Yeah. I love the principle of ebooks, would love to cut down on all the space and weight.

But right now the systems all seem to be under draconian Digital Rights Management, where sinister corporations control everything you can read, and can just delete or edit your entire book collection at their whim.

Hopefully it will work like the music industry: their DRM'd formats flop, and they have to go back to an equivalent of MP3, where you can back it up and control your own collection.

"We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’

Shoot that guy.

Normally I'm all 'yay digital!' but I can't get around it for books. There's just a particular something about holding the actual text in my hand (and that awesome book smell).

Then again, I work in a giant warehouse where books go to rest before being called into action again, so I'm probably biased. (But is fun to open a book and see that it was a personal gift to someone in the 1830s, complete with a little lovey dovey note).

Some of my favorite books - including my favorite book of all time was found by lazily browsing the shelves. Libraries have always been more than just intellectual stimulation for me, but I enjoy the visceral rush of them - the seemingly endless possibilities of just browsing through them or when I was studying, find a book on a topic and then seeing what else is placed in the area that might help me.

dis s0x0r

This is horrifying! That said; I'd be more than happy to take a lot of those books off their hands. I can't imagine rainy days without a book. I mean, I like my Kindle just fine for carrying books around with me, but it's no substitute for real books. If given a choice between my collection of thousands of printed books or my Kindle, I'd toss the kindle in a heartbeat.

What a ridiculous thing for this man to do. I hope the school charter committee steps in and whacks him with a clue stick before they actually trash all those volumes.

Replace "book" with "LP". Watch for full circle in 20 years.

Use #2,327 for a wall of good books: Insulation against a cold North wall.

Yeah, we've been spending much of the past year at work trying to convince the "visionary" powers-that-be that A) there really are a few people out there who still like to buy and read actual phyiscal books, and B) publishing 400-page exhibition catalogues with hundreds of hi-res images only to be read ON A GODDAMN IPHONE does not represent an advancement, even though it uses shiny digital technology.

You can take my books out of my cold dead hands.

I just can't get my mind around reading books on an electronic gadget. I've tried reading stuff at the Gutenberg Project and it's just not right. Plus the expense of the gadgets is still out of sight for most people. Unless they start giving them away for free, I don't see books going the way of the Dodo any time soon.

Use #2,327 for a wall of good books: Insulation against a cold North wall.

And it's a good sound barrier. Our main bookcases are against the wall between us and our neighbour. That's more so we won't bother them with the TV (both the mister and I are hard of hearing) than them bother us.

Trends come and go, but the printed word has endured for centuries.

Oy, I love physical books. It's a very personal, visceral, aesthetic experience for me. I cannot imagine doing all of my reading on an ebook reader; in that form, the books have no character, no depth, no personality. It's not very much fun to read like that.

I get that digital books are/might be the future, but that future will make me very sad.

Trends come and go, but the printed word has endured for centuries.

There's a term for this... "technological obsolescence" I think? You can lose decades of knowledge once the format it's recorded in becomes obsolete. I mean, the printed word can carry information thousands of years old. A digital format that seemed popular for awhile but then died out in favor of something more advanced can carry huge swaths of information into the grave with it. This is why I hate proprietary formats of any kind, and fuck, we do not need to be ditching BOOKS of all things so that we can store our information in formats that may or may not survive.

I agree with so much of this thread until I remember how many trees died for Dan Brown, Ann Colter and Dean Koontz.

I wonder if it won't be like the truly olden days where ownership of books will be a luxury of the rich.