Books: Bits vs. Atoms

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I love reading on my iPad, to the extent that I only buy print books now if they are unavailable in digital format, but I do miss the pleasure of lounging in the bathtub reading a good book.

But we’re still in the “cassette Walkman” days of e-books. Give it ten years, and I’ll be sitting in the bathtub shaking the drops off the waterproof, indestructible, wireless, one-plastic-sheet-with-a-network e-reader I picked up on sale at Walmart for $50, plus the monthly subscription (are you listening, Big 6?). I’ll flick the corner to turn the page, and read the next story in the New York Times, in colour, with sound and animation. Maybe even 3D.

I bought a couple of books from pragprog.com today, and downloaded them in all three of the formats offered: PDF, mobi and epub. Surprisingly the layout and typography of the epub edition was nearly as good as the PDF, without the annoying need to zoom in on each page to enlarge the text to a readable size.

Copyright, pricing and fair usage after purchase need to evolve to keep up with the technology, but that’s been an issue since photocopying became widespread.

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Scott Meyers had an old blog where he detailed some of the issues that confront an author writing technical books targeting different ebook formats. See http://fastwareproject.blogspot.com

This post about how his C++ books looked on kindle may be of interest:
http://fastwareproject.blogspot.com/1999/03/experience-report-my-c-books-on-kindle.html

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I hearty disagree with your points against hardware books because many of your points have a good reason to exist. Let me tell you why every disadvantage of everything is important …

They are heavy: Heavy things can be a burden or a benefit. Often its good to have the feel of touching an item that possess a weight. There's a certain satisfaction about it. Never occurred to you?
They take up too much space: Like everything made of atoms! If everything made of atoms wouldn't take up space, everyone of us would probably soon live in a 2x2m walkable closet.
They have to be printed: Which is good. It creates jobs and makes every book somewhat of a unique item. A keepsake!
They have to be shipped in trucks and planes: Again, more jobs.
They may have to be purchased at a bookstore: Double plus! You can take a walk to the bookstore! It's healthy and counters isolation. You can enjoy the atmosphere at the bookstore instead of slouching in front of your PC.
They are difficult to find: Rare books are good, makes them a prized possession.
They are difficult to search within: True but patience is a virtue.
They can go out of print entirely: Again, this makes books rare keepsakes. Everything that is rare has value. Things that exist in abundance have virtually no value, especially not as a collectors item.
They are too expensive: Everybody has to earn money to make a living!
They are not interactive: Why would you want everything to be interactive?
They cannot be updated for errors and addendums: Imperfections are an important trait and make things unique, which is very good. Nothing is more boring like everything looks or acts the same.
They are often copyrighted: again, somebody has to make a living. And eBooks are not copyrighted?

I’m not working for the printing press and I do like reading books on my iPad, too but every device that becomes more and more perfect also becomes more and more boring and soulless! Take an iPad: it can do a huge lot of things but at possesses almost no character (at least not for me). Take a C64 (or a Yamaha CS80) which (in comparison) can do only very few things, but they do possess ALL character! Please stop trying to virtualize everything, making the world a more and more boring place!

I almost forgot to mention one of the most important reasons why eBooks suck in comparison to paper books: You cannot smell them! Yes, smell! For example I possess several old West-End Star Wars RPG books and I would hate it if they were eBooks. The paper that West End Games used to print these has a very unique, pleasant odor. it’s a joy to open one of these books and read them and the scent brings up a lot of nostalgic memories.

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If I’m using a textbook to learn something (rather than a reference) I’m going to want the print version, though. Flipping from the problem sets to the chapters is a nightmare with scrolling single pages and the limited PDF readers we have on our computers and portable devices; I’m almost tempted to write a new document reader that understands that people don’t want a mile-high (or, ok, a half-mile high with dual view) scrollable pagination for whatever they want to read.

You can highlight in textbooks too, or at least put in sticky notes for important pages. The customization options in PDF readers today are incredibly clunky and tacky in my experience; there’s no nice reader I know of that just gets it right.

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The printed word and the digital word are complimentary and one does not cancel out the other. Enough distinguishes them to allow peaceful co-existence, much like radio and television today.

A lot depends on our ability to sustain the current high energy lifestyles most in the developed world enjoy. Some combination of the two will be in vogue going forward. Currently we have a love affair with the digital because it is new and shiny, but it’s ability to be so readily edited over time and controlled is (in my personal view) it’s biggest drawback. I’d like to see how readable a PDF is or indeed these very words in 300 years! Nothing beats a musty old library :slight_smile:

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I’m a librarian and a software developer, so I really enjoyed this. Thanks! One thing I would add with my librarian hat on relates to these points you made about ebooks:

  • They always require a reading device.
  • They may be encumbered with copy protection.
  • They may be in a format your reader cannot understand.

These characteristics of ebooks, and bits generally, typically make it harder for libraries to archive ebooks than physical books. The content of the book is inextricably bound up with the software needed to make it readable. I guess it is still early days, so we may (already?) see backwards compatible reading devices that are able to render older formats. From this perspective its great to see Kindle Format and EPUB reusing HTML, which (given the Web) will probably have reading devices for a while. Or perhaps ebook platforms will migrate data for us behind the scenes, and the readers will just need to deal with the latest/greatest format. I imagine some combination of the two will be what we see. But maybe a lot will get dropped on the floor, especially when you consider DRM.

