eBooks and print books don’t satisfy the same human need. It’s not just about consuming the ideas in the most efficient way possible. It’s also about the experience of reading as much as the ideas inside.
For the reader who wants to appreciate the sensual experience of reading the words, the various book types (from paperback to hardcover to illustrated works of art) offer that experience in a way they can afford that no eReader or eBook could ever.
The feel of the paper, the weight of the illustrations, the smell of the ink, the display on the bookcase (they ARE trophies after all), all have an effect on the reader’s journey through the book in a way that no sterile hyperlink-illuminated dot could ever convey. Much like a digital comic could never compete with the mint condition comic book encased in plastic and lovingly preserved.
Granted, not all books need to be as important as the classics nor does all information need to be linear and static. For those books, the eBook digital format is most appropriate.
But the great works of our times (from The Bible to Code Complete) deserve to be presented as complete and coherent works of art, not just as raw data with hyperlinked annotations.
In fact…there’s probably a good business model in taking Gutenberg books, formatting them brilliantly, illustrating them, binding them with quality paper and selling them for $100 a copy.
WRT to books as works of art: exactly the same arguments were made when hand-calligraphed and illuminated manuscripts were replaced with moveable type machine printing. Exactly. Printed books were seen as cheap, ugly, knockoff imitations of original works of art (which, of course, they were – and are).
If I buy a book, I own it. I’m done. Short of the total fall of technological civilization, I will be able to read it whenever I want. If I want to read it somewhere other than home, I bring it with me. It’s a permanent addition to my store of knowledge. Short of fire or theft, nobody’s taking it away, and books aren’t exactly a hot item on the black market. Any situation that would threaten the utility of a paper book requires a response far beyond simply safeguarding books, so actually owning a paper book bears no cognitive load at all.
By contrast, eBooks make me think about things I never ever want to think about, like “is my reader going to run out of power?”, “will the publisher revoke my ability to read the book?”, “what happens if Amazon/Apple/whoever goes bankrupt?”, or “why is the layout of this book so bad?”. Even PDFs make me think about backup schemes. Why would I want to complicate my life with these kinds of questions?
That’s not the worst example of horrible formatting. As far as I remember Amazon’s version of “Applied Cryptography” has code formatted as pictures. I can’t understand why publishers don’t care about this. Books on programming are perfect for electronic distribution - they are heavy and nobody reads them from cover to cover.
I agree with all you say, but Barnes and Noble deserves at least a passing mention. Their eBook does a faithful representation of the book, it’s $17.59 (cheaper than the publisher), and I am able to lend most of my collection.
Charles Stross has a fairly good once-over of ebooks, especially pricing but also layout: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html TL;DR version: you want someone to work to preserve the layout of your ebook. Who pays them to do that if the ebook is priced at the marginal cost of production?
I have an e-ink reader, and the small screen size is an issue, but AFAIK that’s a manufacturing issue - bigger screens are available but cost a lot more. So I haven’t bought one. PDF rendering is pretty reasonable, but it’s really not a good format for a device that excels in the “pulp paperback” niche. e-ink has lower contrast than good paper, it’s black and white, but there’s nothing else that puts two weeks of solid reading into something with the frontal area of a trade paperback but 10mm thick.
For reading coffee table books I really think you want something like the iPad3 - colour, backlit (for more contrast), high resolution. Now all we need is decent screen size, because if anything is obvious about the coffee table book market it’s that trade paperback is not the size that sells.
Pricing… doesn’t bother me very much. For what we get at the moment (automatically converted with no checking) I think that free is often overpriced. But once the process is tidied up and ebooks are a designed output it gets a lot better. And worth paying for. I’m using an online e-magazine site for some of the foreign magazines I buy, and the high-res versions of their PDF’s are very much worth while. Sure, you really need a 20" portrait screen to read them on, but I have one of those. And when those screens get to be a decent resolution the PDFs are already shipping with enough pixels to cope (image-heavy magazines so there are a lot of embedded jpeg/png blobs, but the output res seems to be a page ~3000 pixels high). And no DRM, bar the “must be able to run a PDF reader” requirement. Unfortunately with ExactEditions that’s entirely up to the magazine publisher - they generate the PDF, EE just host it. But it is working, and for an early adopter it’s usable. I expect that process will be cleaned up a lot as interest increases.
