You'll not prise my paper books from my cold, dead hands with a crowbar. I dislike ebooks intensely and won't use/buy them except for the most ephemeral use-cases (tech books).

I hope this is not the case. After working all day on a computer the last thing I want to do is to look at a screen.

> the publishers should be able to format the pages, margins, lettering however they want.

For e-books, hopefully they shouldn’t. The reader should.

I'd be all in favor of ebooks as a first-class citizen, except we've been down this road before and we all know where it leads: Books with advertisements embedded in them, which would ruin reading for me.

There are weird differences between publishers in different countries.

In Poland there is this weird contest of making books largest possible. Mandatory points are huge font, enormous margins, huge spaces between paragraphs and chapters always starting from new page. Preferably with some graphic on half of such starting page. Magnified if it's a children's book. Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.

It is shocking when you take same book released in UK or US. It looks like at least cut in HALF and actually much easier to read.

Not sure why that's downvoted; I'm a slow reader and frequently annoyed at how excessively verbose too many books these days are. SciFi books from a couple of decades ago were much shorter and often better than SciFi books today. I like books that get to the point and tell me straight up what they're about and what the central idea of it is.

As noted in the article, usually they just use shitty thin paper.

You were thinking of Neal Stephenson, right?

Do you not want your novels bo be loccuatious?

Most people you see sitting at the library are doing class work or studying with online materials. If you want to see people using books, go up into the stacks or sit by the checkout desk.

> Does anyone read books anymore?

No. Not a single person has read a paper book in the last 15 years. If you go into a book store right now and see someone buying a book with cash, then you can be sure they are a mule for a money laundering operation.

The people in public spaces that are "reading books", the pages are actually all blank. They are paid actors employed by Big Publishing to keep the facade up that they are legitimate businesses, and are not just fronts for laundering money for drug cartels and the like.

They are all in on it, and you better keep quiet, or they will be on to you.

Printed books - > 300-400 € per semester. Ebooks from questionable sites - > free. + more and more material is from papers instead of books so pdf were easier unless you wanted to pay 20 cent per page printed at the university printers.

Text books are highly dense, and often complete works on a subject (or with reference to others forming a corpus of complete works). Some are kept up-to-date on a subject with annexes.

Few wrote read textbooks, they are often used as reference or worked from. But textbooks can form a through line or a framework to guide you through a subject in a bespoke way - as pictured by an expert or team of experts.

A university library would be the last place I'd expect to see people reading books.

Try a non-university library, an airport, a beach, a coffee shop, poolside, or any number of other places, but university libraries are for studying and doing homework, not usually reading books.

Sure I read physical books, but for me they are one medium among many and don’t hold the mysticism that teachers imbued them with.

They are very very big blocks of plaintext in sequential order. There’s only so many things books are good at. I’ve seen people buy paper books for classes with open book exams where ebooks are allowed and that’s just a mistake.

I feel as ebook technology improves just a tad from where it is today so we get some great large format color I’m probably going to stop buying books to save my wallet and I feel long term the physical book will become a novelty and picked up by hipsters in the same fashion as vinyl.

Why wouldn’t people still be reading books??

I can't seem to read from paper anymore. I read plenty online and from PDFs, but I really struggle to read a normal paper book.

This also makes it harder for my kids to read. Too many screens, games and youtube, and they just don't want to read from paper. My oldest at least reads some manga online.

yes, very very definitely.

Because books always meant the physical books. ebooks are something else. Don't make it weird.

To quote Wikipedia:

> A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover.[1] The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex (plural, codices). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.

...so the book is the medium, not the abstract work of literature. A novel can be available as a book or an eBook (or, if you feel really "retro", as a scroll) the same way as a music album can be available as a vinyl record, a CD or via streaming.

Because that is what a book is - a physical item. You’re using the wrong word.

Literature is to music as a book is to vinyl or CD.

> I am having some cognitive dissonance here.

> Yes, of course I realize that many people prefer those creamy pages and beetle-black fonts.

> But for the most part, [me me me]

So is your confusion about semantics, or that some people prefer physical books, which you seem to understand anyway?

How is your preference for digital books in conflict with line you quoted?

The drawbacks and upsides of both medium types are obvious, as is the fact that a medium isn't synonymous with it's content but not irrelevant.

> Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?

Maybe because until some 15 years ago, physical books/magazines/newspapers have been _the_ medium that people had been using to consume the vast majority of written texts over centuries, from their very childhood to old age.

Doesn't surprise me at all.

This is just vapid sophistry.

> Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?

Well, terminologically (which is not the exact focus), because 'book' is the «medium»: 'book' comes from "bark" ("beech") and as such intends the container; the content could be called 'text' ("the weaving of ideas").

So, on the actual point:

-- the distinction involving "vinyl" and "opticals", "music" and "movies" on the one hand, and books on the other, is simply that relatively little option for the "storage of words" has fused the ideas of "books" and "texts" more closely.

-- and going towards the point of the quote, there is an actual experience of the object, an appreciation, which is important to some. You have a parallel in "music and movies", but more than in the container, it is in the "reproduction equipment" - theater vs mobile vs television vs projector etc.

I don't understand the confusion here whatsoever. People still associate records with a certain warnth and unintended sounds like scratching. Further, no one who reads significsntly considers books to be just physical books. It's a srrawman. The distinction is that the lower bar for books that exist /only/ as ebooks (due to cheaper publishing costs) results in a noticeable drop in quality that leads to a prejudice against ebook‐only texts amongst consumers.

Ultimately, I use a Kindle and an iPad because it's more convenient, but with a book I can, afterwards (sometimes many months or years afterwards), remember parts of the book by the section they were in and frequently take only a couple of skips to get to the sentence I want.

That's a pretty neat feeling when you don't remember the words but the idea and the rough location so there's some distinct utility. But perhaps AI fuzzy search will suffice in the years to come.

Really good post that makes you think about Platonic ideals.

I think you have it backward? Although to a certain extent, books have lasted so long as a technology that the two meanings have become intertwined.

Movies used to come on VHS tapes, now they come on DVDs or via streaming.

Music used to come on 8-tracks, then cassette tapes, then CDs, now streaming.

Novels once came as scrolls, perhaps, but still mostly come as books, although now often ebooks.

Non-fiction writing also mostly comes as books, and I suspect non-fiction ebooks are a smaller percentage of overall non-fiction sales than that of novels.

I feel word salad like this will be literature's undoing, rather than any scarcity of physical media like paper.

English is such a marvelously flexible language, and yet you've stretched it beyond common understanding still.

> For what paper scarcity is concerned...

> For what text amount... is concerned...

I don't think this construction works as well as you think it does.

If I can try to translate what you meant, I'd guess:

As far as paper scarcity goes, the foremost US publishers have already been publishing only "pulp fiction" for a long time, especially in contrast to publishers in other countries.

As far as text size goes, that's only an issue in some segments of the market. In some countries it's called "literature for evasion." For that matter, the biggest slice of the market in the USA is coloring books, but that stretches the definition of "books."

I don't even think I agree with most of what you said, but it wasn't until I tried to translate it into readable English that I knew that.