The situation now is quite different with physical books. Like you said, when you buy a physical book you can do whatever you want with it, including put it on a shelf, and walk away for years and years, and come back later and read it. As a thought experiment, consider how different it is to put an EPUB on a filesystem, walk away for 20 years, and come back and open it up and read it. Maybe just think about one year. I guess a lot goes into making sure the shelf is there for 20 years as well, funding for the library, disaster preparedness, etc. But the nature of that is so radically different to the set of concerns that arise when preserving ebooks.

There are a lot of opportunities here I think for new library platforms, like those in the cloud at Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. I personally hope we’ll also see best practices and tools that allow smaller collections emerge at the local and personal level…and that there will still be a role for public, academic and government libraries in all this.

On that note, your point about ebooks:

  • They cannot be donated to libraries.

got me thinking of UnglueIt, which is a (just starting) crowdfunding platform for creating openly licensed (Creative Commons) ebooks for existing print books. The idea being that maybe we can all work together to make the Web into a library for ebooks. Full disclosure: I have consulted for UnglueIt in the past, so I guess this is a bit spammy, but I thought you might be interested.

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Amazon simply decided not to display footnotes correctly. I have complained about that several times, but Amazon ignore complaints.

The Kindle is basically useless for scientific books or any books that rely on footnotes. I don’t know why Amazon are trying to destroy the eBook format.

I stopped buying eBooks from Amazon and now use the Kindle for my existing books and for non-Amazon eBooks.

I don’t see what Amazon have to gain from destroying the reading experience like that. It’s not like making the footnotes difficult to reach makes “piracy” more difficult or anything like that.

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Maybe foldable OLED screens can make a ebook look & feel more like a real book.

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i’ve built a publishing system using light-markup which can:

1a) replicate an already-printed book in .pdf form, or
1b) create a well-designed .pdf for print-on-demand, and

2a) generate user-customized .mobis and .epubs, and

3a) output a wide variety of .html versions of the book
3b) for web-mounting or use in machines-with-browsers,
3c) plus social-networking annotation/discussion purposes,

4a) with links from the offline versions to the online ones,
4b) for a synergistic whole greater than the sum of the parts.

i’ve programmed authoring-tools – both offline and online,
in multiple languages (including basic, perl, and python) –
and viewer-programs that outperform currently-existing apps.

authoring is simple, since my light-markup system is easier
than markdown, and more powerful, as it’s geared to books.

and my authoring-tools are split-screen, with plain-text on
one side, and formatted output on the other, for ease of use,
and a learning curve that resembles your favorite bunny slope.

this will ease the distance between authors and their readers.

when books are stored as plain-text files on our own machines,
we remove the worry of dystopian authorities censoring them.

if you’d like to see an advance look at what i’ve got coming,
i’d be happy to show it to you.

-bowerbird

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What if you live in, say, Iran? You’ve bought this collection of eBooks for your iPad (or whatever), and then the government says you’re not allowed to access the Internet anymore. What happens now? Your library has been stolen from you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Similar situation if Apple went bust. Where has your iBooks library gone now? Basically eBooks are a walled garden which is so much out of your control that it’s not fair. The same argument applies to games bought on Steam or other digital distribution methods.

I understand that in some cases (not Apple) you can back up your digital collection so that you can access it in future without the Internet or the parent company’s permission, but even then you still lose a lot of the advantages you listed above (book updates, available whenever you want, etc.).

If I’ve got a physicaly collection of books, or films, or computer games, no one other than me has any say in what happens to them. I know you’ve mentioned this in your article but I think it needs stressing more, as there are many cases in which you can lose out using bits as opposed to atoms.

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“What’s the point of a bookshelf full of books other than as an antiquated trophy case of written ideas trapped in awkward, temporary physical relics?”

As far as “temporary” is concerned, I personally have carefully preserved copies of a few books that my mother’s grandfather wrote in 1920’s. Books hundred(thousands)of years old can be seen in museums all over the world.
How many ebooks do you have that are still readable and are even 15 years old?

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“How can the bits in the digital version be more expensive than the atoms?”

Because it’s Apple, and they charge more than everyone else on principal. How else can their fans feel superior to everyone else? They have to pay more for that narcissistic boost.

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You omitted one of the greatest advantages, or potential advantages, of ebooks over paper books: built-in accessibility for people who are blind or have severely limited vision.

In this area, formats that emphasize structure over layout are inherently superior. Specifically, HTML is better than PDF. Because PDF is basically a stream of commands for constructing a printed page, accessibility is an afterthought. True, there’s such a thing as Tagged PDF, but in my experience, most PDF files are not tagged.

I also think you’re mistaken to place such emphasis on preservation of the print book’s layout, down to the page numbers. We generally don’t print out ebooks; we read them on screens. And I don’t know about you, but I want the layout to adapt to my screen size, not to mention a comfortable font size. By insisting on faithful recreation of the printed page, you would take away a great advantage of ebooks. There’s a reason why Kindle books and iBooks are based on HTML (or a derived format like EPUB or .mobi), not PDF.

