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| Hearsay: |
Seems like nary a weekend arts or tech section passes without some form of cheering or dire eschatological predictions about the effect of e-books on the literary world. Run for the hills, Ma! The robots is a-comin’ to done take our pipes and armchairs and put out our cozy fires!!
If we enjoy a book we like to recommend it to others. And we quite like others to see what we are reading, especially if the book reflects well on us. This is where I believe the Sony Reader and other electronic books will come unstuck. (Unless we don’t want people to see what we are reading, of course. If it’s a Jackie Collins, say, or a Dan Brown.)
I’ve thought of a couple more reasons to be suspicious of e-books. First, reading books is a tactile experience. The book has evolved over hundreds of years to be the perfect weight and shape to sit in your hand. Also you associate books with holidays. You associate screens with work.
Second, the Sony Reader, which can store 160 average-length books, is described as the gadget that will do for reading what the iPod did for music. Well what has the iPod done exactly?
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February 23rd, 2009 at 10:12 am
The big reason why ebooks are not going to cut it for the foreseeable future is the klutz factor. A book can be dropped in the bathtub, dripped with pizza sauce, infiltrated by sand and forgotten for a day or two in the car during -25 C cold spells without compromising too much its basic function. Sure the pages may be warped and the grease spots unsightlly, but you can still read it. Current electronic gadgets for reading are much more fragile.
Mary
who is messy
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
“I await the day when Nintendo has made its next handheld game console to be fully compatible with e-books—many children will never want to read paper books again! E-books new and old will be readily available for purchase at all video game stores! All remaining independent bookstores will then close shop, except for those few that had the good sense to be located near retirement homes!
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!!!!” – Mario after having eaten one of Pac-Man’s power pellets.
February 23rd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
For the foreseeable future I’m not too concerned about the e-book (or at least not concerned about e-books destroying real books in Bradburian fashion) for reasons touched upon in the quoted Telegraph article. Anything smaller than the size of a paperback (which eliminates iPhones and BlackBerry’s) is too small to be used regularly for anything other than reading emails (or, say, visiting Bookninja). Only an evil ophthalmologist would recommend reading War and Peace on a smartphone.
Also: Books are not anonymous things to look at from afar (thanks to designers). Each one has an exterior (as well as interior) personality. Unlike the Sony Reader or the Kimble-9000, they can be opened and closed (shut-off as it were) at a moment’s notice. Hell, even the bookmarks are tangible. I can throw a book across the room out of frustration and if I feel guilty and willing to give it a second chance, I can pick it up again and continue from where I left off without having to buy a new one. Books are simply too damned intuitive to get rid of.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I’m firmly in the ebook camp. I have a Sony Reader, and you can hold a lot more than 160 books on it…with an SD or a Sony memory stick, you can expand the memory up to 8 gig. I’ve got 650+ books loaded onto it.
When I got my ebook, the first thing I did was replace my tatty old paperbacks – favourite fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. I bought some books from Sony’s proprietary store, and also from Fictionwise, and then I started downloading stuff from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net.
Yes, there is something to be said for taking a book to the bathtub, or being able to throw it across the room. But there is also something to be said for taking your ebook on a trip and not having to decide which books you’ll take with you. I’m reading Edith Wharton’s ‘Fighting France’ right now, but I can easily flip over to Stephen King, some Updike, or some of the sci-fi I like.
One other thing that’s not been mentioned in a lot of these stories: it is SO much easier to hold an ebook open. I have MS, and my hands sometimes get numb or clumsy. It’s much, much easier to hold an ebook in my lap than to hold a heavy hardcover or a thick paperback. There’s no strain on my hands, and I can prop the ebook up on a bookstand or against a cushion in my lap if I want to go ‘hands-free.’ The font can be easily resized, so no need for somebody with low vision to wait for a large print edition. I expect we’ll start to see readers with larger buttons in another five years or so.
The gimp factor for ebooks isn’t something most people think about, but I think it’s an important part of the equation. I think the boomers will start to pick up ebooks more and more as their vision starts to go, for example.
Yes, the screen is potentially fragile, but I haven’t broken mine yet. I’ve had it out and about in -20C weather, and while I didn’t read outside (it would have been too cold even for a regular book!), it was fine when I was indoors. A friend made me a custom wooden case to keep it safe in my bag, and I’ve also shopped for custom slipcovers on Etsy. If you feel so inclined, you can get custom skins for the device, too. People might not be able to see what I’m reading, but that can be a good thing, too – if you read on public transit, like I do, there are plenty of times when you really don’t want to have a conversation about your book (like me, when I was reading ‘The Lucifer Principle’ on the bus – it was a sociology book, but people kept asking me if I’d thought about inviting Jesus into my heart).
I still have regular books. But I really do like my ebook, too. It’s my little aluminum buddy.