On Books and Ebooks

Among book lovers, there continues to be an prevalent negative feeling about electronic books, or ebooks. The reaction, one I myself have experienced, goes something like this: I enjoy reading books, I enjoy the feel and the tactile feedback, touch, smell, look, books can be marked up and carried around, they never run out of batteries, I can keep them on my bookshelf, they look great, and they are permanent; they are easier on the eyes than screens, and dammit, I just love them. I do not want to read a book in an electronic format. And so I don't think ebooks will succeed, no matter what Oprah says about the Amazon Kindle.

While I'm sympathetic with that reaction (indeed I feel the same way about paper & ink books), it entirely misses the point of ebooks.

Ebooks are not in opposition to print & paper books; they are a parallel tool to get the content contained in a book.

There should be no tension between loving the object of the book, and recognizing the usefulness of ebooks - whether or not you choose to use ebooks yourself.

Ebooks offer a host of advantages: portability, choice, access, convenience, searchability, quotability, among others. You can download any ebook in a matter of seconds. You can carry around tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of ebooks with you, on any number of devices: your laptop, your phone, your thumbdrive, your Kindle, or your Sony reader.

The good old paper & print book offers a different set of important advantages: permanence, tactile pleasure, dog-earing. And much more.

But why can't we have both? Why can't I sit by the fire reading my hardcover War & Peace, and also take my iphone out and read the War & Peace ebook while I am waiting in line at the bank? These are different contexts when and where I might want to read, and they call for different tools. Here's what a friend of mine has to say on the topic:

What I do is: I listen to Middlemarch on the way to work, courtesy of LibriVox. Read in bed from old hardback edition. Read on the train (in Lounge, when wife is watching TV and wants me there) from Stanza on my iphone.

Reading an ebooks is just "another way" to be reading, it's not necessarily a replacement of a hard copy of a book.

After all, I prefer to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the utility of the telephone. One does not replace the other. In fact, they are complimentary. I'd suggest the same could be said of ebooks and books.

And, if I haven't convinced you about ebooks, consider this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.

That's a powerful idea. The days of "we cannot afford textbooks" could and should soon be over.

UPDATE: I should have listed some places where you can get free ebooks:

• Project Gutenberg, the grandaddy of free ebook projects, they've been building a free electronic library for all since the early 1970s
• Bartleby.com a collection of ebooks, some not in the Gutenberg collection
• Manybooks.net, nicely sorted collection of ebooks
• Internet Archive, the huge repository of free content of all kinds, including scanned (and text versions) of collections from libraries around the world
• Google Books, the most famous of the book projects, late to the party, but hugely influential nonetheless

 

 

Follow Hugh McGuire on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bookoven

Comments

[Social Construct]

As one that cares less about the asthetics than the information contained within, I am in favor of any form of media that can relay that information. Also, I am impressed with electronic readers giving me access to multiple forms of information simultaneously.

[BlackJAC]

"After all, I prefer to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the utility of the telephone."

Pretty much every science fiction show from the previous millennium stated we'd all have videophones by now so we can talk to people face-to-face at a distance. The closest thing we have to that today is videoconferencing, which requires a whole other room to do it, and voice-only phones continue to exist today because people are used to and maybe even like the faceless anonymity they provide. Never underestimate the effects of cultural inertia.

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

skype video works pretty well, actually, & it's free...though i prefer face-to-face to video skyping as well.

[leshanne]

i agree, books and ebooks can exist side by side, complementing one another for each has its own pros and cons. i have to say though, i don't normally collect books and after reading, i often give them away or swap them. as a bookcrosser, i find joy in leaving the books so that someone else can enjoy them too.

nonetheless, ebook reader is going on my christmas list. ;)

[ed hawco]

With regard to the resistance to ebooks, something you don't touch on is the fear that ebooks will REPLACE paper books, the way CDs replaced vinyl, or arguably, MP3s are replacing CDs. I'm not saying it's a valid fear, but the fear is there.

I'm one of those people who love the physicality of books, and as such I don't have much interest in ebooks for things like literature. However, I can really see the value for other types of books, such as reference books, travel books, etc.

But what would really float my boat when it comes to the Kindle (and its counterparts) is their potential for distributing newspapers and magazines. In other words, "books" that are more disposable in nature. I would LOVE to be able to read today's NYTimes or The Atlantic while riding the Metro to work every day. That would be most excellent, especially if I could extract specific articles and archive them for later re-reading (without having to keep the whole paper/magazine). In other words, if you could clip articles.

But using an ebook reader to read an actual book just doesn't thrill me that much.

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

I've recently come into possession of an iPod Touch (same as the iPhone, but no phone, and no monthly fees). There is an NYTimes application, so we're there already, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/iphonefaq.html

In addition, I was shocked, actually, at how great the ebook application, stanza, is. I am currently reading War & Peace on it. Never would I have dreamed that I would enjoy reading a book like that on a little handheld electronic device, but I do. See:
http://www.lexcycle.com/iphone

[ed hawco]

Well, I'd say ALMOST there, as I don't think the NYTimes iPhone app lets you clip articles, and I don't think it's available on the Kindle yet (but I'm not sure). FWIW, the iPhone/iPod Touch screen is pretty amazing, but the Kindle's "e-paper" is pretty awesome too, and the screen is bigger. So we're getting there, just not there yet.

[BlackJAC]

CDs really didn't replace vinyl, since they operate on the same principle as vinyl: put a disk on a spinning thing and some sort of armature translates its contents into sound as it spins. And then there's the fact that even iTunes lets you make CDs out of downloaded content. It's not fear, it's cultural inertia.

[Sybilla]

Great piece. While searching online recently for other works, I've discovered and shared hard-to-find stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde. A couple of weeks ago, after finishing a paperback collection of stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, I was able to read his novel "The Marrow of Tradition" on my laptop, and to share it with friends. "The Marrow of Tradition" is a fictionalised account of the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, also known as the "Wilmington Insurrection". The novel is eerily relevant due to last week's incident in Pennsylvania, and because of Palin/McCain campaign tactics in general.

Thank you for a lovely article highlighting the importance of making books available to as wide an audience as is possible.

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

Hmm... I should have mentioned this in the article - you can get all sorts of free ebooks in many places, including http://gutenberg.org