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‘The Case for Books’: Should Gary Price buy it an an e-book or p-book? Why?
November 15, 2009 | 2:03 pm
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By David Rothman
Pop quiz!
You’re Gary Price, a librarian and e-resources expert well known online for Resource Shelf and other activities such as DocuTicker.
Robert Darnton, a top academic, has just published The Case for Books, mentioned favorably today in the Sunday Guardian.
You quoted the Guardian but want to see the book for yourself.
Should you buy Case as an e-book or p-book? Share and explain your answer, and later this week, you’ll learn what Gary himself actually did.
Don’t just give a generic reply. Think about Gary’s situations. Via the e-editon of Case, you can pick up cites from the book if you’d like. (Yep, I see the Catch-22.) Also—and this might influence your reply, one way or another—two of the essays in the book are already online for free from the New York Review of Books. Update: They apparently are The Library in the New Age and Google and the Future of Books.
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Comments:
This is a great post and a great question. I will be looking forward to reading the comments here as they come during the week. My own private answer would have to be this: I’d buy the paper book version, take it home, read it slowly, over and over, mark it up, highlight important passages, make notes in the margins, read it sitting down on the sofa with a nice reading light over my shoulder, put on some classical music background music, or maybe even listen to MTV on the telly, and just read it leisurely, over several sittings, and maybe read the last chapter first even and come back to the beginning later, and just have a jolly good time with the paper version, since that is how I like my books. I’ll read the Guardian review on screen, and I’ll read Gary’s blog notes on screen, but for the book by Dr Darton, who runs Harvard’s main library now, I still go by New Hampshire’s license plate logo “Live Free or Die” and I say “Read Paper or Forget-About-It’. But that’s just my personal style, and I fully respect those who plan to read the book in the e-version. One is not a priori better or worse, they are just different ways of collecting the information, and for those who prefer the e-version, cool, and for those who prefer the paper book, nice. Hopefully, we will never have to choose sides. Both paper and E can co-exist nicely in the Brave Newer Worlds coming our way thanks to the Digital Revolution. We still ride horses, don’t we?
I have to say that I got a galley copy of The Case for Books from netgalley.com so I could review it. I got as far as Chapter 6 and went to Amazon to buy a Kindle copy. I don’t have a Kindle, but I have Kindle software for PC and an Acer Aspire 100 netbook. (I love the kindle software (it has quirks that I haven’t figured out, but the reading experience is excellent.)
As I was reading I just made notes (Google.doc) and I will write the review some time this weekend. My only objection to the experience is, like @Danny Bloom, I’d like to be able to highlight as I read.