/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1961012]

Books. Physical books. In the future, it is highly conceivable that there will be very few physical books because of the likes of the Kindle. With resources being steadily depleted, the Kindle and the likes of it seem a great way to help save the environment.

But does that thought not also make you sad? (many of you who are happy not to own a book yourselves, instead opting for kindle).

[BufoPaella !!BzKeErxW52r No.1961027]

I hope to be the eccentric weirdo with the big house on the hill, and a massive mahogany-shelved library of forgotten books which I can show to some easily-affected youngster, just before teaching him magic. Or raping him. Depends on the writer.

[Anonymous No.1961033]

You haven't have a kindle yet, have you?

[Anonymous No.1961051]

>>1961033
I haven't, no.

[Anonymous No.1961068]

Once again:

The Kindle is not causing the physical book to go extinct. People don't read, bookstores go bankrupt. This has been happening before ebooks due to radio, television and the internet among other technologies.

[Anonymous No.1961077]

>>1961068
True, but I can still see a need for it in the future, in order to save resources.

[Anonymous No.1961088]

i personally love "data slate" technology. give me a book sized object and allow it to project me all the books i want. fuck books, they're too uneven and every book had a different size, the only books i keep are encyclopedias and those books that have the laws in them, i've never read them but fuck its impressive.

[Anonymous No.1961353]

Yes, there's something romantic about having a shit load of physical books. But fuck romance. I'd rather fly around with a jet pack and have a kindle in my pocket than sit among a mountain of paper. Ebooks are the future. Deal with it.

[Anonymous No.1961359]

I adore physical books but only because of childhood memories of flipping to a random section of a big-ass book and reading a few pages before being called down to dinner. I'd much rather carry around a Kindle than some dickhead's 700-page MFA thesis

[Anonymous No.1961367]

I have a kindle and love it, when I can get a free book on it. I'm not going to pay for a digital copy I can have stolen from me at the push of a button. But I do like walking around, reading on my kindle. Saves me a lot of wasted time when I normally wouldn't be reading.

I really like physical books. The pleasure of owning them, looking at them, holding them, and reading them is totally unlike digital copies. I'm really sad that bookstores are going out of business since a lot of the books I've liked I found in a bookstore, browsing after I got what I came for.

[Anonymous No.1961375]

I turned to the darkside when my mom gave me her knockoff ipad after she got a real ipad. I swore I would never use an e-reader, but fuck man. They're easier to handle. Easier on the eyes. I can read faster. It's more comfortable in every way. I see no good in buying real books anymore. Prediction: In the future only douchebag hipsters will own books, and they will be the most uneducated.

[Anonymous No.1961378]

>>1961375
>knockoff ipad
what was it exactly?

[Anonymous No.1961388]

kindles are for people who like technology more then literature.


either

A. you use it to steal books, then you are killing literature.

or

B. you use it to buy books, which cost more than used versions of physical copies.


Either way, the kindle is for apple-gadget crowd.

[Anonymous No.1961390]

This is what worries me.

Suppose there was some kind of global catastrophe. Humanity is thrown back into a Dark Age.

Books- real physical books- would still be accessible.

All that electronic data would just disappear.

(A bit like my vast music collection when my old PC was stolen)

[Anonymous No.1961396]

>>1961378
A Nextbook 3 courtesy of home shopping network. I think it cost $200 a half year ago. It works very well for reading, middling for surfing the web.

[Anonymous No.1961399]

when I'm reading my kindle I'm not flaunting my insightful literature to the world, it makes me feel at ease because people will think more highly of me and my modest ways

[Anonymous No.1961405]

>>1961390
Dude . . even physical matter disintegrates over time. There is no permanence, and to maintain even the illusion of permanence is a foolhardy task. However, a hard-drive encased in some highly resistant metal would probably be better suited to the elements than a book made of fibrous plant material.

[Anonymous No.1961411]

>>1961388
I hardly think my piracy of The Black Swan is killing literature, especially since the author is rich already and wrote the book for fun.

