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If you read any ‘ebooks versus print books’ article, you’ll soon come across the print fetishists. These are people who acknowledge the rise of ebooks—grudgingly—but then insist that ‘real’ book lovers surely prefer paper, or that paper is ‘nicer’ or a ‘better experience’ or in some way superior. I am starting to get really annoyed with these people! Overlooking the obvious ‘print and pixel really can co-exist and there is no need for an either/or mentality’ argument, I am starting to grow a little offended by the economic snobbery that I perceive in some of these arguments.

What I think a lot of these ‘paper is superior’ people fail to consider is that even in this modern day and age, having a large paper library is still an economic luxury. It used to be so because the cost of an education to learn the skill of reading was prohibitive; then, it was because the cost of books themselves was high in a time when income was so limited. Now, it’s because the cost of the cost of real estate is, for many, a very real economic fact of life. I live in a large city where even one-bedroom apartments sell for almost half a million dollars. Under what scheme could a young person like me starting out in their career possibly be able to afford a single-family house with space for all the books (in paper!) that I might want to read?

Yes, other cities do have more favourable real estate markets. But my job is here and my life, for now, is here. I am open to that changing in the future. Certainly, if I reached the point of having kids myself, I would look outside the city when considering a home. But the bottom line reality for a young person in my shoes is this: space costs money. A lot of money. So, to say ‘oh it’s so lovely to have all these nice paper books!’ is really saying ‘oh, it’s so nice to have all this money for such a large amount of space!’

When I read these arguments in favour of paper, they all seem to come from people my parents age who have had long lives and careers in the well-paying later stages during which they acquired their homes. Indeed, Of the people in my real life who do the whole ‘I just enjoy so much having all the lovely books in paper’ thing, the only one who is not over the age of 60 is a twentysomething co-worker—who lives in the large, single-family house belonging to her parents.

No offense to my parent’s generation, but they seem to have a different perspective on money than me and my thirtysomething friends. I remember the year my boss mandated attendance at a staff social event that cost $50. We were all horrified, and she didn’t see what the fuss was about. $50 was just not a lot of money to her. And indeed, when I complained to my own similar-aged parent about this, her response was to offer to just give me the $50 so I could go. It simply never crossed their minds that this amount of money might be large for us. Similarly, from the comfort (and space!) of the homes they can afford at that stage of their lives, I think many of them have forgotten the one-room-apartment reality of the younger generation. It just does not occur to them that some people truly do not have the facilities to purchase, and keep, a large collection of books in paper.

So, when I read these comments from people who claim they love books too much to ever stop buying paper, my reaction is not ‘you make a valid argument about the aesthetics of one media over another.’ My reaction instead is ‘must be nice to be rich enough to afford that much space!’ I cannot afford a home big enough to house every book I love, in paper. But that doesn’t make me less of a reader, of a customer, of a book lover. What it does mean is that ebooks have opened up the notion of ‘owning a library’ to people like me who might otherwise be excluded. So maybe those of you in the rich ‘upper classes’ so to speak should be a tiny bit less snobby about us electronic upstarts, and consider—just for a moment—that your choice to stay with paper might actually be an economic privilege that is not universal.

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"I’m a journalist, a teacher and an e-book fiend. I work as a French teacher at a K-3 private school. I use drama, music, puppets, props and all manner of tech in my job, and I love it. I enjoy moving between all the classes and having a relationship with each child in the school. Kids are hilarious, and I enjoy watching them grow and learn. My current device of choice for reading is my Amazon Kindle Touch, but I have owned or used devices by Sony, Kobo, Aluratek and others. I also read on my tablet devices using the Kindle app, and I enjoy synching between them, so that I’m always up to date no matter where I am or what I have with me."

19 COMMENTS

  1. While sympathetic to your perspective (I only coped with this type of situation as a young adult by housing most of my books in my parents’ home), I’m not sure that throwing around words such as “snob” and “privilege” and “fetishists” will improve the likelihood of the sort of civilized conversation you’re hoping to have with print-only readers.

