Agreed on all the points in his list except "readable with any form of light." Books lose to my cell phone in darkness or very dim light.
My book reading is roughly split into two categories. First, the books that I read straight through and can get in and out of very quickly, reading in bursts whenever it's convenient. I read these while I'm eating, while I'm waiting in line, while I'm on the toilet, whenever I arrive to meet someone and they aren't there yet. These simply must be e-books; I can't go back to the days of trying to carry a book everything yet so often being stuck without one.
Second, the books that I immerse myself in for periods of time, because they're more difficult or because I'm reading them specifically for the sake of that immersive, relaxed experience. These I prefer to be physical books, and the arguments in the article weigh very heavily against e-books. It would be a great loss to me if physical books disappeared before e-books improved their navigation and their navigational cues dramatically. I could imagine e-books eventually overtaking physical books for navigation and note-taking. Personally, I write slowly, hate my own handwriting, and do not like marking up books, so note-taking is a chore for me even with physical books, but e-books are just pathetic. Even for me, physical books beat them simply by virtue of their ability to hold different colors and shapes of sticky notes and because I can look at them and see where I've dog-eared pages and stuck in sticky notes and other bookmarks.
There are a few more categories, such as cookbooks and reference books (both of which I prefer to be physical) but the first two comprise 90% of my reading and purchasing. (EDIT: To clarify, I think many reference works that were formerly structured as books should not be books at all in the digital age.)
Weight is probably my biggest issue, I have around 2,000 pounds worth of books which makes moving far more painful. After my last move I left most of them in boxes in my closet and if I don't unpack them for my next move I am probably just going to dump them at a library or something.
I hate reading paper books.
Yes, you can see them in bright light. You also can't read them in no light. I read in the dark way more than I read outside in direct sunlight. I find that I'm constantly readjusting a book to get the light to hit it correctly. With an iPad I get constant light across the whole page all the time.
You can't ctrl-f a paper book.
Page numbers? Page numbers vary per printing of the book depending on its size. It is no better for paper than it is for ebook. In fact, an ebook's word count will be the same across all editions of the book (assuming there aren't any changes).
The only thing I like about paper books is that you can read them on a plane before 10,000 feet and sometimes the covers look cool.
Funny. I always run into issues of glare under florescent lighting with the iPad and it drives me nuts. And no matter how long I use the Kindle, I can't stop noticing the distracting flash between pages. On the flipside, searching and highlighting is advantageous with ebooks, which is why I've primarily used them with reference books.
The parts on distribution of weight make perfect sense to me, especially when I compare that experience of sensing place to the experience of sensing place in, say, the New York Times iPad app.
As someone who was a former book enthusiast who now owns an iPad, I also miss the appreciation of the binding of hard books, how the pages felt and the musty smell.
I think the iPad is great but the part of the atmosphere of a good book is gone even though digital is desperate in the attempt to replicate it.
>With an iPad I get constant light across the whole page all the time.
Hopefully there is a higher-res iPad because my eyes feel more tired after reading an iPad at length. I don't know if that is the main reason (or the backlight) but I suspect it is.
>Page numbers? Page numbers vary per printing of the book depending on its size. It is no better for paper than it is for ebook. In fact, an ebook's word count will be the same across all editions of the book (assuming there aren't any changes).
I keep my books. For example, I still remember my favorite pages in The Catcher in the Rye because I read the same paperback I purchased in HS. It always amuses me to see the notes, in the book, I'd taken during that time.
I don't think that books have lost their romanticism but are giving away to something more efficient.
But how often do you need to? Large topics are in the index, and if you remember a detail but can't flip to it within a few seconds, then you don't know the structure of the book well, and it will do you good to spend a minute or two looking around.
I agree that there are many works where you want to instantly find a particular five sentences and read nothing else, but they should never become e-books. They should become some other form, such as a web site, a wiki, a set of man pages, etc.
