by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-10 22:58:54+00:00
> paper email

The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing. It's rather amazing how they tooled up for this, and adapted to all the crazy ways that humans can send paper through the mail. But just about everybody that works for the Post Office is a space-alien:

https://youtu.be/lr7pyggTmmY?si=g8PN_ajCo9I281-5

It's not simply me disliking books. It's the entire world and the industries that are drying up. Look around you! Newspapers going out of business, or transitioning to online models. They simply can't distribute paper newspapers so widely anymore. Nobody likes to carry them around, the newsprint is wasteful, the logistics are byzantine, and so many people can just instantly visit websites (and print stuff if they want) why keep printing, printing, printing?

Amazon, as I mentioned, began as a bookseller, and now they're actually printing stuff on demand as a publisher. In fact, many publishers are printing titles on demand, rather than stockpiling them in a huge warehouse (wasting real estate and overhead costs.) Many, many customers have openly complained, bewailing the poor standards and shoddy print quality they receive from these POD services, because books used to be artistic masterpieces, an occasion for celebrating the pinnacle of design and artisan craftsmanship; feeling a book in my hand and smelling it, and looking upon the cover art: truly an emotional, spiritual experience. But it's in decline, and you can't deny that.

Yes, it's a very slow decline. Yes, there's still space for dead-tree books and big storefronts to cram them on shelves, because even those brick-and-mortar locations can sell online to eBay or Amazon customers halfway around the world. But it's in decline.

All of this same stuff happened to vinyl records. I grew up with Mom's 78RPM turntable and listened to Bing Crosby on it. We had fun playing 33.333 RPM and even 16RPM on the Heathkit stereo system that Dad assembled himself. I spent TONS of Grandma's money on vinyl records, imports, 12" singles, cassettes, audio CDs, boxed sets, coloured vinyl, picture discs, flexi discs stapled into magazines: you name it, I purchased it, I wore out the needle on it, it all got stolen and sold to the secondhand record dealers.

Now you can still find vinyl records in big cardboard sleeves with marvelous art and you can still purchase a direct-drive turntable with a diamond needle and you can play all those vinyls on your analog tube amplifier with Monster Cable oxygen-free leads and Cerwin-Vega 3-way speakers with a subwoofer and Dolby sound. But nobody who's really a music lover cares about vinyl; you're just a vinyl lover and a nostalgia freak and a misfit who pines for the bygone days. Nobody even buys or makes many CDs/DVDs anymore since we got legal digital distribution.

That's the same way that books will go. It'll be a long time, indeed, but eventually the market will squeeze out paper books and you simply won't find the titles you need on paper. Those college bookshops will reclaim their very valuable shelf-space for graphing calculators, ear-buds, and chocolate bars. The printing presses will be unrepairable; some will go to museums and most will go to the metal scrap-heap forever. Xerox and Canon will continue servicing office copiers but paper itself may become scarce. Who knows.