User:StaceyHamilton/BlogEntry: 2009 January 30 10:14:47 EST
From sasCommunity
Guest blogger George McDaniel: Printed Books Are Here to Stay
Lately here at SAS Press we’ve been discussing the New Media and the future of publishing. I am sometimes accused of being a little hidebound because I tend to favor the traditional over the new. For example, I have maintained for years that if, by some quirk of evolution, the printed book had appeared after online media instead of before, it would have been greeted as a giant step forward. At last, no longer are we to be held in thrall to power-hungry devices that are often ungainly, prone to theft and breakage, require either nearby electrical outlets or short-lived batteries, and are hard to read outdoors. With the coming of the printed book, we have a nonvolatile, easily portable, attractive, and ever so handy medium that can be read in almost any light and is at home in your office, living room, the beach, an airline seat, or under a tree in the great outdoors. It never needs batteries and you can find your place using a simple bookmark. O happy day, the era of the printed book is at hand!
Of course, that’s not the way it happened. The printed book came along centuries before the Johnny-come-lately electronic gizmos and now the air is filled with hosannas announcing the coming of the New Media. And, admittedly, there are advantages. Storage, for one. You can pack zillions of words onto a tiny chip, words that would fill entire shelves of printed books. And you can carry all those words from here to there without incurring additional airline fees. Accessibility is another: a simple search across all those words can find what you’re looking for at the speed of light or thereabouts, while you would grow old trying to find the same thing in a library of printed books. Moreover, electronic books are at least theoretically cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy, and free and virtually instantaneous to deliver.
Those are great advantages and they and other factors are the reason publishers are embracing the New Media. And even a traditionalist like myself can admit that that’s a good thing. What I hope, however, is that e-media never wholly replaces the good old printed book. There are qualities inherent in the old-fashioned book that its “virtual” rivals are hard put to duplicate. For instance, some of the books in my personal library have literally been my traveling companions. I have a weather-beaten copy of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums that went along with me on a long-ago trip out west. It lost its cover camping in the rain in Colorado but kept me company on a memorable journey and it has held a special place on my library shelves ever since. Electronic media will never replace such books for the same reason robotic dogs will never replace the living, breathing—if occasionally slobbering—puppy. The printed book is more than just a conveyor of information. It can be your friend.