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Ebooks, for me, are an absolutely perfect format for novels. Hands down, I will never purchase another print copy of a novel (unless it’s not being offered in ebook form). For reference books of any kind, where you want to be able to flip through the book easily (ie sequential reading from page 1 right through to the end isn’t necessarily required or desired), or books where the page layout actually matters? I haven’t seen an implementation yet that I like. Hopefully the Apple textbook initiative for the iPad (whatever they’re calling it, I’m too lazy to look it up) is a step in the right direction for at least getting page layouts right, but I can’t imagine a digital interface that would be easier than a physical book for the “Hrmm, where was that diagram I was looking for? I’ll flip back and forth quickly and find it”

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Jeff, you’re quite a bit more influential that I thought. It looks like the US Government has taken heed of your post and started doing something about the problem: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17681137

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If I buy a book today, I’ll still be able to go back to it in five, ten, twenty years. I can take it off the shelf, go to the page in question, and acquire the information. It just works.

With an eBook, the format is really tied to the times in which it was issued. The format will have evolved into something unrecognizable or disappeared altogether, and with it, the support to read it. It’s not really an issue for crappy novels that are read-and-forgotten, but it is for one who prides himself in his library.

Unlike music and video where advances in the medium resulted in an improvement of the content itself, the same can’t truly be said of text. Yes, it is more convenient to have a stack of eBooks in one’s pocket, but the words are the same whether they’re printed or on an eInk display.

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Two points:

E-pricing vs. book pricing: This is mostly an Amazon phenomena. Amazon discount printed books hugely. They are often priced at a loss, making the print version pricing very attractive, while producing the illusion that quality books can actually be produced very cheaply. E-books, thanks to the agency agreement, are priced by the publishers and set at about what the publishers need to stay in business (remember, if the book publishers aren’t making a decent profit, they’ll be closed down by their owners and the money invested in something that does have a decent return. Owners don’t keep publishers in business as an act of charity.)

Expecting that you can somehow have quality for really cheap is a pipe-dream, although it may be one that we destroy the publishing industry to try to achieve.

Bad formatting, etc in e-books: Decently and properly formatting documents is expensive. You can’t hire recent college graduates who desperate to work with books at tiny wages to do decent electronic formatting. Which mean e-book prices need to be higher to support the expense. However, the publishers are no dummies. They know that people go ballistic over current e-book prices let alone one’s increased to pay for the cost of decent formatting. Moreover, consumers get mad about pricing far more than they get mad at shoddy formatting.

So, in the end, publishers give the public as close to what the public wants without actually going bankrupt, and we all get badly formatted books.

I’d be more sympathetic if the publishers were rolling in money, but outside of extremely isolated sectors, they aren’t. And that’s while they’re paying their employees as little as they can get away with. Anybody who expects that you can cut the amount of money going to publishers by 2/3rds and not have it make a fundamental change to the quality of books is dreaming in technicolor. Costs of Goods are significant, but electronic distribution is a long way from cost-free, as anyone in the business can tell you.

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Personally, I care less about the infographics than I do about the textual content and the concepts in a book. Meaning that as long as the message being conveyed is the same, I’m okay with them changing the infographics. Now don’t mistake me saying that I don’t care, because I do. It’s just that the infographics aren’t at the top of my priority list for ebooks. I personally get nauseous reading off of a backlit screen like the iPad after too long a time. I personally prefer eInk readers like Kindle or Nook. Now keep in mind that this is something that affects me personally so it’s not likely to be the same for others.

The prices on the other hand are absolutely atrocious, except for Amazon (MOST of the time). I’ve seen the publishers charge ridiculous amounts on there too. The thing is, that Jeff points out, is that there are virtually no production costs, not in the same way there is for a physical copy. Sure there is the cost of the author, the editor, etc, but there are no printing press costs, no shipping costs, no packaging costs, etc. This is true of all digital goods, not just ebooks. In a way ebooks are even worse than other digital goods. Let’s contrast a game with a book. In the case of a digital game you should get a discount for the digital version for the same reasons stated above. Now the one major difference between the two is that in the case of many digital goods like games, you have the company that created it paying for the bandwidth of distributing it off of there site, that cost is still far less than the production costs, but there is still a minor cost there. In the case of ebooks the publishers aren’t paying for that at all. All they have to do is give the digital copy to an online store like Apple or Amazon and they incur no charges whatsoever after the book is written and edited.

Overall Jeff, another great article. Thanks for posting it!

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WRT ebooks disappearing/becoming unreadable: both of the current major formats (epub and mobi) are HTML inside a wrapper. HTML isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

There’s some reason for concern about books with DRM, but in that case your beef is with the publisher, not the format. Amazon does not require DRM – that’s an option when you submit the book, but you don’t have to add it.

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Jeff,

Its interesting that you mentioned about ebooks being over-priced as compared to that of the print edition - it seems that Apple (along with some other major electronic content publishers) has been sued by the US Department of Justice today for this very same reason! Here’s the link to the BBC article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17681137