Books

No more print for Encyclopaedia Britannica

New York Times reports, somewhat sadly, that Encyclopaedia Britannica will not continue with the printed version any more.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

[…]

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

Via Slashdot.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun. It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014. While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage. I thought that was a bit excessive. After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk. Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing. How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes. Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book. How much space is there on a modern hard drive? I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes). How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000. I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes. But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order. 3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already. By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that. Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home. New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here. It read more like:

600,000 books (print)
30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
10,000 audio books (digital)
150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots. But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line. Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world? Especially now that we do have the technology.

On the future of jobs

GigaOm covers the release of the new book by Seth Godin, which, this time instead of marketing talks more about the future of work. And jobs.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created….

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

Seth Godin is a visionary. And whether you agree with him or not, his thoughts are worth knowing about and considering. I only started thinking in the same direction, spending more of my focus on education. But I see where he goes and why. The change is coming. And it’s coming fast.

Unix learning tips from Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza – a very well known programmer in Linux circles – shares a few tips to having a better experience in Unix environments. Here is a summary of what he recommends:

Read, learn, and memorize the “Unix Programming Environment” book by Kernighan and Pike.
Read and learn the “Unix for the impatient” book by Abrahams and Larson.
Learn Emacs.
Use Midnight Commander, which Miguel is the author of. Here is a handy manual.
Keep a copy of the “Unix Power Tools” book nearby.
Learn touch typing.

These are all solid recommendations. I’d suggest to use Vim instead of Emacs, but that’s more of a personal preference – learn one or the other. And I can’t agree more on the touch typing. That is indeed the most important skill that you will ever learn. Right next to the camp fire starting.

At this point you might be thinking “I am awesome”, “the world is my oyster” and “Avatar 3D was not such a bad movie”.

But unless you touch-type, you are neither awesome, nor you are in a position to judge the qualities of the world as an oyster or any James Cameron movies.

You have to face the fact that not only you are a slow typist, you do look a little bit ridiculous. You are typing with two maybe three fingers on each hand and you move your head like a chicken as you look at you alternate looking at your keyboard and looking at your screen.

Do humanity a favor and learn to touch type.

Amazon Bloopers : The end of printed media

Disclaimer: before you read any further, I want to you know that’s it nothing more than an obvious bug in a very large and complex system called Amazon. A friend just pointed it out to me while it was happening. And not just somewhere, but in my own Amazon Wishlist!

Amazon is one of the largest online shops, if not the largest. And while they do sell a large variety of products, they started as and they will always be a book shop. Back when they started, digital books, even though existed, were more of a distant future dream. These days they are a reality. But given that printed and digital books co-exist in the same world, how do they affect each other? One way to look at that would be to compare prices for the same books in printed versus digital formats. Here is an example: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web | Five Simple Steps.

You can buy this book in several digital formats for as low as 12 British Pounds (GBP). How much money would you have to part with if you insisted on the version with nostalgic smell of printed pages and no search functionality? According to the Amazon itself, you’d have to pay up 815.74 GBP!

With prices like that, I think we can safely assume that the era of printed media is over. All hail digital!