this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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I still do read books, but I gotta say that online text competes with and has taken a serious toll on my book-reading.
I've found you have to build a habit around it. Read at a certain time of the day (or after a certain task) and do it consistently, and you'll find the time to do it. Even if it's only 10 minutes a day.
How so? Is the online text as good as what you'd found in books or is it fodder?
Eh, in some ways worse, in some better.
Books have kind of an emphasis on a linear format, and hypertext can be convenient, especially for reference use, and you can't do that in a book. Searchability is nice.
On the other hand, the ownership model of books is handy -- buy it and keep it. Ebooks are the closest equivalent and I wouldn't bet on an eBook being usable 30 years down the line.
There's some content that I can only get in physical books (or at most, ebooks), though.
I still do buy physical books. I'm currently going through a book on the history of military submarines, and last week bought a book on a particular period in US war planning. But the proportion of text I read in pixels is way up, and the proportion that I read on the Web is way up.
There's always https://www.gutenberg.org/ which is the best of both worlds.
It deals with the "'buy' it and keep it" issue, but they only deal with out-of-copyright works, which are usually quite old. Nearly all of what I read will be newer than that.
I've read things there. IIRC, my second reading of Journey to the West, one of the "canonical" Chinese novels, was off Project Gutenberg.
googles
Dunno if it was this translation or another:
https://archive.org/details/journeytothewestwuchengen1592/
...but functionally, they're mostly a complement, rather than a replacement, for commercial works. They kinda fill their own niche.
I wouldn't seriously bet on an eBook reader being usable 5 years down the line. Could it? Possibly. Is it guaranteed? Not even close.
As for the content, my SO points out that we have knowledge that was stored on computers in formats nobody alive knows how to read anymore. We've lost information—some of it probably very important!—that's younger than I am.
In the mean time I'm reading stuff that's been gleaned from writing that was recovered literally thousands of years after it disappeared.
Most ebooks are available in unencrypted form, via open formats like epub and mobi. There's no reason they wouldn't be usable in 30 years.