Books: Bits vs. Atoms. I adore words, but let's face it: books suck. More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made- of- atoms books for the last few centuries.
How do books suck? Let me count the ways. They are heavy. They take up too much space. They have to be printed.
They have to be carried in inventory. They have to be shipped in trucks and planes. They aren't always available at a library. They may have to be purchased at a bookstore. They are difficult to find. They are difficult to search within. They can go out of print entirely.
They are too expensive. They are not interactive. They cannot be updated for errors and addendums.
CREDIT SUISSE FIRST BOSTON CORPORATION Equity Research Americas U.S. Investment Strategy November 22, 1999 Atoms, Bits, and Cash The ABCs of Investing in the New Economy. Books: Bits vs. Atoms. I adore. you get a PDF which appears to be based on the exact same. adjust their pricing to reflect the brave new economy of bits.
Atoms Are The New Bits Pdf Viewer
They are often copyrighted. What's the point of a bookshelf full of books other than as an antiquated trophy case of written ideas trapped in awkward, temporary physical relics? Books should not be celebrated. Words, ideas, and concepts should be celebrated. Books were necessary to store these things, simply because we didn't have any other viable form to contain them. But now we do. Words Belong on the Internet.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website. That's why the Encyclopedia Britannica officially went out of print in 2. In the straight- up match between paper and Web, the Encyclopedia Britannica lost. Big time. The EB couldn’t cover enough: 6. M in the English version of Wikipedia.
- Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People. we will propose a new view of interface and raise a. Coupling of Bits and Atoms.
- MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms is an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is. but they have revolutionary new implications that follow from the.
- . XXVII Atoms 1 Atoms The discrete unit and the. of distinct little bits of matter. had found a new form of.
- BITS ATOMS and P Illustration by Steve McCracken, © 2002. By Richard N. Katz. (NIIT) is in New Delhi, and like many other buildings there, it abuts a slum. He.
- Atoms Are the New Bits “ Welcome to the next. Random House Available at http:// http.
- DOLLARS, BITS, AND ATOMS: A Roadmap to the Future of Marketing Report authored by Rob Salkowitz, MediaPlant. informed of her new purchase and she receives an.
Topics had to be consistently shrunk or discarded to make room for new information. E. g., the 1. 91. Oliver Goldsmith was written by no less than Thomas Macaulay, but with each edition, it got shorter and shorter. EB was thus in the business of throwing out knowledge as much as it was in the business of adding knowledge. Topics were confined to rectangles of text.
This is of course often a helpful way of dividing up the world, but it is also essentially false. The “see also’s” and the attempts at synthetic indexes and outlines (Prop.
Atoms Are The New Bits Pdf Writer
Г¦di) helped, but they were still highly limited, and cumbersome to use. This is why the book scanning efforts of Google Books and The Internet Archive are so important – to unlock the knowledge trapped in all those books and place it online so the entire world can benefit. In the never- ending human quest for communication, bits have won decisively over atoms.
But bits haven't completely replaced atoms for publishing quite yet; that will take a few more decades. An Argument for the e.
Book. While the Internet is perfectly adequate for basic printed text juxtaposed with images and tables, it is a far cry from the beautiful, complex layout and typography of modern books. Sometimes the medium is part of the message. That's what led computer scientists to create Post.
Script and Te. X, systems of representing the printed page in code as pure mathematics that can scale infinitely, or at least to the best possible resolution of the particular device you're viewing it on. Packaging written content into a special file format preserves these beautiful layouts so you can read the text as originally designed by the author. It's also fair to argue that writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Clearly nobody is going to pay 5 cents per web page.
But there's a long established commercial model of packaging a set of writing together into a coherent format, or "book", and selling that. You can't always rely on the Internet being available. What if you have no Internet connectivity, or intermittent connectivity? You could periodically harvest a bunch of related web pages every month and package the current versions into a file.
And that file can be stored and cached locally on laptops, phones, and servers all over the world. Local files have built in, persistent offline availability. No, the Internet will not kill the book. But it will change their form permanently; books are no longer pages printed with atoms, they're files printed with bits: e.
Books. The Trouble with Bits. The road from atoms to bits is not an easy one, and we're only at the beginning of this journey. Books are vastly more flexible than printed books, but they come with their own set of tradeoffs. They always require a reading device. They cannot be loaned to friends. They cannot be resold to others.