    People who love print books are not confined to the upper class. There’s a long tradition of poor people saving up their money to buy books, browsing through used bookstores, or – if they wanted to read a lot of books and were in a situation like yours – simply borrowing books from the public library. So I doubt that you’re going to convert any print-only lovers by telling them that they’re being oppressive to poor people. For all you know, some of the people writing those articles are poor themselves.

    Instead, let’s set an example for the really annoying “paper is superior” folks by not engaging in reverse snobbery.

  2. I suspect, Joanna, that I’m one of those people you are complaining about. 🙂

    When I was your age, decades ago, I learned to prioritize how my money was spent. At your age, I didn’t make a fortune and had to decide between, say, spending a few dollars to see a movie or to buy a book or not spending it at all. Yet even in those hard-pressed days, when I lived in a studio apartment whose rent surpassed 50% of my net income, I bought books.

    I am not dismissive of the economic woes and realities of your generation, but everything has to be dealt with in perspective. I remember my parents, for example, paying a mortgage of $30 a month, at a time when they earned only $15 a week. Gas also cost less than 25 cents a gallon, the New York times was a nickel, and so it went.

    I actually prefer ebooks to pbooks for reading. No question about that. But pbooks do have six things that ebooks currently do not have: (a) When I buy a pbook, I own it; when I buy an ebook, I rent it. (b) pBooks are resalable on a secondary market and/or rise in value as they become scarce; ebooks are never scarce and have no secondary market in which I can recoup some of my investment. (c) Nonfiction pbooks tend to be less expensive to purchase than the ebook version and are available for significantly less on the secondary market, which includes the remainders market. (d) pBooks can LEGALLY be cooperatively bought, thereby reducing the price to individuals even further (I have bought in cooperation with my son several books over the years that we have shared the purchase cost of). (e) Once I buy a pbook it remains mine; unlike the ebook, no one can remotely remove the pbook, replace the pbook, or do anything that interferes with my ownership of the pbook. (f) As my collection of hardcovers grows, I, too, run into the space situation. At that point, I reevaluate my pbooks and remove some from my collection, and I either sell them on the secondary market (see c) or, more likely, I donate them to my local library, which is happy to obtain them as they are in pristine condition, giving me a chartiable contribution deduction on my taxes at the fair market value, which is the average price in the used book market. I can’t donate no longer wanted ebooks to anyone, let alone to my local library.

    The day when ebooks have a universal format and DRM scheme, like videos do, some of these pbook advantages will disappear. But at least from a purely economic perspective, pbooks — at least those from the Agency 6 — have a greater economic value and are a better bargain than ebooks. eBooks shine on portability and ease of reading on the electronic device, but that’s about it economically.

    It seems to me that the person struggling with finances would be better off buying a pbook version than an ebook version of an Agency 6 publication. The initial cost and the subsequent ability to recoup some of that cost seems to me to create an unbeatable combination for the frugal. Of course, free and and low priced indie ebooks change the calculation, but then those aren’t the pbooks I buy.

  3. I do tend to agree, not just from an economic perspective but from an environmental perspective: housing those books for the lifetime of the owner and/or the book is a waste. However, going back to the economic side, I do think there are some concerns. Electronic books are largely licensed rather than sold, so there is no residual value as with traditional books. He would would peruse the used book store has nowhere to go. She would would make use of her parents library for her own education, as I did, lose that inheritance.

  4. Pretty much what Rich said, so I won’t rehash the economics. When it comes to leasing vs owning ebooks, whatever the publishers may consider my purchase to be, I *own* what I’ve paid for. Perhaps Amazon can remove a book from your account and even from your Kindle, but once it’s on your hard drive, it’s yours. I use the desktop KIndle app, and I seriously doubt that Amazon can come in and remove my purchased books from my drive. If you use Calibre, you can transfer Kindle books to that app. They’ll be stored in Calibre’s library on your hard drive, and you can read them with Calibre.

    Licensing agreements be damned. Where else in real life are you required to sign agreements in exchange for the privilege of shelling out your cash? Software. Music? I don’t know much about that area. But the idea that digital products remain the property of the manufacturers/distributors is one that’s going to have to change.

