Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
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dbasch.posterous.com
If the future is one of ebooks and real books coexisting, I'm all for it.
But if the more likely scenario plays out, where publishers use the higher profit margins and control that come from cutting out the printers and stores, and books die as physical objects, then I can't begin to express the sadness and loss I feel.
The joy that comes from holding a book in my hands that I know was read and held by my grandfather years ago is irreplaceable. So is the beauty of a well-designed book, from the paper choices to the typography to the feel of the spine in my hand. And of course, the conversations that flow from seeing the title of a book someone's reading, or browsing their bookshelves at home.
The very lack of technology in a book preserves their integrity against the strong temptations of adding sounds, animations, interactivity, advertising, even video. It's easy to imagine a world in the not so distant future where the idea of reading just words alone is sneered at as primitive and boring.
Is there anyone that can offer any optimism?
Plus, think of the lock-in that the stores are missing out on. As a Kindle owner, if Amazon offered me bundles, I would probably never buy another book at Barnes & Noble.
ebook: $31.99
print + ebook: $32.99
print: $29.99
> print: $29.99
The fact the ebook costs more than the print book is just laughable. It reminds me of Ticketmaster's "delivery fee" that they charge when you print tickets at home.
Is a first edition of Robinson Crusoe a precious object? Of course. It's also (I'm guessing) quite rare and extremely expensive. Yet anyone with a Kindle or Nook (or even a computer) can get Robinson Crusoe from Project Gutenberg for free. Most of the PG audience isn't going to be able to afford a library full of fine leather-bound books. The choice isn't between the fine leather-bound book and the etext. It's between the etext and not being able to read the book at all.
We've seen this play out in many other areas. Mass-produced clothing is another example -- is it as nice as individually-tailored clothing? Nope. But most of us can't afford a wardrobe full of custom-tailored stuff (and historically, people didn't; most folks had a set of "work clothes" and maybe one set of "Sunday clothes", if that).
For that matter, exactly the same scenario played out when the printing press was introduced. Esthetes decried the loss of the hand-written medieval volumes, lovingly calligraphed and illuminated by highly skilled scribe/artists. They were breathtakingly beautiful. One book also cost somewhere around a year's wages for a skilled worker.
I'm not talking about rare books and antiquities, though. I'm talking about something far more common and mundane, and (to me at least) far more special.
The books I've inherited from my grandfather are not precious or valuable to anyone but me. They're precious because I know I'm touching the pages he touched, and when I come across the notes he's made in the margins, they're in his hand, written with the pen I remember watching him use when I was a child.
Most of us can't afford to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on rare books. But most of us can afford a couple dollars for a paperback at the used book store—even those of us who can't spend the $80-$200 that the OP calls "cheap" for a Kindle.
This is one of the reasons I like ebooks for their convenience and ability to be widely distributed, but I would be devastated to see them replace bound books as the only choice.
We're seeing the way that movie and music companies are eager to trample over consumers in the name of protecting their copyrights. Do we really want to turn books into something that can only be read if you have the right device to display them? I don't trust Amazon, Apple, or anyone else to be the gatekeeper of my books. I want the ability to turn my back on them if they start editing, deleting, or censoring books. I want to be able to say "fine, then, I'll just go to the store and get a real book, and your Kindle can suck it."
Some of my worries seem almost silly today, but we've seen too many things go from far-fetched to reality in a generation or less.
I have to say, I'm still pessimistic about bound books however. Perhaps future generations will be reading old books on their grandfather's Kindle and looking at old notes recorded on it -- interesting thought -- kind of bizarre to think about, even in this age.
This one aspect of the lack of ownership that I find problematic, but you don't see discussed as much. The way things are going, you won't even be able to inherit someone's kitchen table because they'd bought a $500 license for their immediate family to eat off of it. Died? Factory repossesses it.
One of my fears is that digital books will change people's reading habits, by having too much choice available instantly it seems too tempting to start many at once and not finish any. With time this could result in books & stories becoming shorter and this can't be a good thing.
I do however realise that these feelings of mine do not make much sense and that one day, when the book I want to read isn't available in a physical form, I will have to surrender and get the digital version. I agree that that day will be a sad one, but many people felt (and still feel) that way about vinyls, and it hasn't prevented the mass from evolving and embracing the new capabilities of the new formats.
I can imagine a future where the books as we know them now are just one specific (and old fashioned) way to tell a story, in a world full of other formats and possibilities. I believe that change must not be feared and as long as the whole world doesn't go crazy, we should be fine :-)
Were you ever in highschool?
Pure information like a book has to go the digital route--there are too many advantages, practically, economically, environmentally. And many would cite the lack of chrome and physical presence of a Kindle an aesthetic advantage over books.
Reading on a tablet type device meanwhile is a dream. Thin, lightweight. I hold the device the same for every page at both the start and end of the book. I can comfortably hold it with one hand even.
Being able to look up definitions is wonderfully useful. If you're on an ipad a quick internet search can be incredibly useful. I just read a Clash of Kings (sequel to Game of Thrones). I regularly looked up characters to refresh my memory on what they did or what they looked like (from the TV series).
When it comes to novels I would be quite happy to never hold a dead tree again. I much prefer burning dead dinosaurs.
I actually prefer the iPhone4 to the kindle for long reading sessions as it's even lighter.
Not ebooks in their current state, of course, but by a hypothetical electronic book that has more capability. I suspect paper books will become like vinyl, hobbyists and retro obsessed will still have a lot, but most people will only keep a few for sentimental reasons (e.g. your grandfather).
There are some great ideas here for anyone who wants to take advantage of them:
- Add drawing support and overdrawing/highlighting to the ereader (this should be there now, lord knows why it isn't).
