or by just plain obsolescence. Paper and ink publications can be read thousands of years after they were made.

ruveyn

by way of obsolescence, yes.

ruveyn

Doesn't make books any less of a waste of paper.

But you'll buy a computer regardless of whether or not books are replaced with them.


Waste of water and energy.

Less paper = less resource consumption. Has always been,




A good device can allow this too.

Electronics that you will buy regardless of whether or not books are replaced with them.

And once you buy the electronic. You can quickly buy thousands of books at much cheaper. And you no longer need the physical space to store them. Overall it saves a lot of money.



You need light to read a paper.


Sure, and it will keep having its uses, consumer books will stop being one though.


Yes, like I mentioned, they shall be used to keep books outside of the digital world as a backup.


Yes, like I mentioned, they shall be used to keep books outside of the digital world as a backup.

Assuming the language is remembered.

No. I think physical media will make a big comeback when people realize the trade-offs with digital files. The reader devices are so new that the batteries haven't begun going kaput yet. People are going to start realizing their devices are bricked in a year or two. Some will upgrade every year to the new model device and never have a brick, but for a lot of people a reader is a major investment. DRM is a problem that hasn't begun to entangle people as they buy books that can vanish instantly, or have their content changed without you knowing about it.

Digital books work as a format for disposable books - the kinds of books you see on the remainder table for $1 in a year or two. Sure, I'd love to save trees by making that crud go digital. But for real books that have lasting value, digital is not a good option. (The publishing industry ought to try for higher quality.)

Barnes and Noble bet the company on digital books, and the early results show explosive growth (lampooned in https://xkcd.com/605/) but only so many people can afford an expensive tablet and content. So far, most of the people buying Nook and Kindle seem to just want a cheap Android tablet (to root and run Cyanogenmod), and I don't know how much longer B&N and Amazon can subsidize selling their tablets at cost without getting people to buy content. Amazon does not have to win, they just have to outlast B&N. The in-store inventory at B&N has shrunk to the point I don't bother going to the store and just go online. So once B&N has trained their customers not to go to their stores, and the Nook is not sustainable as a business model, they're done. Amazon just has to worry about Wal-Mart and the race to the bottom.

I imagine physical movies will be similar, after a few streaming services shut down and people no longer have their content.

... funny, right after I typed all that, I see this:

http://consumerist.com/2012/11/26/heres ... -consumer/

Last edited by Trencher93 on 26 Nov 2012, 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

DRM is a problem only for devices that have it.

The best option is unDRMed PDFs in your hard drive.

When people notice DRM sucks, they will just switch to digital things that don't have DRM (Many already did). Because physical things are gonna die inevitably.

All I needed was another reminder of my age

Assuming the language is remembered.[/quote]

Many are. We can even read sales receipts from ancient Sumer, circa 2500 b.c.e.

And thanks to the Rosetta Stone we have Egyptian heiroglyphics, coptic, and greek.

We have Ugartic and other Phonecian derivatives including Arabic and Hebrew.

Some are lost forever (alas) like the Aztec codices. And we are thin with the Mayan codices.

We have the major western and near eastern materials in good quantity.

by the way, the best mode of keeping information is in baked clay, as the Sumerians did.

ruveyn

Books and physical movies take up lots of space. You have to store them somewhere. And there's only so many that you can store before it becomes clutter. That's why streaming has it's advantage.

Media come and go all the time nowadays. DVD's, CD's etc will all be obsolete before long. Books will remain.

I've still got some of my data and Fortran programs stored on punched paper tape produced from a Cray mainframe many years ago... Not much hope that they will ever be loaded again. Even floppy disks (of all types and sizes) are now obsolete.

Books are obsolete. For real learning you need videos and animation.

I don't think books will ever go away completely. I for one am at times uncomfortable with the idea of everything being online only. What if the power goes out?

I agree. My computer is quite old. I have another even older, but if both of those fail I'm in a mess as I can't afford to replace them at the moment. No computer = no internet, no Google, no research, no eBooks, no email.

At least the books will remain... unless the house burns down!

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein managed very will with paper and ink.

Also the people who invented transistors and computer systems.

Animation can be informative, but it is not absolutely necessary. Drawings in paper made with ink do very well.

ruveyn