  5. Catana – “Licensing agreements be damned.” Way to go ! My backed up copies are my own too, and secured by Charlton Heston’s death grip 🙂

    Joanna – I agree with most of your well written article. I find this fetishistic thing really creepy. The snobbishness that often accompanies it is also quiet bemusing.

    However, much as I would like it to be, I have encountered quite a few of the younger generation who have contracted this disorder from experiences they have had with paper books. The ability for humans to concoct emotional connections with objects as a result of some strong personal experience is long known, and I regret, will continue to happen into the future.

    I know neither you nor I are aiming to convert anyone. We just bemoan the silliness of it all.

  6. I am in my late 40s and while I can afford the $50 event, I can remember the days when it was a big expense. I also live in a small space, by choice. As I get older and people in my life pass on, I see the difficulty of cleaning out their living spaces and dealing with their stuff. That, among other reasons, has made me purge my life of “stuff” in the past few years. Ebooks are a big part of that plan. When I moved into my current place two years ago, I disposed of six xerox-paper boxes full of books. I’m about to do a second purge that should fill at least two more boxes.

    Also, ebooks don’t have to be dusted.

    And like other posters, I make sure my ebooks are deDRMed and backed up privately. I don’t upload them anywhere; it’s just for my own protection.

  7. Joanna:

    You left out the happy fact that young people, who are not yet established, move frequently. As all of us here know, moving a collection of a couple of thousand pBooks is such a joy. Moving a couple of thousand eBooks requires a USB stick.

    I am also looking forward to the certain fact that if I live long enough, I will be moving to a 1 bedroom unit in a retirement home. By then, I hope to have only eBooks; no pBooks at all. This is both for shelf space reasons and for the ability to increase the font size with an eBook.

    Gary

  8. when I was young, I abandoned at least three full libraries of personal books as I moved from one city to another in search of a good job. I can’t even recall most of those books now (and the ones that I can recall. like the Georgette Heyer books) have been replaced, probably a couple of times. Now I have a house big enough for my and my husband’s libraries, and we’ve still got stacks and boxes of unshelved books because we don’t have the room. I’ve pretty much made the switch to ebooks, but my husband and kids still prefer paper.

  9. I’m in the age group that has room for a library of pbooks, although until my own indie books began to sell pretty well, the budget, including the book budget, had to be very tight. My affection for the pbooks waned over the years as I tired of bookcase after bookcase that always needed dusting and of the piles of overflow books all over the house. Of course the paper lovers who pushed your buttons, Joanna, undoubtedly have housekeepers who do the dusting. My goal this year is to thin out all my bookshelves until I have only a few with reference books and favorite series. Everything else is Kindle.

    I’m also 100% with Catana. I buy ebooks, and they’re mine. The ones that would stay on my bookshelves if I were still doing paper are hidden on my PC, and I downloaded and tested software to remove DRM to make sure I can when I got my K1 several years ago. I don’t use it on my ebooks, but I have it and will use it if I need to in order to keep access to what I bought.

  10. Richard, I don’t see how it’s any more ‘yours’ than an ebook if you have to prune it to conserve space. I like that with ebooks, I can have it forever. Either the books I buy are DRM-free, or they can be made so 🙂 Either way, I do consider my ebooks a permanent purchase.

  11. I agree Joanna – I do however recognise that for many people, if this lunacy of leasing survives, they will find themselves losing their eBooks on a regular basis. Due to software issues, eRetailer errors, eRetailers going out of business etc etc. Another reason why prices of eBooks must be lower than pbooks.

  12. Nice post, Joanna. Few people calculate the cost of real estate when they buy a book. Because I’ve been a book person all my life, I’ve accumulated thousands of books. The result… I’ve had to buy bigger houses than I needed for living, moving became a true burden, and I paid dearly (living in Texas) for air conditioning to keep all of my books climate controlled and mildew-free. Giving up all of these books was painful. Many of them were old friends. But knowing that I can get almost all of them on my Nook or Kindle helped me deal with the pain. I now live in a house that’s half the square footage, but I have as much room for me as ever. Certainly when we argue green benefits, this is one that seems to be left out but that may be the biggest.

