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When I don’t want an ebook
October 27, 2008 | 3:45 pm
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By Paul Biba
I just ordered the paper version of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book from Amazon. There is a certain class of books that I have no interest in having in ebook form.
This set of books is stuff from authors I dearly love and I just want to be able to see all their books on a shelf and say to myself that I have them all. Gaiman is one of the authors in this category, Glen Cook is another and Terry Pratchett is the most important of all! There is something about having these things right in my bookcase and seeing them in front of me. Neil Stephenson is another one, but I do buy ebook versions of his stuff because his books are too big and heavy to read comfortably. Nevertheless, I want the Stephenson books on the self along with the others. There are a number of other authors in this category, for me, as well. But I wonder what other ebook mavens think of my heresy.
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Comments:
Hey, to each his own. Ultimately, for my own purposes, I see ebooks as a way of reducing clutter in my life and also as a way of reading lots of books that would not be otherwise easy to find. Its also a great way to save money if lots of your reading includes titles that are available on Project Gutenberg or other sites that make books freely available.
That being said, there are qualities to books that make them desirable beyond the simple fact of the story they contain. If you desire a book for its physical presence or for the simple joy of being able to see it on your shelf, then by all means a paper book is the way to go.
Heck, I would still buy a paper book over an ebook if the only way I could get the ebook was to accept DRM.
Books fulfill different needs for different people. For myself, I don’t really care about having a shelf full of paper books by favorite authors (with the sole exception being those books I have gotten those authors to autograph for me). I just care about the words, especially when I can get ahold of those words instantaneously. Instant gratification, that’s where it’s at for me.
If ebookness wasn’t still so new that it doesn’t have a tradition of how to handle them long-term, then I would be fine with having all my collections in eform. There are a few books that need the physical book form, Tristam Shandy comes to mind, though I suppose it could be worked up in eform, another is a recent 19th century reference book with about a dozen fold-out maps bound in at the end. The maps themselves could be digitized in some form, of course, but using them on a Sony reader would be nothing close to the experience of folding them out and looking at them on a table.
Some of my favorite authors I am more than willing to buy both forms, when available, because I reread them every few years and don’t want to lose that ability to reread them if the ebook is on old tech that I no longer have. In the short term, ebooks are much easier to read (for me) than most physical books.
Now to start working on creating that tradition. I have ebooks going back about ten years (earliest I have were on my Palm, some of which I have been able to move over to new tech).
I would like to thank Fictionwise for keeping books I bought years ago available to me. I fear they will go away one day, but for now I’m enjoying books I first read nearly ten years ago all over again on my iPhone. Very nice.
>>>But I wonder what other ebook mavens think of my heresy.
You’ll burn, witch! Burrrrn!
I’m past that point. If the book is all text, give me e. No advantage to having it in print, yet every disadvantage: weight, bulk, dust-collecting, aging.
As for books that are, say, graphic novels… well, there’s the library — or just Not Having.
I feel the same way. In the paper world, I apply the same logic to paperback vs. hardcover. Douglas Adams, for example, is all in hardcover, while all of my Gaiman graphic novels are in trade paperback.
On my Cybook, I mostly have “disposable” novels — I expect to only read them once.
I have several paper volumes with author signatures, e.g., Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, James D Watson (DNA Nobel). It is possible to get a digital signature on an e-book, but I do not think anyone is collecting that type of digital artifact yet.
For the most part, if the book has a lot of graphics, I’d rather have it in paper, but for the rest, I’m leaning towards switching to ebook, just because 10k books and magazines takes up a lot of physical space. I don’t really collect books with author signatures, but I see this as a severe limitation of ebooks.
I was disappointed that the secure eReader edition of Coraline has very tiny, nearly illegible graphics, which totally diminishes my appreciation of the book.