I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers.

Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time.

Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation.

There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.

As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns?

Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all.

I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.

I miss walking in a room of books.

My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.

Seems like roms for emulators are becoming kind of book like. As soon as a new platform reaches market relevance, there is a dash to make sure these old platforms are emulated.

However, rom files specifically (as opposed to executeables for retro computing platforms) seem to be distinctly less fickle in becoming reliably emulateable.

The reason is seemingly simple, the early rom files were essentially an operating system, having all the software required to boot the system included in what now looks like one file.

There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so.

That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it should not be too hard for future generations to use our books.

Using DRM, on the other hand, might make things complicated.

The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default.

You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes.

But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media.

We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing.

Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off.

A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.)

This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility.

A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all.

A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone.

And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.

>If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.)

Any examples of video or audio files that are currently impossible to watch/listen to because knowledge of the file format, and all software capable of playing it was lost? If such a thing has happened, there are probably people interested in reverse engineering the format.

I can pick up some writing on physical media -- an Akkadian clay tablet -- and read it (if I have the knowledge) despite it being thousands of years old.

Things like laserdiscs, I can probably still buy equipment to read, but it's substantially different as I need the technology to read it.

Microfiche is quite good in this respect, you can easily read it even without the specific tech it was made for (using a magnifier, or projecting the image with a simple light source.

I wonder if you could make a crystal where, like a hologram, you can rotate the crystal a minute amount in order to project a different page (an idea I saw decades ago had a digital clock style projection from a crystal, used asa sundial -- pretty sure it was theoretical).

That way the information is relatively easy to discover, and with a simple light source you can get info out if it.

I keep hearing the fear of losing content because of obsolete file formats.

Then I think about Linear B, and I rest again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B

There's no emulator that can run a Linear B parser. If a linear B dictionary ever existed, it was never mass produced. Linear B is older than the printing press, let alone the Internet. But now we do have those technologies, and "lots of copies makes stuff safe" is cheaper and easier than ever. I don't believe any mainstream digital format (i.e. popular enough to have a Wikipedia page) will be permanently lost unless there's a complete collapse of society, and then we'll have bigger problems to worry about.

In the modern world, a physical book is nothing more than a mere printout of a PDF file or a photocopy of an old edition. People print web pages all the time, but nobody in their right mind would think much about these printouts, let alone philosophize about their tangibility, endurance etc.

On the other hand, old books, with their high-quality paper, binding and letter-press print do seem have some kind of personality...

>There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old.

That's their loss. There are very few people who want to learn math too.

This isn't for everybody, but I would say Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where words are sequentially presented in place to the reader, which has significantly changed the way I read.

I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow.

The project is here:

https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android

(It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place already and it just needs a few simple updates.)

Where I think this could be really useful is status messages. When a status message on some fixed layout display is too wide, the solution is often to have it scroll horizontally back and forth automatically, which can be very hard to read.

I think it would be more readable to put it in an area big enough for the longest word, and then RSVP through the message repeatedly.

If anyone wants a simple way to play around with RSVP, here's a little quick and dirty command line reader I wrote a long time ago to play with this: https://pastebin.com/zfq2eW4n

Put it in reader.cpp and compile with:

  $ c++ reader.cpp

To use:

  $ ./a.out N < text

where N is the number of milliseconds delay between words. It will then do the RSVP thing. It should compile with no problem on Mac or Linux.

If a word (which is really just a string of non-whitespace surround by white space) ends with a period or comma, the delay is doubled for that word.

There's a commented out check that sets a minimum line length. If you compile that check it can put more than one word on a line to make the line at least a minimum length.

PS: this aligns the words on their centers. To change it to left aligning them change where it sets the variable "pad" to use a small integer instead of basing it on the length of the word. If it is the same for all words, it becomes an indent for left alignment instead of a pad for centering.

