E-readers...and the life/death of books (Thread #2)

Thought the old thread on e-Readers and ebooks was getting a tad long so here's a fresh one.

Start off with Margaret Wente, from the GLOBE & MAIL, opining that, like it or not, the book, she is dead:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/margaret-wente/like-it-or-not-the-b...

(Courtesy my pal, Robin)

Wente is usually full of shit, this time doubly so.

It does not seem to have occurred to her that demand for the print edition of The Sentimentalists neatly proves that the book is not, in fact, dead.

Duplicate effort?

Robert

A.J. Now you play nice. That's a Canadian institution you're talking about.

Re: Message #3--there might be books around in 2025 but will there be READERS? Or just sacks of meat hooked up 23 1/2 hours a day to virtual boxes, grooving on the latest James Cameron immersive 4-D technology and subsisting on "soylent green"...

When e-reading becomes as convenient as reading a paper book, then paper books will slowly disappear. At present, there are still problems which need solving: of ownership, of file formats, of reading experience, of storage...

Under the heading of "Not as new as we might think":

See the Edith Wharton passage in this brief post, for complaints about the death of readers and the pernicious influence of publishing.

Writers have moaned on about the death of the reader since the first rejection letter was rec'd via post.

7: You are making me think about Snoopy and his dark and stormy night novel.

Different e-Readers. For the unrepentant geek on your Christmas list. Shop and compare:

http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknewser/holiday-gift-guide-ereader-list_b3597

I read a report (can't find link) that claims dedicated e-readers have no long-term future: for the main reason that most people don't buy enough books to make them worthwhile. The big shift will come when tablets become affordable (and battery life is extended), then e-books could really take off (tablets also solve one of the big issues with e-readers - the inability to deal with pdfs properly).

Because I live in Brazil, where access to English-language books is limited to say the least, my one-year-old Kindle has been a lifesaver. Where previously I was limited to what I could bring back on annual trips to Canada, I now have immediate access to the some 700,000 books on Amazon, plus who knows how many more at places like the Gutenberg Project. Those of you who have unlimited availability of either dead-tree books or e-books should be thankful for your embarrassment of riches. Me, I'm thankful for my Kindle!

I purchased my Kindle in Nov 2009, and since I've had it I've read 54 books on it, including such hefty tomes as all three parts of Lord of the Rings, War and Peace and Infinite Jest. So I'd say I have a fair amount of e-book experience. And I can say that I could never have read, never, that amount of text on a tablet or any other backlit devise. E-ink is the essential component for a successful e-reading experience, without a doubt. All other factors (color, size, weight, speed of page turning, etc.) are minimally important compared to e-ink.

If I didn't live where I do, I might have remained the printed-page purist that I was before buying my Kindle. But having lived the life of an e-reader for a year, I'm not looking back.

I think that anything that makes books, e-books or print books, available and popular is a good thing. I think that anyone who wants to read print books will be able to do so for the foreseeable future. I buy a lot of used books and those stores are not going to disappear.
My main problem with e-books is that the titles I am looking for are not often available in e-book format. I read a lot of history and some of the titles I am looking for do not have a big market. I think that anyone who does any specialized reading is going to have to read books in print for some time. There may be 700,000 Kindle books but one title I just looked at on Amazon is number 6,224,467.

I do have to say, finally reading Infinite Jest was due in large part to my being able to read it on my Kindle. And I'm so grateful I did. Those weighty tomes are so much easier to read on a Kindle, especially when they have footnotes!

Wired gives the new Nook colour a thumbs up and touches on the future on the ereader - Nook Colour.

