Too many words to read here so forgive me if I am repeating someone else…
There are two things you get with a book
- The words/ideas of the author(s)
- The physical medium on which it is produced
Some print books are beautiful, and deliberately made so. The experience is with the whole package (Physical interaction between reader, pages, and pictures/words) and you could not replace that experience. Children’s books (e.g. the hungry caterpillar) would be a good example of this. Equally you are unlikely to want to travel with such a book, and the experience would be suited to sharing, via a Library perhaps, and the book worth having space for on your bookshelf. These are things of beauty and should be more expensive that electronic words and pictures.
Some books are just words - and the beauty is in them (I recently enjoyed a free version of H.G Wells’ War of the worlds on my Smartphone - superbly written). For these an eBook is perfect - no need for pictures, easy to carry around etc… I do want to share this experience with friends though and do not know of an easy way to do this.
So for me the eBook vs physical book debate is more about the user interface requirements of the media within it, and less about whether print and paper is better than electronic formats.
Great article - thanks for keeping us thinking.
You forgot two more issue with eBooks that need to be overcome:
- The FAA
Until I can read an eBook on the plane during those “electronic blackout” moments I’ll continue to carry a physical book along with my Kindle. Those types are the exact moments I need a book to relieve the insane boredom.
- Zombie Apocalypse/ SkyNET
All power is cut in the nation, we have been thrown back to our agricultural days, no one remembers the pin-out of a USB cable yet we know there is secret knowledge locked away inside these devices that teach us to heal infections, which berries are edible and how to make the perfect cocktail. The quest to find a trove of books of knowledge somehow seems more noble than looking for The Sacred Adapter.
“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?”
You’ve probably heard of leaving a bowl of fruit on display, so you eat more fruit. I find it works a similar way. A shelf full of books allows passive reading, where ebooks are more active. I enjoy my kindle, but I have yet to casually start reading it in passing as I would a book.
And if I’m in someone elses house and they’re busy, I’ll happily grab a book of their shelf and start reading it while I wait. It’s a lot less invasive than firing up their tablet or browsing their kindle.
Yeah I’m one of those people who wants a house with walls lined with books.
As for my Kindle, it’s a fantastic device, especially for reading on the move, and it’s the closest reading experience to paper books I’ve seen.
But good jesus the Amazon store is a pain to buy things on. As an Irish reader, I’m subject to crippling market segementation, where you simply can’t buy most kindle books.
Options are 1: lie about your address, risk losing access to your library.
Or 2: torrent your books instead
So far I’ve gone with 1. Not happy at all.
Funny thing, the same day that you posted this article, I heard about Apple getting charged with violating anti-trust laws regarding their e-books.
I don’t know. I read lots of books on my Kindle and iPad, but I can’t imagine still having them in 20 years, cloud or no cloud. They seem very transient to me. I have books from the 1930s in my library, and they still feel fantastic. I certainly can’t imagine an e-book lasting as long as this 1400 year old beauty :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17738163
The formatting is the first issue for me with e-books (and I have a lot of them), but the inability to send in fixes is what drives me over the edge.
Kudos to O’Reilly and Microsoft Press for doing it right.
PDFs are most definitely not the answer for eBooks. I would argue that the old way of laying out content in a page specific format (e.g., for printers) is what should be dying out. Reflowable content is the best way to make content that works equally well on phones, tables, and desktop screens. This is what ePub is good for. Look into it! It’s basically HTML and CSS plus a packaging mechanism.
The problem isn’t that the formatting in Amazon’s eBook format is so incapable, but rather that the authors didn’t give it significant time because they felt that the eBook version of their book was an afterthought. Even Amazon’s DRM riddled format uses HTML. The actual code syntax is not what people are complaining about when they boo Amazon formats.
So many people read this blog that opinions on matters you post often become standard accepted knowledge. I know that you just want to make eBooks better, but in this case, some research on the topic and discussions with other knowledgeable people working with eBooks would help to keep a lot of misinformation from spreading.
Jeff –
Why do sellers charge more for eBooks? Easy – because they can. It’s simple economics; sellers will charge that price which maximizes profits. How much an ebook costs to reproduce is utterly and completely irrelevant to that equation. If they could double their prices and only lose 25% of sales, they would.
The biggest problem with ebooks for higher learning is that you cannot quickly write margin notes. Highlighting is still somewhat primative too. The advantage of printed books is the physical interaction with the media upon which it is printed. You can quickly write your thoughts on them. Until user interfaces are substantially improved (far beyond what even iPad is offering right now), this is going to continue to be an issue for studying.
Another advantage with ebook is I can buy it from different country. I recently bought “Four Laws That Drive the Universe” by Prof. Atkins from Amazon through Kindle. It is not available in India and shipping it is very expensive.
Because I can’t loan them (with rare exceptions)…
I’m not sure about strict licensing here, but what I think is overlooked is that you can now loan out your entire bookshelf at once with an eBook reader. If I’ve got 120 books on my Kindle and let my friend borrow my Kindle, well, isn’t there at least a practical improvement?
Perhaps that’s a civilly disobedient activity, but in some ways it’s also a score for sharing.
Very interesting article but you forgot two major things when you say eBook should overcome books :
- Storing eBooks on our current flash/hard drive is not reliable compared to paper books
- If everybody switch to eBooks, the datacenters needed to store all this data will definitely create more environmental issues than the paper books are already doing. Maybe a better solution should be to find a way to print on something else than paper, from trees.