Hybrid Readers

I'm a hybrid reader, and I'll bet you probably are too. You are a member of the digital world, but you grew up reading books (you know, pages, print, that sort of thing), and you love the object almost as much as the stuff in them. But you like digital, the web at least, and maybe you've been wooed over by ebooks, as I have recently.

If the world continues making people like us, you could make a safe bet that this would be true indefinitely:

One thing did become clear when I spoke to other people about ebooks though. They are seen as a supplement to the printed word, not a replacement for it. Both Cliff and Kate said very emphatically that they would not stop buying real books if they had a Sony. A simple electronic device, however clever, was no substitute for the physical medium of ink and paper. If something was really precious to you, then both felt that they would go to a book store and buy the 'real thing', if you can call it that. more...

But what happens when we die out? Will the young'uns feel as we do about books? I'd like to think so, but I guess in twenty years or so, what I think won't make a shred of difference, not to the young'uns, or the text they are reading.

Anyway, it's nice to see publishers starting to get on board with digital. I hope they keep making real books, though. I hope we keep reading real books.

But please, gimme some cheap, easy-to-get ebooks soon! I am a hungry reader.

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Comments

[joy-mari]

I love all sorts of reading. It's actually easier to read long articles on my cellphone. And I'm pessimistic about books' survival. I'm sure we'll always have stories but we don't need to hang onto the same [outdated?] formats.

[Sutungpo]

Cheap easy to get ebooks? Project Gutenberg, The Online Books Page, Munseys.com, the Internet Sacred Text Archive. All the books are available in text format, easily read on a laptop or even a personal device. There's enough there to keep anyone busy for a lifetime, even though none of these sources tap into texts written since 1929.

I'm waiting on a really good reader myself. I have problems trying to read on a monitor, and always end up wanting to print the book out and read a hard copy. Until the experience of the readers becomes cheaper and closer to the aesthetic experience of reading a book, I can't really get into them. None of the readers is at all comparable in terms of ease of use or costs to print. Most publishers treat the ebook as a tool to extort the most possible money out of what is increasingly a limited clientele, and the financial demands are at least one reason for the widespread piracy of ebooks.

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

I had the same reaction to ebooks & ereaders till i tried stanza on the iphone. changed everything.

for now, their main catalogs are all public domain goodness from gutenberg et al.

I'm reading & loving War & Peace, which alone may be enough to keep me going for the rest of my life, let alone the other 20k or so books in the rest of gutenberg's catalog.

[ps the cut-off date for public domain in the US is 1923, not 1929, which actually is a big difference, since "modern" lit came about more or less in early-to-mid twenties ...but still the wealth of available material is breathtaking, and wondrous ... but if publishers want to get in on the action, they better take cheap ebooks seriously].

[Tunghoy]

As much as I enjoy the freshness and immediacy of online reading -- and the interactivity -- it doesn't compare to browsing through a bookstore and pulling things off the shelf. The tactile quality isn't the same. And with books, I don't have to worry about battery life or whether there's an outlet available. And I can read books in, uh, places that have water nearby. You know, like the beach. (What did you think I meant?)

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

I don't think online reading - that is, reading on a laptop or desktop - has proved a compelling. These machines have been around for a long time, but ebooks have not really made a dent.

Moblie devices - iphones and the like - are a different story - or at least they are for me. Far more compelling, I believe, than one-purpose devices like kindle and sony's reader.

But again, the question is not what you and I think of books and ebooks - it's what kids born now think of them. I suspect it'll be different.