Bah! The book isn't dead, printed or otherwise. The business is "e-volving", and change is always a difficult time...books will survive (the more formats the merrier) and the publishers will survive because writers will keep writing and there will be readers who will want to read them on the latest new and improved gadget or on good ole reliable paper.

my question ...mostly for myself..is - will i end up saving money and space w/ an e-reader or would the all too easy availability of new books on a whim lead to an even larger expenditure on books? i'm sure we spend ~ 1k/yr on books, minimum..Though ABEbooks has certainly helped vis a vis cost. But we also are pretty much out of bookshelf space..and our little house is very much set up like a boat - everywhere there can be shelves, there ARE shelves..built in under the stairs, hooked into the rafters in two rooms (and i've lost enough height that i can't reach those books w/out a stool now). We've gotten way behind..read stopped, pretty much my fault, in re cataloging what we have. So i'm certainly thinking about an e-book reader, but still..waiting.

#16 Your mileage may vary, but as for me, I am amazon's bitch.

16: it's hard to predict really, probably different for every one. I am reading more since I got my e-reader, but not necessarily spending more. My main reason for buying it was that I felt weighed down by books as objects, so I have started using the library more and more for books I can't get in e-format. And there are many free classics available.

The e-reader did change my reading habits though. I used to read only one book at a time. Right now I have 6 in my "currently reading" list, and the list is incomplete.

i can't say i have anything against e-readers, they are good and useful in a lot of scenarios and space-savers. however, i'm still unable to give up reading and buying in print. i'll continue to stick by my books as long as i can.

#16, 17, On the plus side, I am also Project Gutenberg's bitch so it may even out. God, I love free books!

ever since my nephew went off to Afghanistan w/ 300+ books on his nook - over 2/3 of which were project Gutenberg and the like, the idea has become increasingly appealing. On the other hand, i'm not the fan of Greek classics that his is..but we ARE out of space. At least we have a really good public library.

I have had a Bookwise ebook for years. This year I asked for a Nook for Christmas. I enjoy reading a paper book, but I also like the convenience of carrying many books on the ebook. The tipping point is the fact that paper making is one of the most environmentally destructive things we do. I still buy paper books, but only used. New books for me are all in electronic format.

@20>> Check out Feedbook|Mobile. Their freebies are much better formatted for Kindle than Gutenberg's.

I have a NOOK, I do like the fact that my thumbs don't get tired holding a mass market open.
I do like the space I save. I like the permission it gives me to go to the library bookstore and buy 36 books for 15.00. :)
Nothing beats the smell of a musty used book.

I do hope e readers will give authors more access to the public.

#23, I second the recommendation for FeedBooks. The formatting is very easy to read. Since my husband bought my Nook last summer, I have been about half and half reading paper vs. ebook. I will say his motives were very clear: we have no more walls for bookshelves. Not that that has stopped me :)

And then there's Vook:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=3042

26: Funny rant! I can see why a how-to book with video would be useful. Using video to make lazy people appreciate literature, not so much. (That's what movies are for. Geez.)

Oh, about the Nook. It is nice and I have a lot of classic books on it that have been very fun to read. However. I just purchased a book, Mark Twain's autobiography, thinking yay, I saved some moola. Well, first of all it does not have chapter headings for the individual essays so you cannot just open to a particular essay but have to remember what page it's on. Second, he had a funny essay about German compound words and the thing did not hyphenate it so the word was cut off.

I've already decided that the free books, which are often filled with weird typos and funny characters in the place of apostrophes etc., are OK this way because after all they are free. But I paid for this Twain thing, shouldn't it be error-free and easy to navigate just like a real book that I can open up to a certain chapter?

So I have some complaints but by and large it is neat to have yet another way to acquire and read books. I love how it is light and that it has Soduku and Chess.

FYI for kindle users: if you use Project Gutenberg to get free books, it's better to get their generic txt file and convert it using calibre than to get their "kindle ready" versions. Having your entire table of contents come out as block text really defeats the purpose.

And Feedbook doesn't seem to have the selection that Gutenberg does.

been very pleased with the Kindles all three of us now own. I very much like the physical ease of reading...changing font size as needed, the extracting highlights onto your pc, the vast # of freebies, the LONG battery life, e-ink. The free download if the first chapters of most anything; no need to find shelf space. We got Adam the 3G+wifi model as he spends hours each week on public transport and he's very much taken w/ being able to download while on his busrides. The led booklight/nighlight..works v. well for wandering around the house in the dark.