You can't ctrl-f a paper book.
biggest downside from my perspective. then again i'm not a typical reader, because it's been far too long since I've read a whole book ( in the sense of reading fiction, or biographies).
to me, the only, but probably one of the most important reasons for still relying on books is that they are less strenuous on the eyes (e ink, is better but less interactive as of now).
As an erstwhile wannabe literary scholar, I would be much more excited about ebooks if they were generally available in non-DRMed formats amenable to processing and analysis with arbitrary software tools. For example, I can't generate a concordance of a Kindle ebook by any means, and I certainly can't use one with the NLP Toolkit.
As a general reader, I'm unimpressed by the OCR errors, poor typography, and formatting mistakes of backlist ebooks. As for reading devices, I'm unimpressed with the cumbersome library management UI and generally poor fit and finish of my Kindle 3. I'm very impressed, however, by the light weight of the thing; I was reminded of this recently while reading a 700-page hardbound novel – I would have gladly traded it for an ebook.
As for TFA, I'm disappointed to see the author accused of an appeal to nostalgia when he clearly was arguing on the basis of practical advantages and disadvantages. Shifts in communications forms bring changes in artistic and intellectual production as well as shifts in the culture at large – investigating and critiquing these changes strikes me as inherently worthwhile. There's certainly a rich body of work along these lines that pre-dates the ebook; c.f. Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and Hugh Kenner, for example. (Thank goodness that the secondhand paper book market exists, since so many of their books are out of print.)
Here's a spec that barely got a mention at the end of the article: paper is extremely heavy. It's almost 3/4 the density of water!
I just moved across town, and I had a terrible time because about half of all my possessions are paper books. This is roughly 35 boxes, and keeping them all is just too expensive. They take up a lot of space, and it's nearly impossible to find what I'm looking for anyway, so after I've read them once, I don't often return to them at all.
I've been getting rid of them. The reduction in clutter has been both uplifting and liberating!
Another thing we lose with digital books is serendipity. Erin McKean talked about this amongst other things in her brilliant TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY.
I got a kindle 7 months ago and I was given a regular physical book to read this Christmas. I don't know if it's just me but I found it really hard to go back to the book format. Just holding it is much more of hassle. I also love how I can instantly go to the dictionary on my kindle, which also has the serendipity factor! It's not unusual to hop around from word to word on the definitions of the previous one or just finding words which are above or bellow the word I'm looking at! So maybe that serendipity factor isn't all lost after all.
I am worried about one particular fact : these so called disruptive firms don't want to conform e-books to a standard format. Paper has this huge advantage. One can read old literature because they "conform" to one format. In the e-book space, everyone has their own. While Apple did disrupt the music industry, I don't necessarily feel they have set the fire in terms of e-books. They may get the numbers (they do more often than not) but they may not get the innovation.
That depends on what your doing. If your coding it's nice to have 50+ books of reference material on hand but I don't want to take that to and from work every day.
I understand the romanticism with paper books. They are beautiful works of art that gain character over a period of time as different readers come into contact with their pages. Each book as a story of its own outside of the words on the page.
But I, like many, grow tired rather quickly when I read. The small type and lack of interaction causes my to feel sleepy as I try to find out how Alice is going to get out of Wonderland. This issue is completely eliminated on the ereader, and I am surprised the customizable type features aren't mentioned in this article. Instead of having to find the formatted edition that suits my needs, I simple increase the font size to suit my needs. With ebooks, the limits are really non-existent with what can be done to story telling.
When the printing press came around, the powers at be wanted to control it to only produce the bible. But eventually, people were printing powerful material such as "Common Sense" and "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" inspiring nations through the power of mass distributed information. eBooks (and obviously the Internet in general) is another step in our progress.
The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage. Furthermore, the more people who have a copy, the less likely the work is to be lost.
- DRM will fail eventually, like it did with music.
- Storage formats will evolve, but there will always be programs to convert to the latest format.
- Resale will become less of an issue as price comes down. We're seeing the same thing with video games and music.
- Rare works won't slowly disappear over time like they do with paper books.
