The random endorsement: e-books (and anyone who disagrees is an imbecile)
- November 21st, 2007
- Read 1034 times
- 10 Comments
This endorsement is by no means random. It is a direct challenge to one of the many well thought out theses put forward by Peter Ha in his terrific Kindle review:
I’ll be the first to admit that e-books suck. They’re great in theory, but they’ll never catch on. There’s nothing that screams dork more than an e-book. I, like many others, enjoy the real thing. There’s just something comforting about having a paper book to carry around, to bunny ear, scratch notes on, highlight words/phrases and whatever else you may like to do.
I’ll spare you the rest.
Imagine you could resurrect Christopher Columbus. You’d be all, “Yo, Cristobal, what’s up? Check this out.” Then you point upward at an airplane. “How’s this grab ya: we’ve invented these things called airplanes that can take you clear across the Atlantic Ocean in six hours. Oh, and check this out. It’s called the Kindle. On this little plastic thing, we can read every book ever written anywhere we want. If we’re on the beach and want to read ‘Black Hat‘ we can; if we’re on the train and want to read ‘State of Emergency‘ we can.”
After Columbus freaks out from seeing the airplane overhead, he’ll probably be picking up his socks. You see, for the Kindle concept—the e-book—will have completely knocked them off.
The e-book, for all its faults, is the future. And I completely endorse it.
When I read Ha’s opening line, I’m pretty sure I blacked out. How in the hell can he so casually cast aside a technology that stands to revolutionize not only the way we read, but the way we learn? Like, it really is mind boggling.
Let’s take schools. I know that as I was making my way through high school, studies were coming out showing that kids’ backs were being destroyed by having to carry tens of pounds of books in a backpack. Some schools purchased two sets of books for students, one for home and one for in-class. But that’s expensive, especially after purchasing several editions of the same textbook after a few years. Why wouldn’t you, either as a student or a parent, want to see a little hunk of plastic with all of the required textbooks installed? For the schools themselves, when it comes time to update the books—I remember being in 11th grade American History class and still reading about the possible threat posed by the Soviet Union—all that’s required is a mere software update.
Yeah, that type of Communism will never take off. Who wants students to have access to information?
As for the “I like holding a book in my hand as I read it” quip—bologna. Again, Peter shows that his grasp of the issue goes from A to B. What difference does it make if I’m holding a couple hundred pages of paper or a hunk of plastic? I’m still holding one object, only now I have several books to choose from rather than just one. And to the “waaah, who needs to read more than one book at a time?” crowd. I do. What if I want to finish one book on the train and start reading the next one right after that? Or, something that we can all relate to, take your iPod and put only one song on it. Just one. I mean, if you subscribe to the “one and done” policy, then why the hell should anyone ever want more than one song on their person at all hours of the day?
Like it or not, e-books are the future. I simply cannot understand why some people cling to their paper books like they’re some sacrosanct instrument of American Virtue. “Real books won’t crash.” Yeah, smarty pants, then how come you put up with cellphones that crash and iPods that freeze? That’s exactly the opposite mentality I’d expect from someone even remotely tuned into technology. (I say remotely because not every revision of every cellphone ever is worth analyzing as a “game changer,” or some other empty phrase.) Why invent the cellphone when POTS phones work great? Who needs a CD player when you can, I don’t know, invite the Foo Fighters to your living room for a live rendition of “Everlong”? Who needs a sink with running water—I mean, I could just go, on horseback, to the Long Island Sound and grab some water when I need it.
I 100 percent, without any hesitation endorse e-books. Not the Kindle specifically, but it’s the closet device thus far to even come close to exploiting the potential of this technology.
Enjoy Thanksgiving. Have fun cooking your turkey over an open fire because, you know, the oven will never take off. It’s a stupid idea and never should be spoken of again.
Travis (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Call me an imbecile then because I never want to read a book on one of these crappy ebook readers. I have hundreds and hundreds of paper books and trade them with other readers across the country via Bookmooch - until you can do that with an e book file easily then forget it. I refuse to pay full price for a real book let alone a text file of a book. These things may be the future, but sometimes the classics are the best. Paper books have been around for centuries and they are not going away in our lifetimes.
tim (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Paper has had a great run and remains one of the most flexible means of transporting and absorbing information. Anything that replaces it must equal or exceed that flexibility. The Kindle isn’t it. Saying that - anyone who says they “will never catch on” or “i will never use it” and works for a technology review website must be fired immediately or rename his/her column “Lemmings Daily”
dk (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Nick, I agree with you on almost all of your points here (I don’t want to be an imbecile, after all), especially since I currently read eBooks on my Treo.