Just a few words from Cory Doctorow (Someone comes to town…) I think are appropriate right now.
"You've read all of these?" he asked.
“Naw,” Alan said, falling into the rote response from his proprietorship of the bookstore. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?” The joke reminded him of better times and he smiled a genuine smile.
Firstly, I was able to look up that quote easily because Cory Doctorow puts all his books on his website in a multitude of different formats. Also, it points out what I hate about books. There’s so many books out there that I rarely read a book twice, even if it’s good. So, there are a bunch of books I’ve already read, sitting on my shelves. I love eBooks because they take up almost no space, and you can forget about them after your done. You don’t have to worry about if you have enough space before you buy one.
I think there’s a balance between the bland and sterile world of pure digital work (further blanded down by the complexity of reading device layouts) and the master artisan slaving over a single perfect representation of yore.
I see a spectrum of offerings for a package of ideas: from a “quick and dirty” wiki entry, to a series of more thoughtful blog essays, to a presented and edited eBook, through hardcover bound books and up to semi-handcrafted artistic reprints.
In this case, the medium chosen is chosen by the weight that the consumer puts on the ideas contained and the care that the author, editor and illustrator puts into their presentation.
As a prime example, look at the difference between Joel Spolsky’s early (and free) blog entries and his (not free) book compiling them. That difference matters and will continue to matter in the future I argue.
I am an avid reader - I enjoy turning pages. There is something about the feel of paper under the fingers when I’m reading.
That is for novels where I want to experience an interesting story. If I wanted it interactive I would watch a movie.
On the other hand when I want a textbook rarely would I prefer a paper version over a searchable reference. I am reading it mostly for information and I’ll already have a vague idea what to look for.
It’s not an all or nothing thing. I expect Books will continue to be printed on paper for as long as there are books. Instead of durable/expensive/beautiful hardcover and cheap/disposable/plain paperback, we will have durable/expensive/beautiful paper and cheap/disposable/plain digital.
Paper has many qualities that make it inherently superior to bits. In addition to those already mentioned by commenters (permanency, not ruined by water, not dependent on electricity), I can think of some more points in favour of continuing to print paper books:
You can give a gift of a paper book. Good luck wrapping an ebook file to put under the tree. Paper books can be collected and displayed on shelves. Ebooks, not really.
Paper books are nontoxic if eaten and don’t make sharp shards of glass if jumped on. Which makes them kid and toddler friendly, unlike e-readers.
Paper books can be made in any size. If the information or art you’re reproducing works best on a 11x17 or larger page, you can make the book that big, no problem. An 11x17 e-reader, not so much.
That’s a rather inflammatory and unfair representation of not only the utility of books but the entire purpose of why people want to produce books and purchase books.
The cost factor description you give is also biased and myopic.
Look, I can dig the whole “Information wants to be free” spiel when it’s not used as a synonym for “Screw intellectual property.” So I’m willing to partially look beyond certain poor rhetorical choices here. But I don’t feel it helps your argument at all to start off talking about why there’s very little great about books and then spend a large chunk of the end of your article nodding at the ways books are superior to e-formats. I’d much rather read a clear-headed, evaluative piece that comes to your conclusion than one that starts with an unnecessary and pointless attack.
As for cost: ebooks cost what they do for 2 main reasons:
the physical component of the dead-tree books is a small part of hte cost. Production requires paying the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the proofer, the art director, the artist, the distributer, etc. You get rid of these things and you might as well plan on all novels being more or less like fanficiton.net.
the initial cost of ebooks is quite high because publishers make a huge chunk of money off hardcover. It’s not about preserving a format. It’s about preserving profitability. So that the staff in reason 1 can remain employed. Once the cost has been recouped, and the hardcover is no longer selling as well, the price of ebooks drops dramatically. Often to 1 or 2 dollars.
