https://buy-zithromax.online buy kamagra usa https://antibiotics.top buy stromectol online https://deutschland-doxycycline.com https://ivermectin-apotheke.com kaufen cialis https://2-pharmaceuticals.com buy antibiotics online Online Pharmacy vermectin apotheke buy stromectol europe buy zithromax online https://kaufen-cialis.com levitra usa https://stromectol-apotheke.com buy doxycycline online https://buy-ivermectin.online https://stromectol-europe.com stromectol apotheke https://buyamoxil24x7.online deutschland doxycycline https://buy-stromectol.online https://doxycycline365.online https://levitra-usa.com buy ivermectin online buy amoxil online https://buykamagrausa.net

Books and eBooks

Books are more than just their data.

Read an interesting article this morning by Tim Challies on 5 Reasons Books Are Better Than E-Books.  Since I’ve ranted and raved on the subject in the past — even as I keep toying with the idea — I thought it worth commenting on.  Here are his reasons, and my thoughts on them:

1. I can truly own a book

Challies frames this two ways.  The first is the most obvious, and the one I keep circling back to — the model of “ownership” in much of the eBook world (taking Amazon and its Kindle as the exemplar here) is more of a “license” than tangible possession of an object.  Between DRM and hosted services and the like, Challies notes that book ownership in the electronic realm is a very different beast than what we have with physical books.

But he raises an aspect of “ownership” that I’d not considered before (which is really what got me to write about this), and  this is our relationship to the physical things around us, especially books.

[Mortimer] Adler says that full ownership comes only as you make the book a part of yourself and this is done by interacting and engaging with it. You will know a book that is truly owned because it will be “dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back.” If I look at your e-book copy of The Holiness of God I will not know whether you have read it once or 1,000 times. If you look at my physical copy, you will know immediately. You will know because of the bent pages, the highlighted sections, the notes, the scribbles, the circles. The spine is loose, the pages are dog-eared. It shows all the marks of age and use. You will know that I have read the book, you will know what it has meant to me, you will know that it has impacted my life. Very little of this can be communicated in an e-book. If I am left with a lesser kind of ownership, won’t I then also be left with a lesser kind of ownership of the book’s contents, of its ideas?

This strikes home because I do treat the physical copies of books as an extension of me.  I make a point of putting my name in them, noting when I read them. I bookmark them with turned corners (well, paperbacks at least) and bookmark possible quotes or things I want to look up later with turned lower corners.  If they are a book I am using for some purpose, yes, I don’t hesitate to write in them, highlight them, etc.

This is, perhaps, just a conceptual conceit, a tradition that can be discarded with little loss.  Is my music lessened by no longer having the CDs (or even the 33 albums) on a shelf, the commonly used ones showing wear, maybe a tick on the cover next to a popular track?  Now that all music is in MP3 players / iTunes / etc., is it somehow less mine, somehow just another “file”?

Books are different from music in many ways, but how good is the analogy?  We may not appreciate what we’ve lost in ten, twenty, thirty years,  but will we have actually lost something?

A quick story before I move on: Some time ago I was at a library where I saw a book written by an old, old author. That book had been owned by two great theologians, first by one and then by another (who had purchased much of that first man’s library). Contained in the book were notes and remarks by those theologians, one remarking on the work itself and the other reflecting both on the work and on the other theologian’s notations. It was fascinating to see how different people had experienced that book, how it had become interactive in its own way. That is not easily reproduced in an e-book format.

Yeah, a log showing that X accessed a book file at one point won’t be quite as meaningful.

2. I can loan a book.

This point (and most of the others) have direct ties into the first point. There’s both the technical issue (DRM prevents letting me from loaning a book to someone), and there’s an existential issue (making a copy of a file and electronically transferring it to someone is simply not the same as putting a book aside to share with a friend, of handing the book to them, of having them (hopefully) return the book with a smile and a comment.

Of course, no more worrying about folks not returning books, or not remember to whom you loaned a book, etc.  But, still …

3. A book offers an experience.

This is the tactile,  existential element again.  A book is real.  It has weight, texture, smell, appearance.

An e-book reduces a book to just its words, it strips out any sort of tactile experience, and makes turning a page that same experience as playing a video game or shuffling music. It makes a book a whole lot less than it ought to be.

I may have an image of a lovely painting on my computer, but that’s nowhere near the same as having an actual physical print of that painting — let alone the real thing.

4. A book is a single-tasking device.

I.e., it doesn’t tempt you with email or Twittering, it doesn’t browse the Internet.  It doesn’t act as an alarm clock or RSS reader.  Whether we’re talking an eReader that has some online abilities, or an iPad that’s a tablet computer that you can read on, electronic devices for reading are not, purely, about reading.

A book is a book.  It lets you read. That’s all it does, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

5. I can buy a used book.

This circles back to #1 and #2.  Not only are there technical and licensing issues involved in dealing with resales of eBooks, but …

E-books are never used, even when they have been read. They are still just files, as unblemished after ten years as they were the day they were duplicated. They will never go down in price, they will never suddenly appear as hidden treasures, dug out of a box in an old, rundown book store. They can never be loaned out and they can never be resold. They are forever new, forever fresh, forever unused and unstained. There will be no rare first editions, no beautiful special editions to be searched for decades from now. The used book will become a vestige of the past.

Is this a “buggy whip” issue?  Hard for me to say from my perspective.  I think it’s something that’s a loss,  but that won’t be recognized as a loss in a generation or three.

Though, of course, used book stores won’t simply vanish tomorrow, any more than the real books will vanish.  Penetration of eBooks is still fairly shallow, though the pool of readers in this world seems to be getting fairly shallow, too.

So when all is said and done …

I still remain conceptually on the fence with eBooks, at least from that whole experiential / existential perspective.  I love the physicality of books, but am painfully aware of the inconvenience they bring.  There are increasingly more times when I consider that having an eBook reader — let’s just say a Kindle — would be highly, highly convenient.  At the same time, those technical issues regarding ownership continue to loom large and keep me out of the business.

I suspect that one of two things will eventually happen:

  1. Margie will decide she’s tired of me talking about it and will buy me one for my birthday.
  2. My brain will decide one day that, yes, I really do want a Kindle, and I’ll buy one.

And then we’ll see how that goes.

But … not today.

92 view(s)  

4 thoughts on “Books and eBooks”

  1. I refuse to mangle my books. Looking at the paperbacks on my shelf, you would not know that most of them have been read (the exceptions tend to be those that were bought used). I did annotate gaming manuals (you should see my old DM Guide), but it’s been decades since I have had cause to do that.

    These days, the only markings in my books are authors’ autographs. 🙂

  2. Well, it’s not necessary, as the book is no longer an object that can be adorned but simply text and formatting data. You’d either have the author autograph your eReader, or else have an autograph book.

  3. I see the points made, but I gotta say that since I got my Nook, I don’t miss books. Not that I want musty old libraries or used books stores to disappear anytime soon, but I’ve done so much more actual reading in the last 8 months than I’ve done in the last 8 years.

    And if you’re going for a reader, don’t neglect the Nook. For one thing, you can loan books to others with a Nook (though the publishers that allow this makes it a much smaller number than it should be). But there’s also a bajillion other reasons the Nook beats the Kindle, including the fact that it’s got more books, can read more file types, runs on Android OS, and you can change the fricking battery! Not to mention little things like pagination…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *