Sigh. I don’t even like iTunes for music.
What do you think about ebooks and ebook readers? Like so many people (see comments here, for starters), I have an attachment to books as objects. But I suppose I could get used to ebooks, given the right reader. It would require an interface vastly superior to iTunes/iPod, though. Ugh.
I suppose people complained when codices began replacing scrolls….
Filed under: books, reading, technology
I too have that attachment to books as objects. However, for doing research, or for hard-to-obtain books, I do use services like GoogleBooks. They’ve got some advantages over paper books, especially word search. I don’t think I’d buy a reader for electronic books, though; I’d keep using my computer.
My mom has checked out the library’s ebook readers a couple of times, and she really enjoys them. (Though she doesn’t like spending much time in front of a computer screen.) She likes being able to carry around a lot of reading material in one object, and especialy the built-in dictionary.
I think the book will be harder to replace electronically than the cd or dvd. We experience the music or images second-hand, whether through a cd/dvd player or a digital player, whereas we experience books directly through touch.
I recently switched my gigantic, heavy, paper organizer to a tiny Palm device that weighs approximately zero. I thought I’d give an e-book a try, to see if I could handle the small screen format, because then I could have a book always with me without having to lug it around. It’s weird at first, and the pagination is hilarious, with the average contemporary novel clocking in at around 2000 pages, but I found it very easy to get used to and am working on my 3rd e-book now. I use it as my lunchtime book and backup book — it’s never my “main” book — but I do enjoy reading that way and don’t even notice the “turning” of the pages anymore. If a character name shows up and I don’t remember him/her, I can just do a search — that alone is worth the price of admission. So my recommendation is to try it — you might get used to it more easily than you think, and you can still have your “real books” as well.
Great comments, Catherines!
I would have loved having a laptop/ebooks for college and graduate school. Soon a generation will arise that knows not the highlighter, the textbook sell-back, the writer’s cramp…
ugh indeed. i still buy records (yes vinyl!) so can’t imagine myself with an ebook reader. and you know what this leads to, like itunes, with people buying chapters not full books. gravitys rainbow with the difficult bits taken out. 1984 without the miserable ending.
I don’t want to have to go out and buy batteries to read a book.
The computer or laptop would be different in that I’m also using it for lots of other things, but I’m still not paying money for an electronic book.
Call me a Luddite, but I like paper books, plain and simple. That said, if I traveled a lot, a real whole lot, an e-book would be a great way for me to pack lots of reading material without the weight of all those books.
That idea of buying chapters, not whole books, is interesting. Imagine, like burning a mix cd, putting together a mix *book*.
[That idea of buying chapters, not whole books, is interesting. Imagine, like burning a mix cd, putting together a mix *book*.]
william burroughs did the cutnpaste mix book pretty well already.
Yeah, and there’s lots of cd compilations put out by record companies, but now we can *all* join in!
[...] with a rich-looking dustjacket. Is it shallow to make a point of that? I don’t think so. In discussions about e-books, I’m constantly hearing that people are attached to books as physical objects. The jacket, [...]
This was bought as a gift for my 80 year-old mother-in-law. She loves it! (My father-in-law loves not having to carry multiple books for her on their vacations.) Easy enough to use for a technophobe, and an extremely readable display. If I had to point to any shortcomings, it would be the keyboard. My mother-in-law has enough difficulty with her fingers and the tiny buttons that she generally uses a pencil-eraser to push the buttons. All-in-all, a wonderful product and a big win!