The down...the dangerous ease if impulse buying; trying to stay firm vis a vis my resolve to buy atlases/graphic novels etc from local bookstores.

Haven't tried the new "loan" feature since all 3 of us are on the same account.

@29> I agree Feedbooks doesn't have everything that Gutenberg does, but still, it's worth checking Feedbooks out first to see if they do have it because their formatting is the best of all.

With Netflix's campaign to offer only streaming, how will this effect other media like CDs and books? I'm still a big skeptic about the Singularity -- along with the End Days, more hype and hysteria than actual substance -- but I do enjoy the portability and uniqueness of a book or a CD as opposed to a single device that gives you everything. Will there be a day when we get EVERYTHING via an iPhone-like device? Time to call up our modern Oracle, William Gibson, since he seems to have a prescient take on things that usually get swept away by Futurist techno-boosterism (they come across as Digital Babbitts to me).

28> Yes, the quality of commercial e-books is often appalling. I paid £9 for Ulysses (Penguin digital edition) and the book is so full of OCR errors I had to give up and read a free version instead. Which also has errors, but not as many. The formatting of the Penguin book is nice, which is extremely rare, but what good is it if I can never know, when reading a word I don't recognize, whether I'm reading what Joyce wrote or what a stupid character recognition software invented (and no human proofreader corrected).

I can imagine that Joyce is a hard one to proofread, but if they can do it for a printed book, you'd think they can do it for an electronic one too.

Amazon sells more e-books than paperbacks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12305015

Should I point out that, as usual, there is no indication as to how many of these "sales" were free, or how many paperbacks Amazon actually sells, in gross numbers?

When compared to industry-wide data, what these repeated claims from Amazon actually demonstrate is that Amazon is selling few hardcopy books.

"Three month net sales passed $10bn for the first time, up 36% to $12.95bn, but analysts had predicted a higher figure."

Those look like pretty durn good numbers to me, A.J. Gross or otherwise. Nearly 13 billion in one quarter? Shee-it...

Three month net sales of everything Amazon sells, including items sold through websites owned by Amazon under other brands. This means what, precisely, in terms of how many paperbacks Amazon actually sells?

The industry-wide figures for e-book sales are dwarfed by hardcopy sales, Cliff. That's a fact. We also know that Amazon has a history of including free downloads in their "sales" of e-books to inflate the numbers. Treat all Kindle claims from Amazon as suspect.

I bought myself a Kindle after Christmas and I have about 200 books on it - all of them from Public Domain. I have yet to pay for an eBook. I'm really enjoying catching up on Classics that I've never got round to buying or borrowing in paper format and reading oddities found while browsing Project Gutenberg and similar.

Another sign o' the times:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/05/19/technology-ebooks-amazon-kind...

What was that line about "don't believe the hype".

Over at the literary saloon this post examines book production numbers in the U.S. for 2010.

Some tidbits:

...despite the popularity of e-books, traditional U.S. print title output in 2010 increased 5%. Output of new titles and editions increased from 302,410 in 2009 to a projected 316,480 in 2010. The 5% increase comes on the heels of a 4% increase the previous year based on the final 2008-2009 figures.

"The non-traditional sector continues its explosive growth, increasing 169% from 1,033,065 in 2009 to an amazing 2,776,260 in 2010. These books, marketed almost exclusively on the web, are largely on-demand titles produced by reprint houses specializing in public domain works and by presses catering to self-publishers and "micro-niche" publications." (emphasis added)

Largely self-published and public domain works, eh? Suddenly 169% growth looks more like a punchline than a serious threat to print.

Books in the Age of Distraction:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to...

(Gord scores again)

I dont' feel very motivated to get an e-Reader. I prefer to put my fingers on the pages. It makes me feel closer to touching the wrinkles of the writer's brain than an electronic glow can.

I've not read all these posts, so my apologies if I'm repeating something already noted. However, in the past month, I've heard two inteviews on NPR that cause one pause.