If anything I'd love to read more books by new authors for five dollars a piece. I'm thinking about starting a translation business, licensing Japanese light novels, and selling them through Amazon for $5-6 each.

[Anonymous No.1961416]

>>1961405
3000 years later those damn Greek tourists are going to know the rules, dammit!

[Anonymous No.1961423]

>>1961405
Dude.. a book lasts longer than a hard-drive. When the book is old enough, it will be transcribed. When the hard-drive is old enough, it's data will be corrupted.

And making paper is a less industrious endeavor and less technologically demanding than fabricating hard-drives.

[Anonymous No.1961439]

>>1961405
Dark Age= no electricity, so a hard drive would be useless.

Books can be copied and re-copied by hand with very basic, home made tech. That's what happened for hundreds of years

We are more dependant on technology now because we can't do it for ourselves. You could have a Masters in IT, but dropped back into a pre- or post-industrial society you wouldn't have any hope of building a computer from scratch.

[Anonymous No.1961491]

Why can't we have both? Why, in this world of ours, must we settle for one or the other? They both have their pros and cons, so why have both and use which ever is convenient at the time? I mean, sure Barnes and Nobles are going to shove their Nook down your throat, and Amazon is going to push the Kindle, but that doesn't mean we have to forsake our paper books for digital.

[Ohgod No.1961502]

>>1961439
Suddenly, thread diversion!

Could you build a computer/Kindle in the Dark Ages? I mean, it's just silicone chips and shit, how hard could that be to manufacture with modern-world knowledge?

[Anonymous No.1961567]

>>1961502
Maybe, if you could make the right tools and some how make a power source. I mean, we managed to make it now, and we would still have the same materials required to do it, just in their raw form.

[Anonymous No.1961577]

>>1961012
>we'vemadethisthread7timesandwehavebecomeexceedinglyefficientatit.jpeg

All you book fags can come up with is that it smells good and the Dark Ages. Fuck. Off.

[Anonymous No.1961592]

I participate in the use of both.

[Anonymous No.1961606]

whats the difference between a book of code and a computer?


Dear /lit/, despite your animes and science fictions, your computer does not have a soul or will. Its just a pile of code.

[Anonymous No.1962907]

I will be reading physical ones still, thank you.

[Anonymous No.1962915]

i for one have never bought more physical books than since i got*my kindle

> pirate book
> buy copy when good

[Anonymous No.1962919]

save the environment or have the novelty of a physical book

it would be pretty damned vain to choose paper over something that could help lessen humanities negative impact on the earth. if the difference was negligible that would be one thing, but...

[Anonymous No.1962924]

>>1961012
Yeah right, because reuseable paper and planned forests are more of a drain on the environment than electronic gadgets using toxic or rare materials. Heh.

[Anonymous No.1962926]

>>1962919

Paper is a renewable resource.

All the energy spent producing your plastic toy is not.

[Anonymous No.1962933]

[Anonymous No.1962934]

>>1962933
I would taste blond kid's blood that day.

[Anonymous No.1962935]

>>1962934
whut

[Anonymous No.1962936]

>>1962935
I would eat his heart to gain his power.

[Anonymous No.1962939]

>>1962926
LOOOL, I remember you. You're that idiot who thinks that the energy consumed to produce an e-book is the same or bigger than the energy consumed to produce a paperback.

RUN AWAY GUYS, THIS THREAD IS PLAGUED.

[Anonymous No.1962943]

>>1962926
if you mean recyclable, yes it is. at least to a certain point.
i did a little bit of googling around and found this:
http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/how-many-times-can-you-recycle-paper/

at any rate, if we constantly use trees we're going to farm them into extinction. ie, what's happening with fish right now. plus, renewable doesn't mean it's not reusable - also you're not taking into account the idea that we may make future generations of e-readers out of something that can be recycled.

[Anonymous No.1962944]

>>1962943

No, I don't mean recyclable, I mean renewable. In that you can plant more trees.

