eReaders are amazing. I have 3 books that I am reading at the same time that I literally carry everywhere I go because it is so easy. I never did that with physical books.
Additionally, my Kindle was $90. Between all the books I can get for free from Project Gutenberg and how ebooks are often cheaper than physical books (and should probably be even cheaper given their effectively $0 distribution costs), my kindle has already paid for itself and then some, so the fact that it will become obsolete isn't a big deal (I've had it for 5 years). I can buy a new one in a year or so (or tomorrow) and very easily it will pay for itself.
We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too. Hell, every book published today is starting out as an "ebook" anyway, given that they're all written digitally. Given that, it's even easier to distribute it digitally than physically.
I should have said reading on regular tablets or phones sucks but dedicated e readers are decent. But the uncertainty of the devices longevity and the markets tolerance of standards makes them a poor long term investment.
I have books my father had when he was a kid. There are books from my great grandparents kicking around. They will never cease being legeable barring physical destruction. I'm sure your ereader is nice. But will your kids be able to power it on 50 years later and read the books contained on it? And who will curate your digital e books if they are fixed to an account? When you die, does your book collection die with you? It almost devalues the book itself as its no longer a tangible piece of information you can pass along. Its a digital thing trapped in a digital realm which can evaporate in one of a million ways.
There are 49 remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible, I'm not sure how you can claim with a straight face that digital media last "much, much longer" than an acid-free book.
> This data will be stored on 3,500-foot film reels, provided and encoded by Piql, a Norwegian company that specializes in very-long-term data storage. The film technology relies on silver halides on polyester. This medium has a lifespan of 500 years as measured by the ISO; simulated aging tests indicate Piql’s film will last twice as long.
> The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser.
There are many other strategies that last much longer than ink on paper. Combine that with the fact that beyond an extinction event, there will always be computers that can share ebooks between them, and the longevity is basically as long as humanity exists. Except with ebooks + something like bittorrent, I can create 1,000,000 copies almost instantly, distributed around the world.
Reading devices aside, you can copy an e-book and have the exact same ebook. You can back it up across a variety of mediums, and keep doing it so long as we have access to digital devices. The ebook containers (epub and mobi) are also remarkably future proof, consisting mostly of HTML and CSS.
I can also assure you that a lot of time, money and resources have gone into keeping the Gutenberg Bibles around; and it’s not as if your or I could pick one up and read it (unless it was copied into a digital format and distributed).
While all of what you say is true, and there are numerous additional advantages mentioned by GP, I am responding specifically to:
> We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too.
My assertion is simply that this isn't accurate. Digital is easy to copy exactly, but also easy to lose completely; I see the sibling comment about Github's archival storage, but most of us don't have a way to either print or read microfiche, and surely, this is less apocalypse-proof than plain old acid-free paper.
If, and only if you can protect that paper from the elements. If someone devotes effort to protect those paper copies.
Frankly, any event which can destroy all digital copies of a book can just as easily destroy physical copies. And the same amount of money and effort put into the preservation of a physical book, when applied to a digital book, will be just as effective (digital books can in an extreme case, be printed out on “acid free” paper as the raw HTML and CSS, and redigitized later with no loss of fidelity).
That is ignoring the cut mentioned in the article from middlemen and the like (and the environmental cost of transport).
If a publisher wanted (and some already do), they could send me a copy to my email at fractions of a penny with no middlemen. Hell, they could use something like BitTorrent to make their costs of distribution literally zero if you consider the fact that any publisher has spare bandwidth and compute from a desktop or two sitting around in their office somewhere with which to start a BitTorrent pool.
Additionally, my Kindle was $90. Between all the books I can get for free from Project Gutenberg and how ebooks are often cheaper than physical books (and should probably be even cheaper given their effectively $0 distribution costs), my kindle has already paid for itself and then some, so the fact that it will become obsolete isn't a big deal (I've had it for 5 years). I can buy a new one in a year or so (or tomorrow) and very easily it will pay for itself.
We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too. Hell, every book published today is starting out as an "ebook" anyway, given that they're all written digitally. Given that, it's even easier to distribute it digitally than physically.