This is really awesome. I think I played with your source a few years ago, trying to adapt it to work with Google Cardboard. My initial attempt failed, because my eyes would lose focus during each word transition. I decided I'd need to add a lightly textured background, which would be shown all the time, and which would fix the distance my eyes were focusing, and then lay the text on top of that. IIRC I gave up because I realised the 'right' way to do this was to use the Cardboard SDK, but that would mean also writing something to render the text into pixels (as the SDK only supported graphics).

BTW - The Google Play link in the repo doesn't work for me, and I don't see Glance in F-Droid. What's the easiest way for non-developers to get the APK?

I can't seem to find your app on the Android store, even through the link on your GitHub page. Are you sure it's working?

Also, the website linked in the repo seems to be down.

Isn’t recall way worse for books “read” this way?

Here is 1000wpm:

https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s

I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior to the time stamp above.

A few things here:

This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context.

Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.

I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length, punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words (under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research in this area.

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 if you're interested.)

> The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point.

Does it actually require a saccade?

Testing with a quick and dirty command line RSVP program I have, my speed and comprehension seem about the same with either centered or left aligned. But I'm mostly testing with fiction written for the average adult. The words are usually short enough that they are within the field of good visual acuity no matter where withing them the focus is.

I've not done a comparison using text with a lot of long word.

No, I would say quite the opposite.

Reading this way is a skill which needs a small up front investment, but the pay off is immense. The trick is to not try, just relax and pay attention and let the words speak to you as if they are being narrated to you inside your head.

Because there are no constant micro-interruptions from page scrolling, ads, or even from your eyes own saccades, I find that my attention to the text is much, much better, and I need to stop to ponder something I can just tap the screen to pause it.

I also find that I am far, far more likely to finish an article/paper/chapter via Glance than via my browser. These days it's pretty rare that I'll actually finish an article online, but with Glance I'll almost always read the entire thing from start to finish.

I really, really recommend this skill, especially if you have a lot of time to kill on a mass-transit commute, or if you just want to read more.

Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.

Those downsides only apply to the book or software itself. My point was about the stuff you need to have apart from the book/software in order to read it. You need a computer to run software; all you need to read a book is an understanding of the language. It does get harder and harder to understand books over time, but not at the same rate that computers are changing (and language tends to stay relatively simple, anyway, because people have to be able to learn it).

I have thought about the difficulties of long-term storage for a while, and have come to the conclusion that digital mediums are inherently a poor choice for archiving and preserving data:

http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html

As one of the more recent additions to that essay shows, I'm not the only one with that opinion:

https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/...

As I note in the essay, there are some technologies that work better than others for preservation, but digital's biggest weaknesses are inherent, I think.

>> > What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

First, what's the purpose of books ?

There's entertainment of course. But let's focus on books that teach. Their purpose is to let you access some knowledge, in a deep way.

On the other hand, computer systems are starting to fill that role, and the level of depth they can achieve is growing - on a good day, with the right query, Google may give you access to Amazing content, content that may help you connect different concepts - based on your past searches - just like your brain does.

Another option is if it was easy for a book author to package her knowledge in a smart chatbot or maybe an expert system, and we will have hundreds of such advisors advising us, or just interactively chatting with us,correcting our mistakes, that would be an interesting replacement to the book.

>What's the successor to the book?

The second edition.

And how could books be improved?

Until a different unpowered human-readable medium is proven over a longer period of more careless storage conditions, looks like a third edition if appropriate.

If it hasn't been printed it hasn't really been published as thoroughly as it could be, and if it hasn't been bound then it's not yet a real book. Up until recent decades the survival of unique knowledge was largely dependent on the number of copies printed and distributed, so popularity has had undue importance.

But don't let earlier editions become lost or woe on you.

True. Case in point, (the newly discovered 1300 year old book): http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-boo...

It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files.

Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages.

Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/

PDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years?

And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems.

Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.

The cloud-based storage will never die. (And if it does, we'll have bigger problems on our hands than lost PDFs.)