- Put a display on the back of the ereader so people can see the title of what you're reading. This sounds terribly egotistical, but so is twitter, and it's not doing too bad :-)
- Use a (very: e.g. 8'x4') large picture frame/bookcase display to show all the books (and media and art and whatever else) you currently have in your living room or study or whatnot. The technology is not quite up to doing this at scale, but I can see it happening. I do think a human friendly way to browse media not tied to a remote control or sitting down in front of a rectangle or peering through the aperture of a handheld device will be a majorly successful consumer electronic device in the future.
I also don't think that ebooks will somehow demote text-only to secondary status. After all, what do you think you're reading now? :-) Even if you look at the web in general, the best sites (for reading) have text as the backbone, and if they have other media, it's more about supporting the text with a diagram or an example -- not a stage or a soundtrack.
EDIT: Oh! and for battery life -- go solar :-)
There are kindle covers that look and feel like a hardback book
http://www.amazon.com/Verso-Prologue-Cover-Kindle-Fire/dp/B0...
Lending it to other people.
It doesn't matter how many fucking awful Facebook plugins you write, there is nothing as convenient as "Have you read [X]? I have a copy, here, let me get it."
Until I can lend my Kindle books to people - with no restrictions, I will continue buying physical books.
TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service)
Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.)
Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.)
Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over-engineered. It's legacy. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a database for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards.
Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another.
[0]: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
(I haven't tried this method, but it seems extremely straightforward)
I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.
However I grew up traveling to Powells books and living with physical books. I find that a good physical book has something that the digital version lacks. The physical form is a symbol for my memories of a book. I can simply pick it up and thoughts, themes and so forth come back to me. A quick flip through pulls out my memories.
For deep study I still find that writing in ad underlining a book increases my understanding dramatically. For awhile I composed notes at the computer while I read but this was time consuming and akward.
Digital books are disruptive. As Carr once wrote though, the disruption doesn't mean something isn't lost... often much is. We need to find the right ways to bring as much as that along with us from the physical world into the digital as we can. Perhaps I am too old already, but I am sure I will be one of the last with physical books as well as a continual user of the digital.
Even if these features were implemented better, it would probably still be annoying as Kindles are sluggish, low-power devices (which is probably a boon for the serial-reading use case as it encourages you to just flip pages and not get sidetracked, as well as providing amazing battery life).
Then again, maybe I'm just missing something as my coworker seems fine using his Kindle for this purpose.
Yeah it is tough to jump around and some books just cannot be read on a 6" screen ( and I doubt that the DX fares better.) but for most books I found that I am good with reading them on Kindle. The benefits far outweigh the cons for me.
The iPad (ie, any 10" tablet) shines for reading content that's best served as a PDF over ebook format (ie, included pictures, possibly video). Interactive content really does require at least a tablet.
iPad + pdf version is far easier than the DX for the 2 books I tried.
While the kindle DX is bigger, it's still not very nice for reading tech docs. I'd buy an ipad instead and use the PDF version (and I buy all my books ebook unless not sold that way).
i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.
i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
I feel exactly the same, and yet I just bought a Kindle and am very much planning to use it for most of my reading.
How do I resolve this dilemna?
Well, my parents had the same issue, though set up differently. When they fled from Romania after I was born, they had none of the huge library which they had back where they grew up.
So what did they do? They bought books. They bought the kinds of books which they wanted to have sitting on shelves in the house where I grew up, so that I could stumble on them and read them. It worked pretty well.
Most of the best books can be found for cheap in flea-markets. Building a solid library of top quality classics, from Gogol, Dostoievsky, Dumas and Dickens, to Hesse, Mann, Marques and Gary, is not that expensive.
Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).
Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas.
The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.
This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.
I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.
If you read, your kids will read if you give them encouragement to do so.
Thick classics that are too big to carry around, New York Times bestseller page-turners, interesting books with an intriguing synopsis or something recommended by a friend. Things that I will read once, and maybe twice. Even though the ebook selection is still appalling with my local library, I've found it useful in this.
What I don't buy: textbooks, and the favorites I've probably read at least ten times. Those are the books I want to keep in physical form--eReaders don't flip well, and no amount of slick e-ink and shiny devices is going to have the same soothing effect on my nerves as my much-loved copy of The Hobbit.
Kindle, et al, at least for me, is dramatically streamlining the way I consume one type of book--the ones that before, I would go to the library, read, and return without a second thought. But not a whole lot else.
Real books -> books needing many illustrations (e.g. art books)
But, I really appreciate the issue of "What do we put on the bookshelves?" my wife and I have bookshelves filling a wall where we have our combined libraries - and that is aesthetically very pleasing for us. What will our children do if they only have electronic format reading material?
People say, "don't just a book by its cover." Shouldn't that apply to a book's format as well?
1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic;
2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle";
3. I wait 3 seconds;
4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over.
I've probably done around 500 books by now. There's a looong way to go yet :-)
I don't see much point in having physical books anymore other than coffee table books. I like having my library at my fingertips rather than scattered everywhere.
Every now and then I get weak anyway and buy a kindle book. But often Amazon tells me I first need to switch my account from Amazon.com to Amazon.de. That is the reminder of what is wrong with it. Why does it matter where I buy my ebook? I want to buy my ebook wherever and whenever I want, and just have a device that can handle all my books. I know it is possible to get other books onto the kindle, but it is very cumbersome (I don't own a kindle, so the email transfer does not work). And they won't sync between devices, either, afaik.
I find this very depressing, because it seems unlikely to change in the near future. Everybody wants to own their customer, nobody is going to deliver a reader that is simply a good reader. Not the least because it would also require titanic negotiations with book publishers to make their content available somehow.
Wife appreciates the shelf space.
When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter
or read a couple of pages on the phone.