[Anonymous No.1962947]

>>1962939
Energy and resources. Several of them utterly toxic to the environment. A book can be printed without this kind of shit (I'm not saying they are but they can). Same deal, using a grandmother of a car sputtering oil and CO2 everywhere until it dies is ultimately better for environmental purposes than buying a brand new one with electronics, plastics and all those nice polluting things. Even if the car in itself needs less gas and ejects less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

[Anonymous No.1962949]

>>1962944
right then.
>at any rate, if we constantly use trees we're going to farm them into extinction.

[Anonymous No.1962952]

>>1962943
All this pulp, if not mixed with awful chemicals can go right into compost though.

[Anonymous No.1962953]

>>1962949
The problem won't ever stem from books. The problem comes from the endless stream of mailed ads and unnecessary shit like this. And the failure to step up and use forest planning in a massive enough scale.

[Anonymous No.1962956]

>>1962953
can you prove that? it may not necessarily be how many books are produced but the size and scope of the books.

i'd also like to point out that just because something is new doesn't mean that it's more harmful towards the environment.

[Anonymous No.1963045]

Kindlefag here. /lit/ always overlooks one point when discussing whether ebooks or physical books are better for the environment..

While it seems clear that one kindle is preferable to the thousands of physical books that it can hold (relative to environ' friendliness), the large majority of kindlefags will not own just one kindle. Take a short amount of time, a decade say, and look at how many TVs, phones, PCs, laptops, mp3 players, etc you have owned. The argument is flawed because we're consumerist fuckheads who'll shell out another £150 for a slightly better screen.

The kindle would be better for the environment if you used just one of them for the rest of your life. But you won't, so it isn't. Furthermore, the argument is very tedious and it's frequency is absurd.

For the people saying that, were all our books to be digital, we'd be screwed in a apocalypse - I think being unable to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo would be the least of my worries should we revert to the dark ages.

Offtopic, apologies OP.

[Anonymous No.1963063]

>>1961388
>implying Homer and Aurelius give a fuck if I pirate their books
>implying anything past 1900AD is worth reading

[Anonymous No.1963067]

I steal books all the time, Shits amazing. I have 500 books I'm waiting to read because of the internet downloads. I wish I had a kindle so I wouldn't have to read them via my laptop screen but oh well!

[Anonymous No.1963068]

>>1962956
God, you're dense. It's not because it's new. It's because it is made of heavy metals, of plastic, and other heavily processed materials that require lots of raw materials, which need to be processed (often chemically) and generally need more industrial process. Sure your Kindle avoids cutting trees to read books, but its production affects the environment in other way.

[Anonymous No.1963081]

>>1963068
The impact is meaningless. It's a non-issue.
Everyone has a car and it pollutes 1000 more.

[Anonymous No.1963160]

>>1963081
Cars barely produce any greenhouse gasses in their emissions compared to the pollution caused by MAKING just about anything. Take your stupid somewhere else.

[Anonymous No.1963168]

>>1961012

In the future, we'll have libraries full of kindles.

[Anonymous No.1963174]

>>1961388

Buying used books helps the publishing industry just as much as pirating ebooks.

Buying ebooks, on the other hand, is cheaper than buying print while still supporting the industry.

[Anonymous No.1963184]

>>1962953

We're already doing forest planning. The amount of Trees in North America has remained relatively stable throughout the 20th century.

The trees that are cut down to print the New York Times were planted for that purpose.

[Anonymous No.1963193]

Books will never die.
I personally prefer real books. I've always been a technological dumbass, which may be a part of it... But I just love the feeling of holding a book. It's reassuring. I like being able to read it without worrying about battery power, since I'm reeeeally forgetful about charging things until they die.
I don't mind kindles, though. I'd dislike them if they somehow managed to make real books 'obsolete', but I think it's good that they make reading more convenient for some people. I've seen more people reading since they came out, and I guess that's the most important thing.

It really just comes down to personal preference.

[Anonymous No.1963204]

>>1963193