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.)
You think that’s bad? Did you see this earlier?
http://gizmodo.com/5421057/ereaders-are-for-nazis-and-more-theories-from-authors-who-truly-hate-ebooks
Yeah, we covered that story a couple of days ago. And what’s more, the same guy left a long and ranting editorial comment here in another story a couple of days later.
To me books are things you read – so whether they are printed on paper or appear on a screen is only a matter of convenience. I can’t really get with the first edition collecting thing – a book in a locked case or a plastic wrapper is not functioning as a book.
Yes, ebooks will change the way we read, but so did the invention of printing. This wasn’t always seen as a good thing because the great unwashed masses might get to know about dangerous ideas! They did, and we now have human rights and democracy throughout a good percentage of the world.
Music and writing have survived since the beginning of civilisation and they will survive the digital age.
Radios did not diminish print, television or PC did not. Hand held readers have not so far either. WorldCat, a bibliographic database of over 62,000,000 records from over 2,000 libraries around the world is almost all print and titles grow from a huge base about 2 % a year. E-book titles are 1/2 million to which can be added 2 more million of faulty Google Books and maybe another million from other reformats. All of these e-books derive from print or have print versions.
Let’s reverse the situation and say that only 2% of e-books are converted to print and all books are otherwise screen books. My guess is that the selected 2% would be so well suited to print that the small sector would grow, perhaps doubling every 10 years for a while. But the base would remain non-paper.
Reverse that projection and you have a fair scenario for e- books.
The future is a funny thing, and itr hardly ever runs in straight lines. In the indefinite future dedicated e-readers will be as dead as the dodo — I have no doubt nior would any sensible person.
However, in the immediate future what we need and what will push things forward are dedicated readers — that is things designed soley to make electronic reading a bnatural replacement to pulp.
Already this is having an effect on screen technology, and e-ink is responmsible for this even though it is not all that secure in the mid-future as a technology.
If it had not been for dedicated reading devices then we would be reading off flickering screens, on devices wioth short-battery-life.
In other words pushing things forward means gettinjg more and better reading devices in order to produce a true and useful multi-purpose device.
I am not passing down a $6.99 Nora Roberts mass market paperback to my grand-children either, so I fail to see the point. I still think the big fallacy is in assuming that ebooks and pbooks are an either/or proposition. There are some types of books I still prefer in paper, such as cookbooks. What I read on my Sony is fairly disposable mass market fiction.
Chris, thanks for this link, her commentary was good, and the many many comments following her post were also good. One thing, Chris. You seem to take this attitude of “us versus them”, of “paper versus ebooks”, of ”ebook haters versus ebook fans”, of “ebook skeptics or semi-skeptics versus ebook adopters”…but Chris, it’s not black and white here, it’s not us versus them, or them versus us. We are all in this changing world together, and rather than take a rivalry kind of attitude, why not discuss all this stuff, pro and con, both sides of the issue, as a learning experience for all of us. Ebooks and dedicated e-readers are coming to the entire world day by day, and everyone will get used to it, eventually. Sure, there are some fanatics, on both sides of the aisle, but in general, we are all in this togehter, so I would love it if in future posts you drop the confrontatiaonl us vs them approach and just report the links and news. We need to get over this “us verus them” mentality. Paper is here to stay, but in different ways than before, and ebooks and e-news and E-Readers will change life on Earth, yes. Does this note to you make sense? I would email you offline but you don’t answer me emails, I don’t know why…. danbloom (one word) at gmail dot com
by the way, JSleeper above, is that you, my old friend James Sleeper from Longmeadeow?
Nope, it’s a friend of mine named Jon Sleeper.
“We need to get over this “us verus them” mentality. Paper is here to stay, but in different ways than before, and ebooks and e-news and E-Readers will change life on Earth, yes.”
I agree with dan e bloom and will link this up with a question: Why hasn’t the idea of the “paperless office” caught on with the vast majority of real existing offices yet ? Why do we still have those batteries of printers around when we where promised the paperless office decades ago already? ;o)
Life follows misterious ways and (thankfully) there is a lot of diversity.
Hi Chris,
I like your article; eReaders are awesome, but the availability of the books are sometimes not as accessible as once thought, check out http://www.themarknews.com/articles/511-when-free-isnt-free on the other hand it’s great that “All That’s Old is New Again,” – http://www.themarknews.com/articles/730-all-thats-old-is-new-again
Cheers!
I was all set to agree with Peter’s comments on us-vs-them, except I think both dedicated and multipurpose devices have their places (not sure about paper in the long term, especially after spending two straight days hauling boxes of books). I like a multifunction device because I don’t want to carry a boat-load of different things all the time. This is why PDAs have been replaced by phones. It seems to me, though, that technology changes continually shift the boundary between dedicated and general purpose devices. When PCs were new, we bought dedicated game machines. Then we used our PCs. Then we bought dedicated machines again.
I’m not sure a $1K+ tablet device is the answer, either, especially if Amazon/BN continue their efforts to push down the price of dedicated readers.
Rob Preece
Publisher
But when screens get better and faster, there’s no reason that “dedicated readers” shouldn’t take on more of the functions of PDAs and netbooks. Like the Kindle’s web browser, only more so. So even the “dedicated readers” will mutate into multifunction devices.