Why Printed Books May Never Become Obsolete

The BIG reason is that a physical book is a permanent record in time and space and cannot be simply altered long after the fact.  Better yet, the user can even annotate the text to assist his own researches.  What is wtrong with all that?

Folks who are serious about knowledge must always revere books as they have for thousands of years.  After all those first books were often as not memorized and then spoken to a large audience.  This is why dating is difficult for alod texts.

We know the Illiad can be dated to 1179 BC yet the material is built around known oral traditions and useful repetitions.  Its world ended twenty years later and it was all carried to the Aegean.  Likely then written down in Athens using script provided by the Atlantean world.

It emerged as a best seller around five hundred BC when text copying was jump started into a business.  Its impact has never ended..

Why Printed Books May Never Become Obsolete

July 26, 2022 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/07/why-printed-books-may-never-become-obsolete.html#more-176704

Increasingly, people are relying on tablets and e-readers for all their reading needs, populating them with books, magazines, comics, and everything in between. Does that mean that someday printed books will become obsolete?

The short answer is: not necessarily.

The Case for Indefinitely Printed Books

There are some good arguments to make for the future of printed books.

· Slow growth. Though eBooks are becoming more popular, the rate of growth isn’t as fast as you might think – right now, only 30 percent of Americans read eBooks regularly. After decades of advancements in digital reading, most adults are still somewhat behind the curve. If, after all this time, only a fraction of American adults are regularly reading on a digital device, it stands to reason that the popularity of physical books will continue for decades to come.

· Advantages of physical pages. There are several advantages that physical books have that digital books don’t. For example, research shows that people are much more likely to remember details they read in a physical book than a digital one – and most readers find it much easier to flip through the pages of a physical book.

· Nostalgia and physical feelings. Some people will never want to abandon physical books because of the feelings they get when holding one, or because of nostalgia. Reading books is a comforting activity that no digital format can physically replace.

· Collectors and historians. Even if much of the population is comfortable reading digital books, rather than physical ones, there are still going to be collectors and historians fascinated with printed materials. Just as music consumers are still buying vinyl records, there may always be a subset of the population willing to buy physical copies of printed books.

· Inexpensive printing and publishing. Book printing has gotten much cheaper and more accessible over the years. Thanks to better printing technology and a more connected internet, publishing books is easier than ever before.

· Luddites and people who hate change. Even if you could demonstrably prove that digital books are better in every conceivable way, some people will still be resistant to technological change. They will insist on reading physical books simply because that’s what they know.