Ebooks Are an Abomination (2021)

I love physical books too but since 1990 I've dreaded "trade paperbacks" that come in various nonstandard sizes, cost almost as much as hardcovers, and frequently have quality problems such as bindings that break the first time you use them.

I'd contrast those to "mass market paperbacks" which are perceived as low-quality but are standard enough in their construction to avoid fatal quality problems. I collected many of these that were printed in the 1970s and thought they were in excellent condition in 2000 but they are getting terribly yellow today after being stored in my humid and uncontrolled farmhouse. (When I visit the library stacks at my uni, however, I am sometimes shocked at the poor condition of many hardbounds that have been stored under optimal conditions.)

The main reason I started using ebooks is that my eyesight isn't what it used to be and reading physical books is harder, need better lighting for it, easy to lose my place, etc. Ebooks solve all of these problems.

I would agree that the Amazon Kindle e-book reader experience especially is abysmal.

Independent tablet products, however, can be excellent. I'm in my third year owning an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, a 13.3" e-ink Android tablet. And as an e-book reader, it's ... quite good. Certainly few of the problems addressed in Ian Bogost's article apply.

In particular:

- The device offers roughly an A2 or US-letter-sized reading area. This is more than sufficient for most published books (and can be used in a two-page-up mode on many), and suffices to make all but the smallest-type journal articles legible.

- I strongly prefer static document formats (PDF or DJVU), which is to say, consistently paginated layouts. On e-ink paging rather than scrolling through a document is preferred, as well as having content appear consistently on the screen. Physical memory in reading Is In Fact A Thing. Changing my view of PDFs was Sort of A Big Deal: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983968> TL;DR: Many of the issues raised concerning PDFs actually address displays and their capabilities. Not all, but many.

- Epub and other "fluid" formats ... can be acceptable, and are very often more compact than PDF, but the lack of consistency over zoom or formatting settings can be frustrating. The ability to correct for atrocious defaults in font, margin, and spacing styling is at least welcomed.

Among other factors:

- There's something inherently "bookish" about even digital variants of publications. Yes, it's different bookish, but it remains "bookish".

- Etymololgy is ... interesting and illuminating, though of course not definitive. "Book" derives from "beech" (as in the tree), and as with livre and librum, refers to writing inside bark. On tablets, if you will... What we think of as the book is more properly the codex. From "caudex", or "tree trunk". <https://www.etymonline.com/word/book> <https://www.etymonline.com/word/codex>

- My greatest ongoing frustration with ebook readers is abysmal metadata and organisation. The ability have something along the lines of the Dublin Core metadata (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core>), and files named informatively as to contents (I strongly adhere to Author-Name--Additional-Author_Title--Subtitle_PubDate.format), possibly with additional underscore-delimited elements (publisher, organisation, etc., with any punctuation or non-ASCII characters removed or normalised). I really wish Calibre or Zotero, or something strongly similar, were a first-class citizen and useful library management tool on my ebook reader.

- The ability to carry a large library with ease is transformative. We've terabyte+ storage available, let's use it! At ~5 MB/book, that's 200,000 books' equivalent storage per TB. This might even satisfy me.... (200,000 volumes is roughly equivalent to a sizeable local public library's holdings.)

- Much as I'm a fan of paginated layouts, we're likely going to have to move beyond "page" as a useful citation standard when referencing sources. Paragraph number within a chapter or section might be more robust across multiple formats. (I expect now to hear of all the writing systems in which paragraphs are not a first-order component....)

- There's an inherent affordance and usability to book-sized publications, by which I mean generally folio-, quarto-, and octav-sized print formats. (Roughly: 12" (305mm) x 19" (483mm), 9.5" (242mm) x 12" (305mm), and 6" (153mm) x 9" (228mm), see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_size>). Tablets fix the device size across multiple publications, and in my experience a minimum ~8" device (diagonal) is helpful for general works, though 10" and 13" devices are far more useful for more complex publications. Visual acuity also matters, and of course, there's the presence or absence of color rendering (and its saturation / fidelity) as well.

But ultimately, if you're not happy with the e-book reader you have, then give consideration to the other options available.

Oh, and could we please please please please please address the library / content management side of this?

I've written a few times of my BOOX experience on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>