16/02/10

13 Comments to “Cheapest Alprazolam”

• 
  clew said on February 16th, 2010:

  But watch-watchers say the market is shrinking now and depends on fashion as teens age. Hatmaking and handkerchiefs are nothing compared to what they used to be. (I am not only in the States, but on the West Coast.) Alternative future: while the ebook is cannibalizing the paperback market for convenience, the ebook readers will be cannibalizing the hardback market for status and tactile connection. (Wait till the touchscreens respond by changing texture and warmth! Does a book ever get velvety and purr when you read it? No? A cold and inhumane medium.)

  Also, once I have an electronic copy, why can’t I print off my own copy, sized to fit my hands and pockets and bookshelves? Why buy that from the publisher?

• 
  Matt Keefe said on February 17th, 2010:

  I think there may be a case of margins here, though – taking even just a small share of the paper market affects margins, and may do so at a critical level. I don’t have any figures to suggest that’s the case, I’m just speculating that there might be a weird anomalous point where ebooks capturing a certain proportion of the paper market makes both unprofitable. The current fascination with pricing may be an attempt to combat that.

  I also think the debate will become an academic one, in much the way you describe, but for reasons of usage. The kind of books you describe as wanting to leave in your hotel room are the kind of books that could sensibly be replaced altogether – surely constantly updating websites with the same information will be the future. There’s already Google Earth, a plethora of maps, directions, and recommendations services, and I’ve even heard of a site which lets you take a picture of a building and then tells you what building it is you’re looking at (and what the address is) – this only works in a couple of test cities at present, but it seems the kind of thing that will eventually become all but universal. The same with very specialist academic books, where pricing is already an issue due to the huge amounts of work required to compile them and their low circulation – surely they’ll just become subscription website.

  A variety of other applications (and that’s what many of these things are – applications) currently sold in book form – language learning and phrasebooks, recipes, car manuals, dictionaries, thesauri and (already happened:) encyclopaediae – may migrate elsewhere, but I doubt the actual book book (book) will. I can’t see why it would. You want to take a device out of your pocket which can give you directions when lost, and it would be amazing if the same device can point you towards a cash point, police station, friendly embassy or decent restaurant while you’re about it, but you don’t really need it to be the book you read in bed at night as well (for one thing, the pocket in which sensible folks would sensibly leave said device is probably going to be annoyingly out of reach across a cold room at that point). My theory is that ebooks offer no real advantage over books as such, but that there are certain applications that are currently pretty poorly served by being books. If we called these pApps, people wouldn’t think twice about turning them into electronic versions, which I think is more accurately the case.

• 
  Nina Rader said on February 18th, 2010:

  Uses/advantages of a paperback:

  - you can bookmark pages for easy referencing
  - write notes in the margins (not likely with an expensive/bulky hardback)
  - can take on buses/trains/planes to do above
  - give as a simple present/keepsake
  - spontaneous purchase (unlike ebooks and hardbacks)
  - not as tiring on eyes as screens
  - gets you away from screens (a change of scene)
  - a sensual experience, beyond the intellection of reading, that is tactile and even olfactory
  - can be browsed in a book shop, itself an all round experience that can be shared
  - eventually in time, snob value, probably
  - shows its age(memory value) but still easily disposable
  - avoids copyright wrangling: you can lend it to a friend, sell it on at a school fair or to a second hand bookshop without all the bother that bedevils anything that is digitalised
  - give it as a personal memento to somebody who will appreciate it for being something that belonged to you, that you loved and handled, maybe even leave it to someone in your will. You can, of course, also do this with a hardback. But the chances are that a hardback will not be as frequently read or handled. It’s hard to think of a hardback or ebook in warm and cuddly terms.

  In similar vein, a bank clerk chatted to me recently about cheques being phased out. ‘Won’t happen,’ he said. ‘Our biggest time for processing cheques is just after Christmas. You can’t give children and grandchildren a bank transfer, can you?’

  No you can’t.

• 
  Tom Coates said on February 26th, 2010:

  The best analogy here, both fortunately and unfortunately, is vinyl. Vinyl persists because the experience in some ways is better, more visceral, more physical, more sensual. However, it survives among a small group of people. The mainstream moves elsewhere – first to CDs and then fairly rapidly, over to MP3. If ebooks take off, then yeah, absolutely, they will cannibalise print sales.