They cannot be donated to libraries. They may be encumbered with copy protection. They may be in a format your reader cannot understand. They may refuse to load for any reason the publisher deems necessary. They may have incomplete or broken or obsolete layout. They may have low- resolution bitmapped images that are inferior to print. They may be a substantially worse reading experience than print except on very high resolution reading devices.
The copy protection issue alone is deeply troubling; with e. Books, book publishers now have an unprecedented level of control over when, where, and how you can read their books. In the world of atoms, once the book is shipped out, the publisher cedes all control to the reader.
Once you've bought that physical book, you can do with it whatever you will: read it, burn it, photocopy it (for personal use), share it, resell it, loan it, donate it, even throw it at passers- by as a makeshift weapon. But in the world of bits, the publisher has an iron grip over their e. Book, which isn't so much sold to you as "licensed" for your use, maybe even only for specific devices like an Amazon Kindle or an Apple i. Pad. And they can silently remove the book from your device at their whim. In the brave new world of e. Books, book publishers are waking up drunk with newfound power.
And honestly I can't say I blame them. After centuries of publishers having virtually no control at all over the books they publish, they've now been granted near total control. How Much Do e. Books Cost? Consider one of my favorite books, the classic Don't Make Me Think.
How much does it cost to buy, as an e. Book or otherwise? Except for Amazon, all the e.
Books are more expensive than the print version. This … makes no sense. How can the bits in the digital version, which require no printing, no shipping, no physical storage whatsoever, be more expensive than the atoms? What Do e. Books Look Like? What you actually end up reading when you buy the e.
Book can vary wildly. Here are pages 8. Don't Make Me Think. I attempted to take a photograph of the book, then realized it's incredibly difficult to take a decent picture of two pages of a book for a photography noob like myself, so I manually scanned the pages in instead.
If you buy the e. Book from the publisher, you get a PDF which appears to be based on the exact same data used to print the book. Pages 8. 0 and 8. There are some unrelated minor differences on page 8.
But when you buy the e. Book from Amazon, you get a proprietary e.
Book format which contains very little of the original formatting. Pages 8. 0 and 8. The footnotes are gone. The title font and font colors are lost.
The layout and spacing is completely off, and to my eye the page frankly looks a little broken. When you buy the book from Apple, you get yet another proprietary e. Book format. For comparison, here's page 3 of Don't Make Me Think from the publisher's PDF, which as we've previously established is very nearly the same as print. I downloaded the sample chapter of Don't Make Me Think from Apple's i. Books, and it appears to be an even worse representation than Amazon's.
I have all the same criticisms of Amazon's e. Book format here – page 3 has broken layout, no footnotes, missing title fonts and colors, plus now it takes four, yes, four pages to read that very same single print page. So e. Books Suck, Too? With Don't Make Me Think, I intentionally chose a book that highlights the remaining gap between atoms and bits in books. I've read dozens of other e. Books on Kindle and i.
Pad, and generally the experience is good. For books that are entirely text, with very little layout, the various e. Book formats do a great job. This may very well be a majority of books in the world. All e. Book formats handle text and basic fonts perfectly fine. But then, so does the Internet. If an e. Book can't outperform the Internet at layout, it loses one of the strongest arguments in its favor.
Still, there's no way Amazon's or Apple's current e. Book versions of Don't Make Me Think are suitable replacements for the print version.
Worse, you won't even know what you'll be missing unless you download a sample and compare it with the print version, as I have. That's disappointing, because part of the joy a book brings to the words inside is by expertly packaging those words into a whole experience.
If an e. Book can't capture the nuance of the layout at least as well as a hoary old PDF does, again, why bother? We, as readers, are easily giving up as much as we're getting in the transition from books made of atoms to e. Books made of bits. To make it worthwhile, I believe publishers need to do two things.
Books should be inexpensive. Because I can't loan them (with rare exceptions), because I can't resell them, because I can't buy a cheaper used copy, because I'm only licensed to read them at all on "supported" readers under whatever terms the publishers will allow me to, an e. Book simply has less utility and value to me.
Right now, e. Books are far less flexible than physical books and therefore a worse value. Yet they are far cheaper to produce and sell for everyone involved.
The pricing absolutely has to reflect this. If I can get a used copy of a book for less than the e. Book, no sale. If I can get a new copy of a book for less than the e. Book, no sale and screw you. Books should be a near- perfect replica of the print book.
With the advent of the i. Pad 3, it is finally possible for e. Book readers to provide nearly the same visual fidelity as the print book. I don't want to spend money on an e.