Rather than bitching about the price, though, doesn’t it make sense to come up with technological solutions to the limitations of bit-formats? Then the price issue becomes less of a factor.
“But unless the publishers are willing to treat eBooks with the same respect and care that they give to their printed books – and most importantly of all, adjust their pricing to reflect the brave new economy of bits, and not an antiquated economy of atoms – they’re destined to eventually suffer the same fate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Um.
Britannica isn’t out of business, they just aren’t publishing the print edition anymore. They’re still doing the DVD-based product, and the web-based version.
Britannica did exactly what you’re saying. Their DVD edition costs about $30, not the $1300 of the print edition. The DVDs has been that inexpensive for years and years. The web edition likely has a similarly affordable annual subscription price.
Britannica even tried being completely free on the web, around 1999-2001. They had topical articles in a portal-type arrangement, along with the encyclopedia. It wasn’t workable, so they went to a registration model.
I’m surprised, Jeff. You just wrote an article lamenting how linkrot makes digital archiving a monumental task, and you think eBooks are a fundamentally good idea?
I have books from the 1970’s and earlier that are still 100% intact. No DRM, no linkrot, no bitrot, no BS of anykind. They still fundamentally work. A good hardcover binding lasts for a very, very long time.
Most books I buy, I would consider to either be reference works of one kind or another, where I would go back and refer to the book as needed. For most home libraries, simple organization beats Google-style searching any day, and this is true for anything from code lookup to recipes to politics. I really doubt this will change any day soon. If a book’s code becomes outdated (rarer than you think), that’s not an argument that books are terrible but rather an argument to buy the updated book, and put it right next to the old book on the bookshelf.
We must take far, far, far more digital photographs than we took film photos.
But unlike film, we don’t make prints of them all. We might make a print of one digital photo in a hundred, probably the one that really stands out.
If it’s really special, we might get it printed in a larger format, frame it, and hang it on the wall. That might be one in a thousand.
Similarly, eventually we’ll read ebooks most of the time, and only obtain hard copy of the books that mean the most to us. Perhaps in extra-nice editions.
Right now, your bookshelf probably includes some special books that really speak to your personality, and a bunch of books that are just there because it’d be a hassle to get rid of them.
Hear hear. Books need to reach the quality of modern mp3 – great features (IDv2, cover images), near-perfect quality (320VBR) and certainly no DRM of any kind.
PDF isn’t realistic unless your device has a screen as good/big as the iPad. Personally, I read on a 7" android tablet, so PDFs are a nightmare.
all the non-PDF eBook formats can do a better job than your examples, but the publishers don’t bother so far. They depend mostly on automated systems/services for conversion to various ebook formats.
many of the downsides of ebooks you state are currently true for many/most channels (format choice + DRM/license), but not inherent in the format. O’Reilly is a nice counter-example. http://shop.oreilly.com/category/customer-service/ebooks.do
though the couple O’Reilly titles I have don’t have much code of image stuff to deal with, so I don’t know how hard they work at the formatting, either.
also note there’s a “Books in Browsers” faction working on improving the reader experience with a browser reading from a local ePub (typically). http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/BooksInBrowsers
I agree with Mrj0, the Nook deserves a mention. I received a Nook Simple Touch about four months ago and have since read about 10 books. Before the Nook I read probably two books a year (cover-to-cover). The biggest reason I’ve burned through so many books is because of its ePub support - I had a backlog from O’Reilly, PDF books and others I’d gleaned through the ages. Since then I’ve purchased additional titles from both O’Reilly and Barnes & Noble, and both work fantastically.
So far I’ve had the best of both worlds - digital distribution and (usually) no DRM thanks to O’Reilly and Google Books open circulation.
Besides the fact that copyrighting is immoral. There are a plethora of old books to be read for free from google e-books (I used to go to archive.org but google does a much better job) and other outlets. There are a plethora of lesser known writers that don’t charge hardly anything (couldn’t have happened without e-books). Assuming you can strip the drm from your e-book you can then use Calibre to format it to whatever form you like.