With the advent of ebooks, distribution of knowledge is becoming less and less restricted. There will, however, be those who cling to the old technology out of nostalgia. They'll be forgotten in a generation or two; it was the same way with scrolls.
I don't think you understand the point of his post. You certainly missed the last section, titled "Ebooks are inevitable," where he admits that e-books are already better in many ways and are very far from fulfilling their potential. With ebooks, we're still looking at the equivalent of the day after Gutenberg printed his first Bible. His "spec" comparison (like most spec comparisons) is meant to point out where e-readers are deficient, because he wants e-reader development to focus on those deficiencies. We need to decide which paper book "specs" are important and ensure that they get recreated in our new digital world.
The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage.
By the "long view" he's talking about world history, not rereading a book he bought twenty years ago. Most of the texts we have from over a millennium ago had to survive through centuries when nobody cared about them.
Also, I don't want to be rude, but when you follow "tl;dr" with a putative summary, it means you've read the whole thing yourself and want to save other people the trouble of reading it. If you decide something isn't worth reading straight through and just skim it instead, say "tl;dr" and leave the summarizing to people who actually read it.
eBooks win big on being able to break the DRM then put it in a speed reading program. Speed reading is a huge time saver, and software support for it is very helpful.
I wonder when they'll allow some decent speed reading GUI option for Kindle or iBooks without breaking the DRM first.
That's a big can of worms. iBooks are assembled out mined materials and in factories that also have an impact on the environment. And think about the conditions for the workers. The conditions in a paper mill in the American northwest are much better than an Apple factory in China. So I guess it depends on what you consider more important, and what you want to support.
"iBooks kill how many trees? Zero. That is a big win."
This is a misconstrued argument. False, misunderstood nonsense.
Here's how its actually done. Paper for books comes from huge forests of Eucalyptus trees grown especially for the purpose of paper making. They grow very fast (and anywhere) and are constantly being replenished because paper is a commodity. There are MORE trees grown now because paper making exists than not. An additional benefit also being that they are great CO2 sinks!
Mature, rare trees are never used in paper manufacture. Its easier, cheaper and kinder on the environment to just keep growing Eucalyptus.
Now, lets look at recycling. Paper recycling is cleaner as an industry than it used to be but it still is more environmentally damaging than making new paper from scratch.
But don't allow facts to get in the way of a good prejudice.
Well, purely on aesthetic terms paper books win hands down.
eBooks suffer from no hyphenation, no widow and orphan control, no good math markup, huge rivers of loose lines, etc. The list of typographic atrocities is endless.
I liked my Kindle at first (especially for the convenience of having lots of titles on one device) but the reading experience is not good. Paper is definitely the winner still even though it is heavy.
My book reading is roughly split into two categories. First, the books that I read straight through and can get in and out of very quickly, reading in bursts whenever it's convenient. I read these while I'm eating, while I'm waiting in line, while I'm on the toilet, whenever I arrive to meet someone and they aren't there yet. These simply must be e-books; I can't go back to the days of trying to carry a book everything yet so often being stuck without one.
Second, the books that I immerse myself in for periods of time, because they're more difficult or because I'm reading them specifically for the sake of that immersive, relaxed experience. These I prefer to be physical books, and the arguments in the article weigh very heavily against e-books. It would be a great loss to me if physical books disappeared before e-books improved their navigation and their navigational cues dramatically. I could imagine e-books eventually overtaking physical books for navigation and note-taking. Personally, I write slowly, hate my own handwriting, and do not like marking up books, so note-taking is a chore for me even with physical books, but e-books are just pathetic. Even for me, physical books beat them simply by virtue of their ability to hold different colors and shapes of sticky notes and because I can look at them and see where I've dog-eared pages and stuck in sticky notes and other bookmarks.
There are a few more categories, such as cookbooks and reference books (both of which I prefer to be physical) but the first two comprise 90% of my reading and purchasing. (EDIT: To clarify, I think many reference works that were formerly structured as books should not be books at all in the digital age.)