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By Chris Meadows

image Kat Hannaford at Gizmodo has an opinion piece that appears to start out as Yet Another Anti-E-Book Screed. She writes about how books have been around forever, reading worked just fine the way it was, and so on.

While she never quite brings up the smell of a book (my personal favorite anti-e-book cliché), she does go into the same “books-as-objects” fetishism to which e-book skeptics often cling:

Our grandchildren won’t be housing first edition ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kindle, passed down from generation to generation. There’s no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book, and when it comes to works of fiction and non, which have had thousands of man-hours injected into them, surely that’s the reason people read them? To escape for a few hours turning some pages, and then eventually handing it to a friend with a glowing recommendation to read it from cover to cover?

But then Hannaford turns around and adds, “I have no beef with reading ebooks on a mobile phone or tablet, however.”

The last few paragraphs of the piece cover how more e-books than games were added to the App Store during the month of September, and that the President of Nintendo mentioned Nintendo is considering adding 3G connectivity for e-book downloading to the next DSi. Tablet PCs get a mention as well.

These are all fine with Hannaford, she explains, because they are things you will already have for other reasons; they do not require you to go out and make expensive purchases of one-trick eInk ponies.

So in the end, Hannaford appears to suggest the same thing we have covered others saying before: the future of e-books lies not with single-purpose e-reading devices, any more than the future of hand-held organizers lay with the PDA of the 1990s.

People are more likely to read on devices they’ve bought already for other purposes, and as those devices improve, single-purpose hardware will gradually go away.

I wonder if Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony are already cognizant of that fact, and plan to transition out of the e-book hardware business as more multi-purpose reading devices come on the scene? Or perhaps they are already planning how to turn their e-book readers into Android (or other OS) tablets of their own?

Anyway, it is interesting to see an e-book semi-skeptic. We don’t seem to get too many of those. And speaking of which, a common e-book opinion even among e-book supporters is precisely the opposite of Hannaford’s: “I couldn’t read on those small glowing screens, but something bigger and more paper-like, such as an e-ink e-book reader, works great!”

(Also at Gizmodo: Matt Buchanan writes about publishers’ plans to release e-books with a four-month delay.)

 
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