    Rob Preece
    Publisher

  13. I must admit I’m somewhat offended by the accusations of snobery in that rant. Certainly none of the book lovers in my circle are folks rolling in cash or living in palatial mansions. Admittedly they aren’t living in highly urbanised small apartments and the like. Just small to moderate sized suburban homes or apartments.

    They tend to have enough room for moderate collections of things, be they books, dvds, or other media. Admittedly for some, portions of said library did reside offsite at various times (be they rented storage areas or parental homes).

    Certainly I’ll admit I much prefer print (and tried and failed to read ebooks on an iPad), though I’m not sure that will hold forever. There may come a time when I am happy with the layout and fonts of ebooks and e-Ink might reach a point where I’m happy enough. I just don’t see that happening anytime soon, doubly so for anything that’s heavy on layout.

    Maybe I’ll never switch, aside from in the case of comic books, and stick with print or audiobooks.

    Of course ownership isn’t neccessarily the big thing for me. I’ve always been a huge and devoted library user and so I’ve never been a person who must own everything. Add to that my friends, family and I being big sharers of books and so again we’ve never felt that need to own everything. Which all leads to not needing vast chambers for personal libraries.

  14. Snob: “a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people”

    I don’t see how Joanna’s use of the word is inappropriate or offensive. She is discussing the quite common appearance of articles and commentary across the web and elsewhere, suggesting that readers of paper books and the ‘love of real books’ makes them the ‘real book lovers’, unlike the new eBook reader upstarts.

  15. Thank heavens! And here I was, afraid that an aspect of life would somehow manage to avoid class envy. Most of the ink snobs, as I refer to them, I deal with aren’t flaunting their wealth when expressing their preference for pbooks. In fact, a case could be made that my preference for reading ebooks on some $100+ gizmo would be me flaunting my wealth. Especially if the person on the perceiving end can only afford to read books from the public library.

    Most, especially the ones who use the “touch and smell” arguments, are just folks who are either resisting a technological advancement (as they most likely did with computers, email, online shopping et cetera) or are just a bit uncomfortable due to their lack of familiarity with ebooks and ereaders and are just using these silly arguments to mask latent Luddism. These folks also tend to be around the age of your parents. It is quite possible that this is the reason the ink snobs are looking down their noses at ebooks, and not because they’re out persecuting the proletariat.

  16. My computer hardware engineer husband is no luddite. He loves techy-toys. He just isn’t an early adopter, and it’s still early days yet in the ebook world. And he likes seeing his books around him, and knowing that he owns them and that nobody can take them away from him – or risk losing them, as in the iFlow and the earlier #amazonfail 1984 debacles have demonstrated.

    I love my ereaders, but I take extraordinary lengths to back up my books, and to ensure that I own the content. But I’ve got the time, the energy, and the motivation to do so. Not everybody does – certainly he doesn’t. It’s far easier for him to stop at a book store on his way home and just pick up the paper book.

  17. Becca – I don’t know what you mean by “extraordinary lengths”. I strip all eBooks I purchase of their DRM by drag’ndrop, and regularly backup by devices. It all adds up to less than five minutes a week, at the very most.
    The time I invest on this procedure each week is vastly less than the time needed to visit a bookstore to manually purchase paper books.
    That is not an argument about converting to eBooks, as I completely understand your husband’s views. It is just a comment on the relative effort issue.

  18. I just have to remember to download the books to my computer so I can import them into Calibre, rather than just wirelessly downloading them to my kindle. And I back it all up regularly, and then backup the backup. And I keep Calibre up to date (which reminds me, I need to update to version .8) and make sure my plugin tools are up to date. It’s just a lot easier to stop at the store, and then shelve the book. If we have a computer failure, I’m screwed. But if we have a fire, we’re both screwed. oh, well.

  19. Well Becca – I buy all eBooks through my browser. I immediately strip the DRM and load up with Stanza. Stanza doesn’t seem to feel the need to update every few days and anyway, all updates don’t need to be made, it’s not as if they are compulsory.
    That all takes less than five minutes. I use an Apple iMac, so Time Machine backs up every hour automatically without prompting. Every month I backup valuable/purchased files from my iMac to a DVD by drag’ndropping one folder to a DVD. Life can be made easier 🙂

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