Why I'll miss a world where books make the first move | Hacker News Reader

Why I'll miss a world where books make the first move

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14 pointswyclif11 comments

Yeah, yeah. Enough with this. Why do all criticisms of e-readers by book lovers seem to be overly nostalgic? The problem is obvious to me: These people are book lovers. That is, they love the books themselves more than the information in them. This leads to criticism like "oh, but you can't get that feel and smell you get when you open a book" or "you can't show off your intellectual awesomeness to your mates-to be" as opposed to constructive criticism like "note-taking on e-readers is still much more cumbersome than normal books". For those of us who like cheap, waste-efficient and accessible information, this is an improvement. The rest can go hang out with the people who complain that youth is decadent and that we're amidst insurmountable moral decay.

Of even greater concern to me than the loss of the tactile experience that books give to readers is that, to my knowledge, there's nothing equivalent to the public library system for e-readers. Libraries are important for any youth, but particularly for poor and disadvantaged youth. They're a huge democratizing force, providing mountains of information and education for free to even the poorest members of society. Thanks to the prevalence of DRM on ebooks, I think the odds are against us seeing anything as universal and far reaching for ebooks.

Ebooks are great for the privileged middle and upper class. But thanks to DRM they lack the lend-ability and share-ability of real books, and they require a relatively expensive ebook reader. Even if libraries have the ability to lend every ebook ever published, it'll still require kids using the library to have a relatively expensive and fragile e-book reader. With real books, all they have to bring is an inquisitive mind.

With real books, even poor and disadvantaged children have access to books, not just through libraries, but also through borrowing, and sharing books from friends, relatives, neighbors, etc. And because most books are cheap to the point of damn near disposable in our society, most kids can count on getting gifts of books, hand-me-down used books, etc. Heck, it's pretty easy to scrape up an enough for a paperback on an allowance, lawn jobs, etc.

This worries me a lot. While I know that the circumstances I grew up in are very privileged compared to most of the world, we were poor by US standards. My family was often on some form of public assistance, and there's no way in hell I could have afforded a Kindle, Nook, etc. if such a thing had existed in those days. Growing up, the local public library was my teacher, my escape, my best friend. I'm saddens me to think kids in the near future may not have access to that same wonderful resource.

What about the internet and hand-me down computers?

It's about 40 bucks a month for a decent internet connection right? Maybe the computer is worth three furniture pieces.

Geesh! How out of touch with reality are you?!? Do you have any idea how many families in the US can't afford $40 bucks a month? That's assuming that the parents are supportive of buying a computer and an internet connection. If not, the kid on his own is fucked if he's gonna need a computer and 40 dollar a month internet connection to get access to the library.

BasicISP dialup is $6.95 per month. You can't listen to music, watch videos, or play games over it, but it is plenty adequate for reading text. And you can access it anywhere there's a phone.

What if the Kindle is the library? Instead of checking out a book, you borrow a Kindle locked to the library's Amazon account. Instead of paying for a Kindle, you just put up a damage deposit.

Very different costs involved for the library. Instead of loaning some 7 year old kid a 5 dollar paperback, you gotta lend him a much more fragile 200 dollar Kindle. Not to mention you need to stock enough Kindle for every patron who might want one in addition to purchasing licenses for the books.

Right now, every book can be lent out individually. A library might have lent out all it's copies of a specific title, but as long as there's a single book left in the building, they've still got something to lend. It seems like that simplifies capacity planning quite a bit as opposed to the model of having to provider readers as well as ebooks.

Let's hope ebook piracy takes off, then.

Oh come on, not enough social information? How much more social information do you people need? Want to know what someone listens to? No need to trawl their car's floor for album covers -- not only do they have their favorite albums on Last.fm, they have a scrobble of every play made in the past couple weeks. There's already a "favorite books" section in Facebook, how long until ebook readers have live integration with the rest of that?

A similar piece by James Wolcott was posted to HN last year or so.

I do have the urge to see what people are reading around me (usually on public transportation) and find that aging eyes have done more to impede me than e-readers. Maybe if I rode through a more prosperous end of town it would be different.

It would be interesting to live in a world where a library is just a storage of e-reader made to look like books.

Just pick up an e-reader and it will sync to your phone looking at your wishlist and selecting the first one off the bat. Or use your phone to choose the book you want to read on the spot.

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