foleymo

I left this post as a comment on an ex-colleague’s corporate blog post about what it means to be “published.” Enjoy:

I’ll be the first guy to say it: kill paper books. Paper is just a dead medium. Actually, that’s not true; that would imply that it was ever alive.

Paper doesn’t link well. You can’t link from one paper to another. You have to read bibliographies, and then you have to track down all those other books.

Paper isn’t easily shared. It takes an enormous amount of energy and effort to share a thought on paper. You used to have to clip something out of a newspaper or photocopy it. Then you’d have to look up the person’s address, find an envelope and a stamp, and wait around for the postman to deliver your thought. Now, just hit the “share” button and off it goes.

Paper is elitist. Paper books force you to come to them. I’ll be happy when all the world’s books are digitized and catalogued online. eBooks are the beginning of the great liberation from geography of the world’s information and knowledge. In the age of books, a tiny rural village only had access to the knowledge stored at the local Carnegie library. Now, that same village with a web connection has access to just about everything. It would seem like magic to our ancestors: order up any book and have it delivered to your fingertips in a snap.

Paper kills trees. Think of your favorite tree. Now, think of your favorite book. Is that book worth killing that tree? What if you could have that book in digital form? Would you still kill that tree?

Paper wastes energy. How much energy does it take to kill a tree, turn it into paper, put ink on it, ship it you and dispose of it when you’re finished? Now, multiply that by every book that could be stored on your Kindle, Nook or iPad. Seems like a waste of precious resources, doesn’t it?

Paper wastes space. How much extra room would you have in your house if you could simply get rid of all your book shelves? Perhaps you have some books packed away in your attic or basement. Why not liberate that space in your home or office? Why not just put all those books on an external hard drive, or better yet, on Carbonite.com? While we’re at it, we should empty all the libraries and turn them into community centers or study centers. Servers are the new libraries, and we can access them from just about anywhere.

Paper gets old. So, you’ve slaved over your book. You’ve done the research. You’ve documented everything. You’ve copy-edited it to perfection. You printed it. Now it’s outdated. You can’t go in and change things after you’ve printed a paper book. You can’t add a blurb about some groundbreaking new research. You can’t fix that typo on Page 76. It’s permanent and it’s getting more irrelevant with every passing day.

Why would we want to hold on to the old way? It’s a dead medium for sure. Digital books are alive.

Originally published at http://michealfoley.com | Comment »