As a graduate school student, I would gladly pay $600 + $50/book if I could move my textbooks to a device like the Kindle, but the publishers simply haven’t bit on the concept (I would assume due to DRM concerns). If this .azw format proves semi-secure, perhaps we might see a change in this stance.
Mr. Bezos, I beg of you - please get the textbook publishers on-board. My back can’t take much more of this.
Randy (Who am I?)
7 months ago
As a Sony eBook reader for the past year, I like the article. Will I switch to the Kindle?
Lower prices for the Kindle, but an uglier device than the Sony book.
Amazon backing Kindle versus Sony’s Connect Store.
Sony book 299 versus Kindle 399
Kindle keyboard versus no (Sony) keyboard
Can’t decide
Damien D. (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Thanks for these points. I agree that some of the arguments of people just loving their shelves and physical books are weak. That argument has never worked for any other media and I doubt it will for books (I will also be grateful for the day I don’t have to drag around the boxes & boxes of books from apartment to apartment).
All in all, though I still don’t think kindle will be the item to bring this around. It’s not that aesthetically pleasing, it’s expensive, and not open enough.
Katrina Strauss (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Thank you, thank you, and did I mention, thank you? I am an e-book author who spends as much time promoting the medium itself as I do my work. If I had a dollar for every person who promises to buy my work “once it comes out in print”, well I could quit trying to write for a living. Guess what, I love print books, too. But I also used to love my 12-inch vinyl collection, scratch marks and cluttered entertainment center and all. I’m not sure how to get this point across outside of whacking people upside the head with it. So I’ll just refer them to your post instead. ;)
HS Kinn (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Indeed, my hubby was one who thought he’d never dig the eBook format, till we went on vacation a couple summers ago. He ran out of beach reading material, and I didn’t. I let him read on my Palm Tungsten and he was hooked. Now he’d rather have an eBook than a print one anyday!
Skorch (Who am I?)
7 months ago
In the end, people just want instant access to whatever. Be it music (how cool is wifi on the Touch?) or information. An e-reader isn’t very exciting. What makes this product incredibly cool, is exactly what Nick describes with his Columbus analogy. The other stuff is neat (battery life, epaper, etc), but they’re not very revolutionary.
Deward Blevins (Who am I?)
7 months ago
As a compulsive SciFi reader I would love to have an ebook. When I was in high school and college I would have been “over the moon” if I could have had my textbooks all available on something like an ebook. Sony’s and Amazon’s are the closest to being what I would prefer, but content is still the REAL problem. There is still much more paperback content and it often costs the same or less than the electronic content. And there are too many restrictions on how the electronic content can be handled. I need to be able to handle and store electronic books much like I handle paperback books. For me even a 500 book limit of storage on the Kindle would require me to be able to store some of my books offline. And I would not be willing to store something I paid for anywhere not in my personal control. Nowhere on the internet is in my personal control.
I do not understand DRM concerns regarding educational text. The cost of the course materials could be included in the tuition for the course.
Krytes (Who am I?)
1 week ago
While I agree that the argument “paper books just feel better in my hands” is insufficient in itself, there are other, much more important reasons for not switching to ebooks right now:
1) Ebook price (for ebooks not in the public domain). I find it hard to stomach a $10 price for something that costs Amazon virtually nothing to reproduce. Why should the profit margin for ebook sellers suddenly jump up so sharply?
2) DRM. If I buy an ebook, I want full rights over what I do with it and who I choose to lend it to. I have these rights with physical books, and I’m not willing to give them up just to read an ebook. Because of the formats in which ebooks are distributed, I would also need the ability to back it up to any common format I choose, so that my book format doesn’t become obsolete and unreadable in a few decades. I will NEVER be willing to buy a DRMed ebook. I wouldn’t even accept one for free if I had a choice of that or paying for a non-DRM version.
3) Availability. Many of my books are old, unpopular and/or out of print. Very few in my existing collection are available as ebooks, and those are generally available only in DRMed formats which I refuse to buy for reasons outlined above. There is a way to get around both the availability and DRM issues by manually scanning and digitizing my paper books. This is actually what I’ve done, but it’s an expensive solution (it’s cost me about $800: $400 for an ebook reader and $400 for good OCR software) and a tedious one. I don’t think it would appeal to the average paper-book reader.