The End of the World as We Know it?

[Dannager]

If my eyes don't work, I can find someone whose eyes do to read to me. I can also use books to press flowers.

So arguments in favor of physical books:

1. You can make someone else read them to you if your eyes are terrible.

2. They are suitable for pressing flowers.

It's true that electronic formats do open up certain avenues of accessibility, but they lose others and depend on an increasingly complex web of other things that have to work. Remember the 2003 blackouts? I hope your gear (of whatever stripe) aren't running low on charge when the blackout hits.

An e-reader using e-ink technology can run for ridiculously long stretches of time without the need to charge, simply because the only energy expenditure occurs when you change what's on the screen. In order to really lose access to your e-reader, you'd need to be caught in the middle of apocalypse-level blackouts. The Kindle, for instance, can run for months at a time without needing to be recharged.

 

[Dannager]

But for how long? I've got 30+ year old Dragon magazines that are still perfectly readable. Can you be certain that your electronic file formats will be supported on a similar time frame as a physical book will be readable?

I can be as certain that I will be able to read my e-books in 30 years as I can be certain that I will be able to read my physical books in 30 years.

Actually, no.

I'm far more certain of being able to get to my e-books in 30 years than any physical ones.

 

[Dannager]

And, in this case, it can take quite a bit to get where you need to go. From the main page of the D&D website, it will take at least 4 clicks to get to an article or issue, and that is knowing exactly what you need to do and what article/issue you are looking for.

Hardly. If I know what I'm looking for, all it takes is two clicks: type your term into that handy search bar at the top of the page (I wanted to find the Wights and Ghosts Monster Manual update that came out recently, so I typed in "wights") and the suggestion drop-down shows Wights and Ghosts as the very first result. Click on that. Then click on Download PDF.

Two clicks. The same as a Google search.

The website design isn't perfect. But it's solid. It works. It's not difficult.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No, you don't.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!!!!

Well, then. Thank you for pointing this out, as I had no idea that this existed. That makes things a little easier.

 

[billd91]

I'm far more certain of being able to get to my e-books in 30 years than any physical ones.

Not believing that one will pan out for a second. Too much history says the opposite.

 

[MrMyth]

Hardly. If I know what I'm looking for, all it takes is two clicks: type your term into that handy search bar at the top of the page (I wanted to find the Wights and Ghosts Monster Manual update that came out recently, so I typed in "wights") and the suggestion drop-down shows Wights and Ghosts as the very first result. Click on that. Then click on Download PDF.

Two clicks. The same as a Google search.

The website design isn't perfect. But it's solid. It works. It's not difficult.

Well, I have to disagree. Searching on their website is notoriously unreliable, and trying to find something if you don't have part of the title on hand is especially bad. Look, I agree with you most of the time, and this is admittedly an area where people often exaggerate the faults well beyond recognition, but I don't think the answer is to try and pretend those faults don't exist, either.

Can it work? Sure. Especially for the most recent articles or ones with relatively unique titles. But I'd say I've run into difficulties with it as often as I've had it give me what I need. And sometimes that's inevitable, sure, so I'm not expecting perfection - but an overhaul would be most sorely welcomed.

 

[The Little Raven]

- the Pathfinder popularity that presumably surpasses that of D&D for printed products only;

Note: Pathfinder only sold better than D&D during the slowest release quarter for WotC in 2010, and in the recorded quarterly sales info from ICv2 we've received since, D&D has reasserted itself as top dog.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I can be as certain that I will be able to read my e-books in 30 years as I can be certain that I will be able to read my physical books in 30 years.

My experiences tell me otherwise.

I lost electronic data from the 1980s in the 1990s due to format changes. I lost data from the early 1990s in the late 1990s- some of which was because the company in question (Microsoft) decided to change the way they did spreadsheet programs and provided no way to translate from one to the other. I had to spend thousands for a third party to translate my business files- I couldn't afford to translate my recreational files.

I'm fortunate that my data in my Palm Tungsten (purchased in 2005) is downloadable onto an old Mac that can import the data into Office, or I would currently be re-typing 3 RPG campaigns, a couple hundred PCs & NPCs and a Chordbook For New Standard Tuning (Guitar) I'm writing from scratch because the Palm is dying and it won't talk to my newer electronics. We're talking 330 files, some of which are 5+ pages in length.

In parallel, I have audio recorded on formats that are well & truly dead...and the music is currently not available (I've looked). To access it, I have to maintain the older tech.

Meanwhile, I can still curl up with my original AD&D books and Dragon magazines, my novels from the 1960s and so forth.

So, no, I'm not as confident in my ability to access electronic data encoded in one form decades down the road.

 

[Dannager]

Note: Pathfinder only sold better than D&D during the slowest release quarter for WotC in 2010, and in the recorded quarterly sales info from ICv2 we've received since, D&D has reasserted itself as top dog.

The latest news is that the head of Paizo says that her sources say that Pathfinder is outselling D&D print products.

 

[Dannager]

My experiences tell me otherwise.

I lost electronic data from the 1980s in the 1990s due to format changes. I lost data from the early 1990s in the late 1990s- some of which was because the company in question (Microsoft) decided to change the way they did spreadsheet programs and provided no way to translate from one to the other. I had to spend thousands for a third party to translate my business files- I couldn't afford to translate my recreational files.

I'm fortunate that my data in my Palm Tungsten (purchased in 2005) is downloadable onto an old Mac that can import the data into Office, or I would currently be re-typing 3 RPG campaigns, a couple hundred PCs & NPCs and a Chordbook For New Standard Tuning (Guitar) I'm writing from scratch because the Palm is dying and it won't talk to my newer electronics. We're talking 330 files, some of which are 5+ pages in length.

In parallel, I have audio recorded on formats that are well & truly dead...and the music is currently not available (I've looked). To access it, I have to maintain the older tech.

Meanwhile, I can still curl up with my original AD&D books and Dragon magazines, my novels from the 1960s and so forth.

So, no, I'm not as confident in my ability to access electronic data encoded in one form decades down the road.

There are about a hundred ways I could lose access to my physical books. They could be lost. They could be stolen. They could be destroyed. And this stuff happens all the time to people.

Meanwhile, if I have a PDF up in cloud storage with Google (and a local copy as back-up), nothing short of a surprise catastrophic failure of the internet coupled with the simultaneous destruction of my own computer, external hard drive and separately-stored thumb drive will prevent me from recovering it.

And yes, in thirty years, I'm confident that I'll still be able to read the PDFs I have today, or will have ported them to whatever format is contemporary and widely-used for the time. Certainly more confident than I am that I'll still have all my books. The binding on my House of the Beast Pathfinder module came apart last week.