Will e-books put old books out of business?

I just read an article (see URL) that talks about e-books and the coming and improving technology of having books online and downloadable, and what that will do to future authors – both those with narrow audience appeal and those bigger authors who like the idea of not having to share the wealth generated by their success.

The author’s point all came down to e-books eventually becoming successful and books as we have known them in the past as becoming obsolete. I think I would disagree with that point. Being a librarian and “keeper of the books” doesn’t completely have anything to do with my opinion. It’s more of realizing the nature of high technology today and what it’s going to do in the future.

Think about it for a moment. With every new invention, innovation, or change in technology it is always toted as the newest, biggest and of course the best. Information will last forever on this new “whatever.” Then within in a decade or sometimes even less another new form of digitization comes out. Look at the history of technology. We have gone from transistor radios, LP and single records, reel to reel cassette tapes, & 8 tracks (which were short lived), to audio cassettes, compact discs (“CD’s”) iPods and MP3 players, with many others and many variations in between.

Every time a new technology is introduced, a whole new industry has to be invented to support it. But not with books. A book is a book is a book. Now, I don’t deny the various qualities of books over the years, (and centuries). Books produced on pulp paper in this last century don’t hold a candle to the one’s from previous centuries. But all in all, book technology is a much more stable technology than “hi tech” is. We have books that go back for centuries and are still discernable and readable. Even cave writings are ‘readable’. How many people can still listen to their 8-track, (provided they even own one)? Every time a format changes in technology, you have to transfer your information over to the new technology or you lose it; it becomes useless in its former state.

Okay, on the aside here, I do sometimes think “they” purposely try to make something obsolete to force the creation of new jobs, or the generation of making more money. But that’s another issue.

Then we are dealing with lost information.

Hopefully, we will not get so taken up with technology that we – in our hurry to stay up with the times – don’t throw out all those books, because they take up too much room, or they cost too much money to maintain, or… whatever, only to discover that when they did and the ‘new’ technology has become unstable and is upgraded, we discover we have lost information that will never again be regained - unless we want to repeat history and go through the Dark Ages and out again.

It scares me when I think of all the union catalogs are thrown out because we have it on-line now. (Okay – that’s a librarian’s thing.) What if the OCLC WorldCat database crashes? They have now reached over a billion records. How long did it take to get to that many the first time? How long do you think it would take to do it all again? It wouldn’t be done overnight, that’s for sure. Okay, so they have backups. But it’s all the same technology. What if – for some reason, not too unreasonable – something goes wrong with that technology? What then? You can’t look a CD and ‘see’ what information is stored on it. You can a book.

Hopefully we’ve learned that lesson not to do that. Let’s not get carried away here and throw away the baby with the bath water (baby being the Information and bath water being the technology it’s sitting in.) Our new technology is a wonderful thing and it has done things for our world, cultures, economies, governments etc that even the inventors never dreamed of. But as wonderful as that is, we need to step back, take a look at all of the history of information and analyze the statistics of it all, it’s impact and it’s potential for disaster. Now, I’m not meaning to sound all “doom and gloom” about technology. I love it. But let’s not get in a big hurry here.

So will books with pages you can turn be completely replaced by the e-books technology? E-books may become very popular and more accepted by the grassroots populace, but doing away with old books completely? I don’t think so.