Books; can we live without them? Talk of the Nation is kicking this apart as we speak. I would first skip over the obvious social weakness that leaving no tangible artifacts of our collective knowledge would imply -- though I think this is a vital consideration. I also want to leave the generalized ambivalence that older people have towards computers -- this is a generational issue that will be gone quite soon. I just want to address book and digital interface as an informational construct.

I still buy a lot of expensive books. Admittedly they are computer books, but thats how I roll. I still find the ability to browse through a physical book a lot more adaptable than a monitor. Digital reality is always at best a metaphor or filter; reading pixelated text, even with the approximation of antialiasing, will always be more stressful than perceiving true printed words on a real artifact in print.

The argument of books vs. digital content is an argument of reality versus digital proxy. Let's not fool ourselves; no matter how clever the proxy, reality has the high ground.

That being said

You cannot search a book with anything like the facility of a search form in Acrobat. Nor can you re-aggregate or reinterpret book content with the facility of a dynamic website, or easily mail it to a peer (and I'm setting the bar of "ease" pretty high here.)

When cotent is meant to be reference you cannot compete with digital content. However even when learning computer information, I find a print book to be a much better source when dealing with linear, read and learn type of experiences. I definately find a stack of books (open or closed) a better user experience than a stack of windows. And please remember, I have a nearly 300 degree field of vision in the real world -- even my Cinema display doesn't touch my real desktop when it comes to the abiltiy to organize and display my sources of information.

We are very far from a true virtual reality and i don't expect we will cross the uncanny valley very well. I hope not - I LIKE the real world.

Still, I really don't mourn the death of print in transient forms like newsprint and (to a lesser extent) magaines. Transient information is MUCH better suited to a digital format, if for no other reason than to prevent deforestation. My e-mail inbox is as stable an artifact as I need to cache news and useful bulletins. (and of course, there's my website for more long term storage. You do have a website, don't you? :D) 

I should mention, one of my sister is in print, so I don't completely ignore the conversion points, just as (being from Oregon) I don't completely ignore the plight of the lumberjack. And I do respect that a professional trained journalist is an asset to society. However I also think that in an age where thousands and thousands of blogs echo our daily reality, good sources of informations have the ability to stand on their own. We may be an army of ameteurs, but the digital marketplace of attention is responsive to collective attention, and I do believe that even without editorial supervision, agents like the Wikipedia have established a fairly good benchmark of reliable information. (And "good enough" has always been good enough for print, even without the obvious low points of yellow journalism and the Hearst empire).

Two of the greatest agents of change in the 20th and 21st century are the automatic rifle and the Internet. The automatic rifle ("Machine gun" ) gave anyone -- even a 13 year old girl -- the ability to affect (bully, butcher, steal from) society to a degree that the ordinary agents of control are unable to compare with. As Black Hawk Down demonstrates, as individuals, trained soldiers are stronger than overwhelming numbers of armed ameteurs -- however in India, Viet Nam, Africa and the Middle East the Third World has demonstrated that their willingness to take abysmal losses in order to drive out foreigners is stonger than the willingness of Western agents to maintain their positions.

On the plus side, the Internet has given everyone, even the Third World, a positive tool to establish their interests and enrich themselves through education and intelligence. It has made Indian programmers competitive with Western professionals and transported whole industries such as call centers and data entry overseas. It has also created a worldwide commercial space that the governments of the world have very little ability to govern effectively, or even understand. Lastly it has created a worldwide library of ideas where there is infinite variety, and an opportunity for ayone with an interest to contribute to the dialog of the planet and maintain their identity, ideology and ideas in a universillay accessable environment.

This was, of course, the job of books for the last few centuries.

Books did a pretty good job -- an unprecented job. They are the reason why there is not twelve varieties of chemistry, 100 different varieties of mathematics, or any real variety in the spelling or understanding of any given word in any given language. It is the reason that my knowledge of the inner thoughts of Malcom X has survived Malcolm X itself -- and so will anyone who finds his work thousands of years from now.

They are also of course responsible for the spread of Western religion, which is remarkable in its own right, especially given the competition. The world has become a "Publish or perish" phenomenon. However, even the best print of a work of art such as a Van Gogh has never competed with the original, and JPEGs of artwork will never replace the value of true works of fine art. That being said -- there are techniques of recreating painted works of art that use true paint, which in a way do give original artwork a run for their money, and a lot of art is being made digital with no value given to the "original" over the reproductions.

I do not believe printed books, or art, is headed for extinction. That isn't my feeling toward transient items such as magazines or newspapers -- but I do think that a monumental worldwide audience (Time, the New York Times, People, Vogue) is necessary for a sustainable publication in a way that was not true 30 years ago. Certinaly classified ads are digital now, and for the predictable future. But just as with every 30 second skip I erode the commercial value of television ads, I do not go out of my way to support the print industry from circling the drain.

I don't think "Society" needs to prop up ineffective media. I support TV with my monthly cable view (and a cabinet from IKEA), and I continue to buy books becuase they make me more effective at making websites that make books obsolete. If you want to make money in print, make a comic book: if you're good enough, they'll make a movie of it.