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Feb 24 / Ozymandias

The E-book Dilemma – or – Kindle: The End of Days?

[Edit: added Kindle 2 picture – just because.]

image

I find myself in an interesting quandary.

I’ve always been a huge reading fan since I was a kid, and although it’s harder to find the time I need to read everything I want, I still work at it. I love everything about books – the way they feel and smell, the tactile aspect of flipping a page, and the magic of being transported away by an engaging story. Yet I also love Amazon’s Kindle, and the promise of electronic books. I purposely held off from purchasing the first version, but the second one is on its way to me as we speak. I’m looking forward to reading off that beautiful e-ink screen, and being able to download books anywhere and at anytime. And I love the idea of being able to travel with as many books as I want, and not have to haul them all over the globe.

What I struggle with is whether I want to collect my future books electronically or physically. I love having bookshelves full of books that I’ve read. In some ways it’s a combination of memories of good times had, and a projection of my personality and likes that anyone can peruse when they come over. I like to think that by owning a physical book I can reread it at any point in the future, or lend it out to a friend.

That said, I also look back at how many books I’ve given away or sold (never discarded!) just because of their bulk. Many I’d love to reread one day, but I’ll have to purchase new copies. And realistically, even if I had kept every single one of those books, I would never be able to reread them all – not with all the new material I also want to consume. So the idea of keeping all those books around for my future use is a bit of a fallacy.

So here I remain, in literary purgatory, unable to decide whether to (primarily) purchase physical or electronic copies of books. The one thing I keep coming back to is that electronic books take no space, and it’s a lot more realistic to imagine rereading a copy that I can keep in a virtual library.

<sigh>

For what it’s worth, I’m very aware of the disadvantages of DRM on e-books, and am assuming that I can protect my personal, purchased copies in ways that’ll let me use them on whatever device I wish in the future.

Related posts:

  1. Two Weeks with Kindle
  2. XKCD on the Kindle
  3. A Better Kindle 2 Cover

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  • Roland

    I’m a frequent reader of an Adobe InDesign blog where they recently posted about InDesign’s abilities regarding ebooks.

    My response there, although off-topic, was that I can’t justify paying $350 for a reader plus $10 per book if I can buy a brand new book for $7 a piece, with the physical "versions" being there for the rest of time or good gifts for friends or hospitals and other good causes.

    I do agree there are quite a few advantages to ebooks (storing them, portability, etc.) but until roll-up e-ink screens are affordable I’ll hold off, as I want to take the reader everywhere, and the Kindle just doesn’t fit in a jeans pocket.

  • http://www.beltonmo.net Porktree

    The ‘Amazon’ guy was on The Daily Show last night. John Stewart made good points about the price of the Kindle, the price of books, etc etc, you should watch the re-run tonight if you didn’t catch it. I like the idea of the Kindle, I don’t like the way Amazon is handling it. And I use my local Library way to much to get a lot of use from a Kindle. But I still want one.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    Price is an interesting point. I’m lucky in that it wasn’t that big a consideration, but I admit that Amazon definitely isn’t selling as many Kindles as they could if they sold for $200 or so. That said, they’re still selling every one they can make, so they might as well keep the price fixed for now.

    I guess my musing above is more relevant in a world where ebook readers are truly sold on a razor/razor blade model. What format do you purchase? 100 years from now will we still print books? I really don’t know.

    The decline of print newspapers may be an early indicator. I do think there will be demand for professionally created news; the question is how people will read it. On the web is one answer, but then one wonders what the device is that is used. I’ve seen suggestions that some papers should consider just going digital, but giving a Kindle (or equivalent) e-reader to subscribers… drop the price a bit and it seems pretty reasonable IMO.

  • http://devioustree.co.uk/ Tom Drummond

    There’s a possibility that book publishers might go a similar way to some small indie music labels. Buy the physical copy and get the electronic copy with it. Indeed, Pragmatic Programmers (http://www.pragprog.com/) allows you to buy a hard copy + PDF version of many of their books (costs extra) and you get to read "betas" of the digital copies months before the book is finished.