  Interestingly, this hasn’t always been the case. Cory Doctorow, who is awesome and you should hang out with, makes every one of his books available as a free ebook download: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

  Historically he has argued that people who download the book get to see if they like it, but that in the end this tends to result in a proportion of them choosing to buy the physical version. Whether this is a majority reaction, because they just want to donate or because they wanted a physical copy is unclear. But it does completely appear to have supported his progress as an author. His ebooks have resulted in larger sales.

  I personally think, unfortunately, that this is unsustainable. That it relies on the experience of reading an ebook being inferior to that of reading a book (or at least superior only for different kinds of uses), and that’s a chicken and egg argument – at some point, ebook readers either have to have a superior experience to physical books or they’re just not going to be that relevant to people’s lives. If they are relevant, then they cannibalise and freely distributed ebooks destroy professional publishing.

• 
  Nick Harkaway said on February 26th, 2010:

  Again, I agree. I don’t think the non-cannibalisation position is sustainable in the face of better technology. I already find myself buying my light reading on Kindle or iPhone, because I want the content but have no desire to hump the physical object around or have to shelve it later. I think, increasingly, that there’s a place for books-as-objects and for hardcopy for hard study. Different brain wiring fired by different ways of accessing the material, like the difference between hand-writing and typing. However, as the tech gets better that may fade, too.

  I’m not sure that the outcome is the destruction of professional publishing, though; I saw an interesting piece recently saying that the reason news media were suffering was partly because in response to the web they tried to go populist and diminished the amount of serious, skilled investigation they did. Now there’s an increasing demand for good information which they can’t easily satisfy, and sales of gossip are a bit less impressive. I think the ‘trusted brand’/'sustained investigation’ is something a large news outlet could do well – especially because they have the heft to hire lawyers if they turn up something contentious.

  Similarly with publishing houses, the problem for readers is identifying rather than sourcing material. Publishing houses have recently not been noted as brands or identities (with the exception of Knopf, and to a certain extent Penguin’s classic line and Faber & Faber). That may have to change. It may be that publishers can carve out a niche as a badge of ‘stuff I am likely to like’… Anyway. No turning back now.

• 
  Nick Harkaway said on February 27th, 2010:

  Actually, on sober reflection, I’m not sure vinyl is a good parallel. The thing about books is that they are, as it were, an unmediated medium – you don’t need a device to translate the book into something you can access. A book uses your existing sensorium. Vinyl requires a record player.

  I suggested before that the better comparison was a kind of perfected music box, but even that is wrong, because a music box is a way of delivering an experience which is intended for other situations. No one plays the music box or writes music for it.

  The book is the native platform of text, as it were, and that does mean that it’s in a slightly different place. Vinyl was a way of listening to music out of the venue context, and it had advantages, but those advantages were by and large also found in later recorded media (unless you’re one of those gifted and slightly alarming people who can spot the problems with digital compression and so on).

  But the book is not a way of recording a live performance. The book generates a performance inside the reader’s head. I don’t know to what extent the physical form is part of that – although there is my question about whether reader a paper book and reading an ebook are different brain states analogous to hand-writing and typing – but it seems to me that there is a substantive difference there. Basically, vinyl was a substitute method of getting music competing with other substitutes. The book is the original thing. Anything which competes with it has to be able to move in on the original ground and win there. Whether that’s possible will depend on technology, marketplace, world economic and technological development, culture… it seems less cut and dried to me than it might be.

  Incidentally, the Captcha software is asking me enter the words “Lagrange it” to post this. Which I think is awesome.

• 
  clew said on March 1st, 2010:

  “whether reader a paper book and reading an ebook are different brain states analogous to hand-writing and typing ”

  If screens get crisp enough, what mechanism would make the reading different? The ability to link off elsewhere? (But then, is reading in a library different from reading in an isolated room? if so, it’s not the e-ness doing it…)

• 
  Nick Harkaway said on March 1st, 2010:

  Clew –

  I was thinking about the physical differences. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there is apparently a difference in the brain when you’re typing or writing by hand. It seems possible that there’s a difference when reading a paper book or using a computer/device to read. Different context, different physical input… not sure, but as I say, possible.

