Response to John

OK, so taking your comment para by para.

1. POD. Yes, you are wrong to assume that POD would produce a less-than-desired bound format. BUT, seen this way, his POD model is even more of a waste than 8.5 x 11 papers would be. So you’d get a book printed to read it, and then throw it away? You’d always have the online version, I assume, to look little things up, but then you’d have another full copy printed if you wanted to read the whole thing again?

The problem with this is Seth Godin’s idea that books still have value as a souvenir. In other words, people will still buy books to remind them of what they read, to own a physical object that associates them with those thoughts, and to show off on their bookshelves. As the linked article points out, “only a souvenir” scares the heck out of publishers. But this Penguin article’s even bleaker, suggesting that the book doesn’t even have souvenir value. And I think it very much does, and we shouldn’t underestimate the power of that.

It also has artifact value. Late in the Apollo program, NASA fought to keep sending men to the moon because they wanted real people to see the real thing to be able to record man’s full impressions and observations. Sending a robot wouldn’t do the trick. This is kind of the inverse of that: if we digitize all of our books, and toss the hard copies (can you imagine tossing a first folio??), you keep only a fraction of the experienceable object that is that book. You throw away the rest of the metonymy. And that isn’t good for research, or for our human experience of the world.

2) Libraries. This is kind of more like the “Everything is Miscellaneous” question. Digital formats will enable different kinds of random browsing and new finds. I’m not so concerned about this.