Seth Godin recently posted a piece on the inevitable demise of printed books. It scares me a little.
I’m not scared of the demise of the printed book as a route-to-market for a fiction author. I’ve been expecting—anticipating, even—that for years now, and I don’t think it’s something any author should be concerned about.
I’m scared of Black Swans.
How many backups do you have of your data? The pictures, letters, financial records, emails and all the other things that just exist in digital forms? Maybe you’ve got some key files synchronised to Dropbox or iCloud. Maybe you’ve bought some local backup in the form of a NAS or USB hard-drive. Perhaps you’re bit more paranoid, and you’ve also got a network or cloud backup solution, like one of these. Or you might not trust a single company, maybe you’ve got multiple network backups with different providers distributed around the globe. You might even be paranoid enough to do your own physical backups on top of all that, maybe to DVD or Blu-ray. That’s got to be paranoid enough.
When you figure in the backups that the network backup providers do themselves, the picture is even more reassuring. They probably have multiple copies of your data distributed around the world, so even if one datacentre gets hit by a meteorite, there’s always a copy available in mere seconds. They may have local backups to magnetic tape. If they’re sufficiently paranoid, they’ll take two tape copies, and ship one of them off-site to a secure location. That’s got to be paranoid enough, right?
A Black Swan Event is an event that is unpredictable and has a major effect (and everyone pretends it could have been predicted in hindsight). Defending against a Black Swan is hard, because you don’t know what you’re protecting yourself against. The ony thing you can be sure of is that you’re probably not being paranoid enough.
So, imagine some time hence…
Print books are pretty much dead. If any survive, they’re confined to museums and the only people who read them are historians. The sum total of human knowledge is encoded primarily in electronic form. And then some unpredictable event chops the legs out from under civilisation. Society collapses. The delicate edifice crumbles. People die. Knowledge is lost. The relative value of knowing the atomic weight of uranium or the root cause of cancer plummets: what people mostly want to know is how to grow enough food to live.
But time passes, and things change. What’re the chances that the descendants of the survivors can pick up where we left off? Pretty much nil. They need electricity, a surviving computer that contains an ebook, the knowledge on how to wire it up, the knowledge to find and open the ebook on the computer, maybe even the username and password of the person who bought it. They’re screwed. It’s all so…fragile1.
Then think about printed books. You need two things: eyes and fingers.
What are the chances of finding a book? How many copies are there of books on anatomy, on agriculture, on mechanical engineering? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
How long does a book last? Well, as long as you don’t set it on fire, a bloody long time. I inherited some books from my dad that were a century old. The oldest surviving printed book is The Diamond Sutra which, at time of writing, is 1,145 years old.
So what I’m worried about is that we’re not paranoid enough. We’ll forget how flimsy the systems we’ve created are, we’ll let our defenses crumble, and one day, just maybe, we’ll lose the accumulated wisdom of the world all at once2.