Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning.<p>I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column format with the original Greek in the left column and with a complete Latin translation in the second. For a language lover like me, the web has nothing even remotely close to this. There <i>is</i> an inimitable sense of discovery you get as you thumb through pages and compare column to column in a work such as this - a sense of discovery that the web can't begin to match.<p>I think this has to do with both history and aesthetics. Why was such a work ever printed? What does it say about those who did it? Why all the care to put it in handsome bound volumes? Such factors combine with the unusual nature of the subject matter to enhance the sense of discovery one gets when reading such a work. The web can’t do this because it can’t provide either the historical sense or the aesthetics.<p>Now imagine a room full of such works from different times and places spanning the centuries. They do indeed provide an amazing sense of discovery that cannot be matched on the web today.<p>There is no magic to antiquarian books and there is no need to romanticize them. They are just books. But they can be really fascinating. Serendipity with such books <i>is</i> different from serendipity on the web - it goes beyond content to a sense of discovering how people in different times and places lived and about what fascinated them in their day. Perhaps the web can some day capture this same sense if technologists can devise a way to capture a comparable sense of the intangible elements of time and aesthetics. It does not do so today.<p>Of course, if one's sense of serendipity turns on the content of the information alone, then these intangible factors are irrelevant, but I think it is artificial to try to separate those intangibles from the content itself when it comes to the pure excitement of discovery..

This is a pet peeve of mine. A fun pastime is to tell a book aficionado, or maybe a librarian how in 20 years all their favorite medium will be obliterated completely and how the likes of them will be dismissed as luddites. Just sit back and relax for the next hour while you listen to an ad-lib essay on why books are so great and how they have "life" and how computers are "mechanical and lifeless", and how staring at a computer screen will surely cause asociality (while of course staring at a book is not likely to). I've even heard people tout that the book experience, from the feeling of the covers to the smell of it, is inexchangeable to that "degenerate computer crap". Overly melodramatic.<p>Do I really believe that books will come to an end that soon? No way. Much later, maybe. Do I hate books? Not at all, I love them. I own many of them and regularly buy, borrow and read more.<p>Honestly, I'm sad that these people can't identify with all the change they're being subjected to, but I'm tired of the behavior. If you don't like where everything is heading, that's fine, you're free to keep your old ways but if you're going to grumble on about it, then you better stop swimming upstream and start learning the other way too. Maybe the reason I'm so receptive to change is because I was born into an era of it.

Horrible title for actually quite an interesting discussion.

There's quite a bit of serendipity on Wikipedia: <a href="http://xkcd.com/214/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/214/</a><p>Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other. You can open as many tabs as you like, but now you have the choice.

I don't actually think of books so much as I think of browsing stores for actual goods. On the one hand, I have too much stuff (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html</a>) on the other hand, I'm far more likely to unexpectedly encounter a useful <i>and actually buy</i> a thing (say a cooking tool) at the mall than online (even something simple, like a quality spatula).<p>I wouldn't even look at cooking items online. No AI recommendation engines have ever recommended cooking utensils to me that I can remember, and certainly nothing that I was interested in. I've never made a conscious decision to outfit my kitchen, so I've never gone on an online shopping spree for that sort of thing. However, if I walk by Williams-Sonoma in the mall, I may stop in and check out what they've got.

People use the net to find a wider array of information than they did before, but they don't go as deep. On the other hand, book readers are much pickier in choosing the topics they delve into. I could probably go through my entire cycle of sites in the time it takes me to pick out a book at Borders.<p>I'll never forget stumbling across the 17th century tulip craze in a book from my public library. I never heard another word about it until a Matt Taibbi article a couple months ago. On a long enough timeline horizontal browsing intersects with information once reserved for those who dig deep, but how many almanacs would you have to read to know as much as a librarian?

There is something fantastic though to being stuck listening to crap on the radio and suddenly a wonderful song comes on. Pleasure through forced deprivation.