I was asked the other day why I prefer real paper books over electronic books the other day and realized I’d never really posted on this subject, which I feel somewhat strongly about. I have a fundamental distrust of computers and technology. That may seem a little odd coming from a software developer, but the more I learn about software development, the more this distrust grows. When it comes to books and printed materials, I can condense this distrust into three basic problems:
- Digital technology changes too much.
- Digitized data is fragile and transient.
- Digital printing is not self-sufficient.
Ever-Changing Technology
Ever tried to open a document you created 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? Did you succeed? Chances are you didn’t. Ten years ago, data was saved on 3.5” floppy disks or a CD-R if you had the money for a burner. (The USB drive didn’t come into being until 2000.) Do you even have a 3.5” floppy disk drive in your house? Is the disk or CD-R even readable anymore (since the usual half-life of such things has already past)?
Twenty years ago, you would have used a 3.5” or 5.25” disk. Have you even seen a 5.25” drive in the past 10 years?
Thirty years ago, you would have used… who knows what. I was two years old. I’d have to look at Wikipedia to even get a good guess going. Audio cassettes on your Atari? Yeah, like you have something to read one of those.
Even if you read the media, do you have a program that works anymore to read the format? Do you have something that will read whatever word processor you had then? This is possible and maybe even likely, but even so there’s the risk it won’t work or you don’t have one. Formats change. Programs must be made to read a format. If you don’t have any such program, you might be able to get it to someone who can extra something out of it, but it’s probably gone.
However, I can pick up a book from any of those eras and read them today. A notebook, a journal, a magazine, a newspaper are all quite readable with modern day technology. If you printed your document and placed it somewhere dry and clean, you can still read it.
Fragile and Transient
I already mentioned that the old media fails rather frequently, but it gets worse. Digital data is, by necessity, encoded in an unnatural way. That is, digital data is very robust and easy to process is many ways, but the way we choose to represent digital data is made up.
To demonstrate this problem, let’s consider a manuscript that someone finds in the desert from 2,000 years ago. Let’s say that it’s in a script that no one has ever seen before, will it be understood? Actually, it might be. If that script happens to be similar enough to a known script, a linguist might be able to extrapolate at least something about the contents of the document. All languages and scripts are related, even constructed languages like Esperanto.
Now, imagine the same scenario 2,000 years in the future. Someone picks up a magnetic tape that still has some good sections on it. In the future, they know something about ASCII encoding, but not some of the other encodings that were used today. This one is one of those other encodings. They’d have to use some sort of statistically analysis and hope it’s written in a language they know with text strings they can find or something. They’re going to have a much harder time of it reconstructing the data.
Digital formats add another layer of encoding upon already encoded information. Usually multiple layers of encoding are involved. This makes maintenance and upkeep much higher than for books.
A printed book’s encodings are just the script and language it’s in without the extra layers of encoding, file formats, compression, etc. Digital data has many more things to fail along the way to prevent easy reading in the future.
Self-Insufficient
This is really the most important reason I like books. I can pick one off the shelf, open it to a page, and immediately examine it’s contents. If I have a book in my computer, I have to boot the computer, load the right program for reading it, and read it. If I put it on a flash drive or SD card, I have the full contents of the text with me, but I can’t do anything with it until I get a computer or cell phone or a Kindle or something capable of showing me the data.
A book requires no translator or reader to explain it to me. It requires no special equipment to read other than my hands and eyes.
In the end, a book is something I am sure I can pass on to my children as their inheritance or share with someone else without any additional effort. I rarely have that kind of guarantee when sharing a digital file or something. The digital copy of a book gives me the ability to search or process data in it, but if I just want to read, reference, or consume the content of a book, the printed page is always better.
Cheers.
