Hoo ha ha! Priceless!
Dave
The question that has always troubled me about the electronic age is what happens if (or when) the power goes off? Everything that isn’t printed out will be lost. Who would be able to figure out what ebooks were for, and even if they had an idea, would they be able to power them? And how long would the data stored on one last? Probably not long. A CD would have a longer lifetime, but someone would have to recognize that it held information and find a way to both read and decode it.
There’s a lot to be said for printed books. Stone tablets, too.
Margaret
Hugh - thank you so much for reporting back - not to mention gleaning so many quotes!
It sounds like it was a fascinating evening.
Cheers
Pipi
Thanks for the recap, Hugh. It’s always interesting to hear what those in charge of books (at least traditionally) think of the issue.
Margaret: I’ve long wanted to write a story about that called “The Day History Ended.”
One of the reasons we even have a modern age is due to the (re)introduction of ancient Greek texts via the Arabic translations during the later Middle Ages into the Renaissance. What happens in the future when no one can read what would then be ‘ancient texts’? Or even know they exist?
Already it’s happening (albeit on a minor scale): I wrote my first published novel on a CPM machine that used 8-inch floppies. I still have them somewhere for ‘archival’ reasons, but soon those floppies will be as unaccessible as hieroglyphics were before the original Rosetta stone.
Oh God no! Anything but that! A house without books is like a desert … no it’s not … that’s to insult deserts, which are really beautiful places!
My father died suddenly just as he and my mother were going to come back to the UK on home leave in a house that they had rented for the summer. There were no books in it. For two months, my mother, brother, his fiance/wife, my grandmother and I lived in that house, all of us rowing all day long.
Then some old family friends said they were going away for a month or so, and suggested that my mother should terminate the lease on where we were and we should go and live in their house while they were away.
It was full of books … the arguing stopped immediately, and not because we all buried ourselves in reading. It was a home …
A house without books is not a home … And, Pipibluestockin, I’m sure that if ever you did move into a house without books, no matter how good your eBook reader, you would wish you had your books round you, no matter how burdensome they are when you have to move. 
Mark
Sorry to upset you so much Mark.
I quite agree that a house entirely without books is a form of hell. As a teenager I learnt very fast not to accept babysitting jobs in book-free houses… dear god… shudder just not worth it.
I was writing in a form of shorthand because I know my situation. I live in a very small flat and I have poor impulse control when it comes to acquiring new books. I read copiously.
I’m still up to my knees in a house full of books even though I’ve been forced to cull. I’m down to references, non-fiction titles which are useful to me in some way and favourite fiction titles I can’t live without. Looking around I can see that my next move will be just as burdensom as my last move.
Ebooks represent a solution to some of my problems regarding storage, space and moving.
Fear not, you didn’t upset me … the events I related happened 40 years ago and what is of import, why I quoted them, was the fact that it brought home in a graphic way that the mere presence of books in a living environment, at least for those who have always been surrounded by books, transforms that environment in ways that profoundly affect the people occupying it, even if they don’t actually spend all their time reading the books.
I am glad we actually agree, and also that you are not dreaming of abandoning all your books in exchange for a small electronic device!
Mark
Funny, but a friend of mine and I were talking about something similar not too long ago. We’re collaborating on a book over the Internet, and I asked him to make sure he kept multiple backups of the book, as do I, just in case anything happened to the main copy.
He paused a second, and then said, “So…what would happen if a giant EMP or super magnetic storm or something hit Earth and totally wiped out every last bit of electronically-store data in the world?”
It was a sobering thought. At least the Bushmen wouldn’t have to worry.
geek mode on
Data stored on CD or DVD would probably survive an EMP. CD data isn’t stored electronically, but as differences in the optical response of the media.
Some forms of nonvolatile memory are inherently radiation hardened and would probably also survive.
geek mode off
Whether you could find a computer that could read it is, of course, another matter.
But then, if something wiped out all the electronically-stored data on earth, we’d all have MUCH bigger problems than just resurrecting our manuscripts.
Katherine
Yeah, but with paper books, at least we’d have a book to curl up with and forget for a while at least about how bad things were! 
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language comes in at a whopping 1842 pages. When I looked up the use of ‘they’ for another thread, I was so wishing I had a digital version, posterity be damned. 
That behemoth is heavy!
I love all my books. I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. I did not like the moving bill the last time we moved. I did like that someone else was paying it. 
(But if we ever did have to pay it, many of the books would have to go.)
Yes, Studio717 has an important point: Works of reference. I did not grasp my dictionaries from the shelves in the recent 2 years. Only digital dictionaries. Life has become so easy…
Maria
This evening I was reading “Fix-It Duck” with my three year-old son. Nice thick card pages, all beautiful illustrations with simple text. That is where the digital book will fall down. There is just no way that a digital book can replace the whole bedtime routine of a child going and picking a book, sitting and turning the pages and getting the idea of left-to-right (in Western languages) sequencing and so forth. For us adults the physicality of a book may just be a luxury that can be compensated for with search fields and the ability to have a hundred books in your pocket. But for a young child, the physicality of a book is intrinsic to the whole excitement of reading and early understanding of text…
Best,
Keith
Yeah, good point, Keith. Having no kids, I didn’t think of this. But having BEEN one, I remember well that feeling of ‘curling up’ with a good book. Of that tactile aspect of it and the illustrations and the feeling of turning those huge pages (seemed huge at the time). I also have referred to curling up with a book twice in this post, at least twice I think, and that makes me think that my connection to paper books is tied up with those experiences I had as a kid. It’s definitely a comfort thing, a tactile thing.
For reference material, I am completely in agreement with all those who want these in digital form. I’ve even gone so far as to scan entire books so I could have them on the computer and not have to lug them around and to have the always accessible.
But for anything with more profound personal meaning, like the works of Ramana Maharshi, or a really wonderful novel I can immerse myself in, it’s gotta be a paper book! I don’t like the environmental repercussions, however. Maybe they will start making books out of processed bamboo? Seems to be the latest ‘green’ product–fast growing, non-toxic, a very sustainable product. They are even making bamboo bed linens and they feel as soft and comfy as cotton. Or did someone mention this already?
Alexandria
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience. The last thing I want to do while writing is switch to another program and look stuff up. I keep my dictionary/thesaurus/grammar/whatever books right next to my desk so I can quickly flip through them while I’m working.
I also prefer paper dictionaries because it’s easier to search for a word when you don’t know what the word is. Maybe other people don’t experience this, but I’ll find myself knowing that I need a word - I can’t remember what it is, I only remember that it starts with ‘D.’ It’s much easier to just scan the pages of a paper dictionary than type ‘d’ in a digital one and scroll down through the list. For me, anyway.
For me too, paper dictionaries win hands down … maybe it’s just a form of procrastination or something, but when you look something up in a paper dictionary, you get all the other information on the page, all the words that surround the one you’re looking up. In my experience you don’t get that on-line.
Here in China I have few books … and only a Chinese-English and an English Chinese dictionary, so I have to use on-line English dictionaries. I have to say I don’t enjoy the experience.
Mark
Well, I have to say that when I need to do quick translations I love electronic dictionaries. It’s so much better than throwing the monstrous paper slabs around. But when subtlety is required I much prefer paper because you see related words or the word “context.” It seems to me it really should be quite easy for the digital dictionary makers to make context display an option.
Dave
Hi, your dictionary approach is astonishing for me personnally. When I remember myself sitting there with 7 or so dictionaries just to translate one simple word (Kanji-Japanese, Classical-Japanese - Modern Japanese, Modern Japanese - English, English - German, Terms for several disciplines), I got heavy arms just looking at it. I could have never been as productive as I was in the last 3 years with these tools. And how much do I appreciate these databases, that tell me binomial name of animals or plants we found in sites, their translation into English, their looks and habitat, and then I have a good basis to check whether all these translations in the normal dictionaries (paper or digital) are correct. It is a workflow that I did not dare dreaming of just a few years ago.
Otherwise, I prefer books on paper to stone inscriptions and texts on bamboo and wood. Yes.
Happy weekend,
Maria
I own two copies of those gigantic 2nd edition Webster’s (even keep one out on my dictionary stand), one copy of the micro edition of the OED, and 17 other dictionaries (not counting my non-English ones).
But for a quick definition or to make sure I have the right word (I still have to look up discrete and discreet everytime), I do a right click and then choose “Look up in Dictionary.” It’s very handy and will often go a bit more into the definition and explain the differences (discrete and discreet are a good example).
A number of years ago, I even bought the OED on CD-ROM. (It’s a pain in the *ss to use, though, and is Win-only.) Fortunately, today, I can look up words online through a subscription of my local public library. Very nice.
All of this is for non-specialized words, of course. My field, if you will, is history, so most of what I need can be found in regular dictionaries.
My intended point was not that online dictionaries, thesauri, etc. are less convenient, efficient, timesaving and so on, rather that I don’t enjoy using them, whereas I do enjoy using a paper dictionary and the serendipitous discoveries that can be made on the same page. So, for preference, I will always use a paper dictionary or set of paper dictionaries.
Mark