The first was with someone who was trying to recover and document for posterity the twitter traffice related to the popular revolt in Egypt. Their medium of choice to ensure future generations would have access to this monumental event? The printed-on-paper book. Everthing else, said the archivist, was transient.

The second was the founder of The Internet Archive (sorry, too lazy to look up his name), who has begun working on a harcopy book archive (to be housed in multiple locations to prevent catastrophic loss) because he doesn't trust our ability to preserve for posterity such documents via electronic means. As I recall, he stated this was partly because the ability to recover the electronic file 20 years from now was questionable, and partly because the electronic form is too subject to what I would call the equivalent of photoshopping; that is, combining scans from more than one copy (perhaps more than one edition) of a work to get the 'perfect' image, thus losing an accurate record of an actual book.

These two stories reminded me of a study by the Library of Congress into long-term audio archive options. They decided on 78 RPM records! The reason - we now have material for such a recording that would last almost forever and they can be played back almost independent of technology. All you need is a needle, a megaphone, and a turntable you can spin at a fairly constant rate (by hand, by crank, by motor...whatever).

If the e-book eliminates the paper book, we'll all be the losers eventually.

Os.

The latest e-reader ownership stats:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/ereader-adoption-hits-12-in-u-s-says-pew-re...

A workmate of mine sent me this when I got my (oh so shiny) iPad:

"5 reasons why e-books aren't there yet" - http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/06/06/ebook.reasons.wired/index.html

I have to agree with most of the points made. Although I do have to say that I make notes much more willingly and easily in my iPad (just a few taps here and there) than in a dead tree edition (find a 2B pencil, think HARD about "defacing" my book, then write in it).

I can't write notes in books. Mum yelled at my sister and I once for destroying one of her books as small children and I can barely even write my name in pencil at the front of a book now before loaning it out. Thank heavens for post-it notes, I can stick those all over the place with a guilt-free conscience, but it still takes effort to find one and a pen...

On the bus, most people are still reading dead tree editions. But there's usually at least one person on a bus reading an eBook. I'm mostly reading dead tree editions still, but I'm finding the iPad terribly convenient as an eReader in many ways.

I love the fact that the ereader is light. I can download huge collections on it and I don't need to carry heavy books. I am currently reading a huge collection of Mark Twain's writings. I also downloaded all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

Here in Portland I notice about three or four people in the bus with me reading ereaders.

However when I get home the ereader is for Sudoku. I still prefer the feel of real books, and there's no weird gobbledygook characters where a quotation mark should be :).

Am I the only one who cringes at "dead tree books"? There's gotta be a better way of differentiating between the e-readers and books that happen to come from trees.

Real. Like real life as opposed to the Internet.

E-readers are bad for your health. Apparently.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30574260

Well, sort of. Going to bed with anything that is the equivalent of a night light of the blue-tinted, back-lit variety, appears to be the problem. That article says that "Original Kindle readers do not emit light so should be fine..." Cell phones are just as bad as e-readers, perhaps worse.

I'm very glad that they point out that blue wave light is the culprit. Nice, warm, incandescent night lights for children that need the comfort are still good.

Thanks for the article. Nice to know I can be good at something without even trying. I'm a professional sleeper, expert rating. ;-}

One for the "It's all on the Internet" brigade:

"No one but he who has the time to collect them (the facts), can have any notion of the extreme difficulty which is occasionally experienced in obtaining a correct knowledge of the slightest matter. We have frequently found in the course of our labours, that out of five or six accounts already published of a subject, not one was correct; and we have spent days in search of a little information, which we previously supposed was known to everyone concerned with it, and yet, to our surprise, no one could furnish it..." (E.C. & W. Osborne, in the preface to "Osborne's guide to the Grand Junction Railway", 1838)."

Quoted in a book I bought today, Brian Reed's account of the origins of the railway over Shap Fell in Cumbria, Crewe to Carlisle, itself dating from 1969 and (AFAIK) not reprinted since...