  • http://www.coffeerama.com coffee

    Kindle’s appearance is certainly reminiscent of Apple products

  • Peter

    André, you might be amused at today’s XKCD… I saw it and had a good laugh: http://xkcd.com/548/.

    I picked up the Sony reader a year or so ago and quite like it. The display is very nice, but I do wish I had wireless access on it. The screen painting is also a little slow for my tastes. Still, I find it useful as a way to carry around books that would be physically too much of a pain to lug around. An e-book version of the Origin of Species is much easier to read while traveling than the paper copy. One drawback I’ve found though: it’s hard to read something when people keep asking you what that thing is you’re reading from!

    I don’t think these things are going to replace paper books, frankly. For many things, paper books make much more sense or are just much more pleasant to hold and read. I mainly use mine for books I would never want to have in paper form (manuals, for instance, or books that are just too darned big to lug around).

    The decline in physical newspapers is a slightly different issue, by the way (at least as I see it). I can think of two factors: Craigslist has rather famously sliced the legs right out from underneath the papers by making the classifieds largely obsolete, and newsprint is a pain in the butt do deal with. Seriously, who wants to wrestle with a gigantic piece of paper, have those inserts go flying out all over the place, and get that ink all over your hands? It’s even worse when the paper has been sitting out in the rain for a couple of hours. For me, the physical act of reading the paper is annoying and filthy. No thanks! Now, getting the "paper" on my Sony or on the Kindle… that might be worth paying for.

  • WiNG

    The feeling of a real book is just not possible to compare to the kindle and I believe that will keep books alive alone for still many years from now.

    I do not see the real benefits of traveling with 300+ books on an e-reader with you everywhere either. I mean, if I am going to travel outside for a week or so I might have time to read a short full book, not 5 or 10 and no way near 300. Aiming for that seems to me more of pokemon-like consumism of "gotta catch them all" than love for reading.

    -"Hey, look! I have a new version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, now with Oprah’s comment on the text, on my Kindle 3!"-

    -"That’s sh*t man! My Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, with scanned colour hardcovers, on my Sony Readerstation 4 can beat it with hands down!"-

    That’s… just… wrong.

    Of course that there are certain advantages to electronic readers, and it is true that reding on e-ink is wonderful compared to a computer screen but, until I can insert a pagemarker through the SD card slot to remember in which chapter I was, the feeling with the real thing is just not comparable… yet.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    One, to be clear I completely agree about the tactile value of physical books. That’s something I would miss. I would push back a bit on traveling with multiple books, though. When I travel for business I am often on multiple 10-14 hour flights, and given a choice between random crappy movie of the week or my own literature I’ll always read. I kid you not – if I go to Europe for 7-10 days, I take literally 8-10 paperbacks along, and finish them all. In the past I try to take used copies of books so I can just leave them behind on planes or in hotels for someone else to read… but I really am looking forward to hauling around the single Kindle. :)

    To Peter’s point, I really do think there’s an opportunity for newspapers to migrate to digital readers… I don’t remember the percentages, but a huge chunk of the daily cost of producing a paper is tied up in printing presses, paper, labor, ink, distribution, etc. How many people would be willing to commit to a subscription of a newspaper delivered digitally on something like the Kindle?

  • Alex Atkin UK

    I actually was suffering the e-Reader dilemma myself last month.

    I want one for programming books, as there is no point owning them in print when the data they hold becomes dated. Its also a pain trying to keep the page open to follow instructions in tutorials and even having a PDF open on the same computer, is not all that convenient.

    The problem with all this is the Sony reader I was looking at is simply too small for programming books. The screen is about half the size of your average programming book so I decided it probably just would not work sufficiently. The contrast too is not ideal yet on e-Ink, it has some maturing to do.

    Once an A4 or Letter sized version comes out at a decent price (and I mean screen size not reader size) then it things will get serious. Even better if colour e-Ink is out by then as I also fancy using it for magazine subscriptions. As a subscriber of Linux Format for example I get free PDF versions of their old articles, would be useful so I could recycle the magazines and just keep the PDFs on a reader.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    Just got my Kindle – charging now. Feels really nice!

