Libraries used to be physical places with bricks and books, but they are increasingly virtualized collections of digital content having no fixed location.
Many people already access audio versions of books through their libraries.eBooks have been around for many years with a limited following, but thanks to new eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book, downloading books from the Internet is increasingly common.
While still not as flexible and easy to use as a book, these devices point the way to future generations of electronic books.Since physical distribution uses expensive resources, and books can take up a lot of space, we expect in the next few years most people’s reading will be done using electronic devices.This will reduce the cost of book production and distribution and make written content less expensive and more useful.
Electronic books obtained through the Internet offer things that physical books cannot, such as instant search on words or phrases and electronic bookmarks.Quoting material from a written text is a lot easier when it can be done using cutting and pasting.Even books themselves will change, as electronic distribution and access reduce the barriers to writing and distributing writing.Blogs, Wikipedia, and other on-line writing forums are only the beginning of a trend creating a very long tail of written information and opinion on almost any topic that you can think of.
Based upon a Consumer Survey on Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics I published earlier this year, the typical home in 2013 will have over 200 Gbytes of user-generated content.With about 100 million households in the U.S., that translates to over 20 exabytes of user-generated content.By the next decade, there will be more user-generated unique content than commercial or government content; after all, there are many more individuals than companies and governments.
It's already started: Today many people share user-generated photographs, videos, and writing through social networking and sharing sites on the Internet.
One of the traditional functions of libraries has been to preserve knowledge and content. With the growth of individual user content and with so many ways to share it, future libraries must follow suit. Present efforts to preserve publicly accessible content on the Internet are mostly based on volunteer efforts, such as the Wayback machine at www.archive.org.
Tomorrow’s virtual libraries may look like this. They must incorporate and preserve commercial, government, and user-generated content and make this material accessible as well as organize it for individual use.As people become more dependent on electronic information sources, both their own content stored in their homes as well as content accessed over the Internet will need to be correlated and combined.
New uses of metadata (information about the data stored on a particular host or device) will enable this access and use of content.This electronic cornucopia of content, both commercial and personal, will enable whole new forms of entertainment, education, and even work.
But I would say it's the other way around. There's some je ne sais quois about books, but the reasons to go to a digital copy are irrefutable.
Talking about modifying the printing industry, how about Maxim's decision to use some new paper for their October issue? Presumably will have some interactive aspect.
I started to analyse how I use different types of books and realized that I used ebooks only for professional purposes. It is easy to search something specific in the ebook, it takes less time to find the book you need in the INternet that to go to the store or to order the book you need on the Internet.So as far as work is concerened, online libraries are the best.
Speaking about reading for pleasure, I would never read an electronic book from in my free time.I read enough text from the screen for my work. So I need a feeling that there is a difference between my work reading and leisure reading.
"Electronic books will be even more popular when we create true electronic paper that looks like a book but can be any book and allows electronic search and uses of content."
EUREKA! Will that reshape the tablet PC industry OR will it be a product of its own? Either way, I so look forward to it. I'm imagining a facebook toolbar on the cover for students! Maybe if Mead is 'smart' enough, they will revive the new generation of this electronic trapper keeper!
I like books myself. They turn on instantly and require no power. However they can't easily be search and cutting and pasting is physical. Electronic books allows a lot of options for doing things with the content. Electronic books will be even more popular when we create true electronic paper that looks like a book but can be any book and allows electronic search and uses of content.
Longterm, will electronic communication eventually lead to the end of writing, and of written material? That is the opinion of a fellow I met recently and could be the subject of another blog.
Currently individuals and groups can create access and use rights using the Creative Commons, creativecommons.org. There has been talk of recognizing these sort of rights by the Library of Congress, which handles US copyrights. As people share content that they create themselves rights retention and fair use needs to become more common.
It is true that some will still cherish the old way of conserving knowledge- on paper. But the truth is that even libraries today are more and more odering digitized copies of books as it help them have more materials without the need to increase their physical storage facilities. There will always be places called "Libraries" where you can go and stay to read or use a book. But most the the contents will be online and this is rather an advantage.
I figure I'll be into eBooks when flexible displays stacked like a book are available.
Reading ebooks..a bit more than blogs slapped together just doesn't sit well with me..if it's interactive like when hovering over certain text it has a scene, or allows me to smell certain scents..(it might break my head out of being stuck running on 3 cylinders).
Hey Root, Books are here to stay, what about phone books??
I like having access to digital books too - there are far more books in the world than I can reasonably get physical access to. But I hope libraries don't go away. Sometimes you need to go to a place that is just about knowledge and reading, away from distractions at home.
You discover things you never knew you'd be interested in by wandering the stacks and looking for unusual titles and covers.
You can put a book in your pocket, and you need no additional energy to use it (except, perhaps for a reading light).
Books are permanent - with proper care, a well-made book can last indefinitely - some books are still legible after thousands of years. No digital encoding technology so far can claim anything approaching that stability.
Digital information can degrade, or be adulterated. You can never be totally certain that the information in a digital book is the same as it was when someone accessed it ten, twenty, fifty years ago, but you can be certain with a book.
Libraries can share and augment their collections, and make them more available to more readers with digital book technology, but the hardbound book must never die.
Well, I hope the ISPs read your report because I'm sure we will want to share that information with friends, family or maybe just random people.
Streaming 200GB/household? well, FiOS will look like Dialup.
I wonder if we would start using copyrights for our own content and maybe try to make money out of that. I know stock photography exists, but something at a broader sense.
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