The most often heard complaint about ebooks runs like this: "There is no way I will ever cuddle up in bed with some machine to read. I like my books." The body language and tone accompanying the comment is that generally reserved for someone in mourning. As far as these folks are concerned, the rise of the ebook is the death of pleasurable reading.
I completely understand the sentiment. There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book. The smell, the feel, the weight, the way they look on our shelves (and eventually bow them), the crisp whisper of a turned page―all of these things are part of the pleasures of a book. And curling up with one in bed on a cold winter night, or soaking up sun while reading on a beach, are some of the finer pleasures we can know.
It's a fact of life, however, that not every story is that enjoyable. Not every story is a keeper. Few and far between are the books you'll cherish, returning to them time and again, to revisit old friends, relive old happiness, and recapture the magic of that first read. Some stories are just bad―really bad. Not even worth the cheap pulp paper they're written on.
Stories so bad that even a warm bed, candlelight and soft music couldn't make them better.
And this is the thing about the ebook lament. It's only really valid if the person delivering it never reads anything but great books while curled up in bed, or on a beach, or in the bath. I'll allow as how there may be a few folks for whom this is true. For the rest of us, there's the reality of reading on planes, in line at the post office, on the subway, in a cubicle over a bag lunch or at a coffee shop just trying to relax or escape. We're the same folks who usually have at least one battered paperback within arm's reach at all time, and we've read things that can easily be sorted as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
How and where we read has been changing, and changing quickly. It has been aptly noted that web-browsers are less Internet navigation tools than they are ebooks with highly diverse content. The vast majority of people already read a great deal of content on a machine―just as you are doing now. And yet because this content is not defined as a "book," people classify the act of consuming it as something other than reading. So we have this curious paradox where many folks who think they could never read off a machine, already do so on a daily basis.
I've read books on a variety of devices, beginning with an Apple Newton, and moving on up through Palm PDAs, notebook computers, Sony E-readers and my iPod Touch. I realized, very early on, the great joy of these devices was that most of them allowed me to carry a whole library in my pocket; and with wireless connections, I can purchase books instantly. No more being stuck in an airport wanting another book in a series the bookshops just aren't carrying. Because of this insight I worked with a software developer and was the first author to have his work for sale through the Apple Appstore.
And I've already preordered my iPad. (Need it for work. Really.)
The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading, than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct. What that did do was to change transportation forever. Ebooks will and are changing publishing in ways that terrify publishers and will turn out to be better for authors and readers than ever could have been imagined. And we won't have to murder trees to print up the really bad books―we'll just download, read as much as we can, and hit DELETE.
And here's the silver lining for Luddites: The very same technological advances that make digital and print-on-demand books possible, will make those wonderful and very special editions of cherished book exceedingly economical to print―even in limited runs. Because of digital technology, you'll have even more of those very special books with which you like to curl up. You'll have them to stack up on your shelves as souvenirs of a delightful reading experience, and you'll have your ebooks to read while you hunt for even more stories to treasure.
Mark Coker: eBook Market Exploding, Confirms New IDPF Survey
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), in an email to members Friday, reported U.S. wholesale ebook sales for the month of January, 2010 rose 261 percent to $31.9 million from the same period a year ago.
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The internet is not a combustion engine.
Oh wait...never mind.
Positive-- convenience, less tree cutting, ability to manipulate data ( enlarge font, annotate etc), some saving in cost of book. etc
Negative-- unlike a traditional book,. the ebook you purchase has zero residual value, obsolescence of the device; one more thing to charge; cost of device; replacement costs; reading devices not very durable;
availability of ebooks is limited. Many e-books are more expansive than the paper books.
Conclusion-- there is no serious need for these devices. It is a marketing driven attempt to create a need where none exists.
E-readers used to be expensive, heavy, bulky and somewhat complex to manage (file conversion was a big deal).
Back in the early 2000s, I had a Rocket Reader. It was a bit unwieldy, but I took it on my daily commute to work, and also read it in bed. After a few years use, I misplaced the power cable, couldn't replace it, the product got discontinued, so I put it away. I replaced it with a laptop computer; lots of reading material available on the web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers#Discontinued_models_and_products
Around 2001, I heard Studs Terkel on a radio program, bemoaning e-mail. Studs feared that e-mail meant the death of written human communication. Boy, was he ever wrong, but he was who he was, and his generation didn't 'get it'. I think we're well beyond that kind of thinking now.
. . . “Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. . . .
Imagine having a record but no record player.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible."
Did everyone singing the praise of ebooks miss this in the NYTs today? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?src=me&ref=arts
My wife's an archivist and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of the problems and tragedies of loss created by digitization. Our culture is about to dissolve and readers of a certain sort are going ga ga over something called an iPad? The barbarians have been welcomed to walk through the gates.
To the best of my knowledge, almost no books are being published exclusively in digital form, so the hard copy is still available for us all, and I imagine this will be the case for a long time yet.
No one is seriously suggesting that the advent of the eReader means the imminent death of paper books, they are simply a different form of book, which for some is a useful and likable addition to their reading pleasure.
Good point. My oldest book is from 1788. No way my CyBook will still be around and fully functional 200+ years from now.
I love my electronic reader. It’s perfect for fiction, whether I’m going to read it once or a hundred times. And it weighs less than most mass market books, which is a bonus IMO.
I can't imagine the hue and cry when the first paperbacks were released. It's probably similar to what we're hearing today in regards to e-books. "Ewwww, a paperback? It cheapens the reading experience! I gotta have a hard cover in my hand in order to be satisfied!"