• 
  Aleksandrex said on March 1st, 2010:

  When it comes to saving the world, it should be noted: paper is a former trees – our planet’s treasures. We MUST to decrease usage of paper as much as possible. Moreover, in our highly digitalized life, we are able to do that. Cell operators already suggest their customers to use internet instead of receiving paper statistic. Do more…

  http://www.thoughts.com/for_the_day/blog/thoughts-for-the-day-497909

• 
  Nick Harkaway said on March 1st, 2010:

  Aleks –

  Maybe. I haven’t seen the numbers on paper versus electronic, but I’m not entirely convinced that server farms and the culture which goes with them are more environmentally friendly than libraries and bookshops and the culture that goes with them.

  But yes, if there is an environmental benefit, that’s a factor.

• 
  clew said on March 2nd, 2010:

  About typing vs writing: Yes, but we can point to a lot of differences in typing vs writing that could be the mechanism for different brain effects: viz., speed; recruitment of muscles to the shoulder for writing, or only in the hand for typing; visual focus on the hand when writing, away from it when typing; learnt at different ages; etc etc.

  For reading text on a screen, if we postulate a screen as crisp as pulp print and a device no more inconvenient than a book, what mechanism makes a difference? I am suspicious of any explanation that depends on beliefs in the brain of the reader (‘electronic text is evanescent’, ‘the internet is a constant potential distraction’) because a) they’re so hard to test and b) most of them can be true for print on paper (‘magazines are just junk’,'what’s in the next book?’).

  Also, I have very happily read and absorbed long Enlightenment texts on a cellphone (with a LCD screen, very crisp no flicker low power, would that they were still made). Because I agree that the interesting thing about reading is that it happens in the reader, I am not convinced by romantic attachment to any particular production of words. We only need to get them through the eyes to an undistracted brain.

  (About paper vs electronic vs the environment: paper books have advantages: they are carbon sequestration until you recycle them. The numbers would be hard to run, but an efficient electronic system might be more slowly distributed — like old netnews — and read on cellphones or netbooks that people don’t update often. You could still get anything, just not right away.)

• 
  Nick Harkaway said on March 2nd, 2010:

  Clew –

  The brain thing is a closed question; someone can test it and find out for us. I can see plenty of ways in which the experience may differ, and I can see several which might be entirely contingent on cultural programming and one or two which might not. In the end, though, the only thing to do is test it and find out, which some smart fellow will no doubt do sooner or later.

  I’ve also read some pretty long books on electronic displays – Kindle, most recently, Sony Reader before that (bleurgh) and iPhone. I even do some fairly heavy visual lifting working on my own books on screen (and I do in the end print them out to get the different experience, by the way, which subjectively is impressively different). I find the experience pleasing enough, but there are some situations in which it doesn’t suit me. I don’t know if it’s a romantic association, the present level of technology and design (which incidentally: yuck) or something rather more interesting.

  It’s true that books just need to be got to an undistracted brain, but that leaves a lot of ground to cover. It’s also true that there may be more to the reading experience than the information printed on the page. Typesetting (still completely absent from ebooks) and design are important, too. For that matter, paper choice, glue, jacket, binding, weight… all these things are part of the input. They may or may not be important, but they’re there – before ever we talk about context.

  Got to go – more anon.

• 
  clew said on March 4th, 2010:

  Huh. Paper choice, glue, jacket, weight… these haven’t been steady over the brief history of the codex, and yet the printed material has just gotten more and more effective as it got easier to distribute. (broadsheets! pamphlets! dime novels!) Also, the cheapest pre-computer typesetting I see at Distributed Proofreaders is worse than plain text on a screen (letters broken, ink unsteady). Most of it isn’t as good as LaTeX can do in a jiff.

  Maybe I’m not thinking of ‘ebooks’ as the same set of things you’re thinking of. There’s a service somewhere that lets you choose screen proportions and font for the device you expect to use, and runs plain text — especially PG output — through TeX to pretty it up for that device. I haven’t tried any of the DRM’d formats, I think. They’re *worse*?

  I don’t seem to have a taste for authenticity; I like pretty things, and have some sentimental attachments to family things, and stick to old techniques when I think they work better. You seem to think something much stronger is important. Normally I think of the authenticity taste as thinly disguised exclusivity, but that doesn’t particularly fit with what you write about your ethics, so I am puzzled. Should I be thinking of Morris and Voysey, or Marcel Duchamp, or what?