    @Alex: Check out Plastic Logic’s upcoming e-ink reader. They’re doing a larger, flexible sheet and likely aiming at the text book and newspaper market. I think this might be a great newspaper solution. Here’s a link from Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/…/plastic-logic-f

  • Alex Atkin UK

    But yet again, the whole reader is A4 NOT the screen. That means A4 documents still come out smaller.

    I really think until the screens either fill the entire device, or they make the device that little bit bigger so the SCREEN can be full A4, it won’t hit mainstream. At least not for office use which is exactly what the larger readers are being aimed at.

    Thing is, the second thing I would like to use it for is printouts. Instead of wasting paper just it to PDF onto an e-Reader. It would even be useful to previewing my CV to see if it looks alright before printing it. That again means the screen has to be exactly the right size so it will be comparable to the paper printout.

    I’m sure its coming, its just a matter of time like with any technology. But the first device to offer this functionality is likely to cost an arm and a leg.

    Just look at the iRex 1000, it has a 10.2 inch screen claiming to make A4 pages viewable. But that’s still just over 4 inches smaller than an A4 page and costs a fortune. You would think they would be aiming for ACTUAL A4 on that device as its aiming as an office printer replacement. I would also argue the dpi is a bit low. To really make it feel as comfortable as reading an actual printout or newspaper you need to match the dpi of a newspaper, which means a dpi about double what e-Ink is today.

    We don’t need 300dpi, but 150dpi is not unreasonable. My mobile phone funnily enough is 320dpi, its totally overkill for a 3 inch screen, but it does almost negate the need for anti-alising. I had it for weeks before I noticed cleartype was turned off. ;-)

  • Alex Atkin UK

    For the record I realise that newspapers probably aren’t technically 150dpi, but e-Ink like newspapers currently has to use halftoning/dithering to simulate greater shades of grey.

    If your pixels are small enough, you can fool your eye into thinking there are more shades so 150dpi is a good value to render a 75dpi document with more than the 8 shades of grey e-Ink is currently limited with. Yes 300dpi would be amazing, but I can’t see it happening as most PC monitors still are less than 100dpi.

    And again its not always that simple. For example e-Ink may have more than one physical dot to a single pixel of information, so it may already have dithering within a single pixel (in fact I would be amazed if that is not exactly how the greys are generated) which is why making it display a higher dpi is tricky, as the sub-dots are already tiny to render a single visible dot.

    Just wanted to throw that out there before someone told me I wasn’t looking at the big picture of the technical restrictions.

  • Alex Atkin UK

    Ooops, perhaps I am an idiot. I just realised that Plasic Logic unit IS meant to be Letter display size not reader size. Interesting.

  • http://www.skibit.org/ Skibit

    Physical books will last as long as there are individuals who will romanticise their value. When there is a generation raised on digital media, with little or no physical books during their upbringing, then the death of the book in ins physical will have begun.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    @Skibit: You posit an interesting stake for discussion. And the funny thing is that I can’t figure out if I agree with you or not. :) I do agree that new technologies come along and supplant the old. Generally a better way of doing things becomes the norm. What I struggle with is whether the advantages of physical books are robust enough to survive this technological change. I could argue either way. In the medium term (20-30 years) I think there will be a blend; what I’m really curious about is what things look like 100 years from now. Unlikely to find out, though!

  • http://wingwpress.wordpress.com/ WiNG

    We can surely agree that the CD industry replaced the old vinyl one. We are also on an era when (theoretically) downloadable music is replacing CD as well. However, have you noticed how many people these days still go to vinyl market fairs or stores? And I am not talking about 40 or 50-year-old people but guys on their 20s or early 30s. There is a rather strong feeling out there that vinyls simply sound better (despite CDs claiming to have better sound since more than thirty years ago) and quite a few labels have started to release new discs on vinyl format again.

    Surely the CD has replaced vinyl, but vinyl is not dead either. The first electrically recorded vinyl dates from 1925 and the format is still there. According to wikipedia, vinyl sales have been incrasing uninterruptedly since 2005, achieving a 200% increase from 2007 to 2008… not bad for a dead format that was invented not even a hundred years ago. Even if the extrapolation of this towards the Book/Kindle topic is somewhat fallacious, are we sure we can rule out books as a dead format in the near future, or even in this century, considering they have been with us since the written word was invented?