TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

His argue for e-books being ’soulless’ because they lack physicality is silly. Media containers are not the media themselves. Is a film the DVD it comes on? Is music the CD? Of course not. Neither is a PDF, mobi, or a print copy a book.

Essentially, he’s saying that the media container, the paper book, is what has the soul, which is silly. It’s just more reactionary fear from a techno-hater.

The same antiquated argument was made about music when the radio came along. “Radio will ruin music because music is supposed to be listened to live, in concert” they argued.

It seems like each time a new technology comes along, their are always people who will fight it, saying the new technology will ruin everything. Andrew Keen is just re-hashing this old argument using ebooks as the scapegoat for ruining literature.

I think it is just the other way around. With the current primitive ebook formats, all there is and all that counts is the bare text. No fancy embossed cover, no gold foil title, expensive cover or fancy artwork. Just text… which puts all the emphasis on the writing and makes good authors shine.

… so library books i’ve read and returned, and that only exist in my mind are soulless?

come on. so *reading* and *having physical, printed books* no longer have to be galvanized. both are excellent. now we can talk seriously about which is more important. (obviously i have formed an opinion about this.)

mr. keen just finds change upsetting, i think. “eee. the sky is falling…” or he’s just an idiot. some people are, i hear.

I agree with all the above but find it inconclusive. Some of the distinctive attributes of paper and screen come into play as library aggregates. Here the distinctive self-authentication attributes of paper complement the self-indexing attributes of screen delivery. The interdependence of these attributes is only now getting defined, especially in the Google settlement and in academic debate where the paper and screen copies of the same title are just not equivalent.

That said, other attributes of print still matter. These include advantages of legibility where legibility is immediacy of meaning, haptic prompt navigation and persistence. I can suggest these attributes with examples.

Immediacy of meaning: I use a large book /Empires of the Atlantic World/ in both print and ebook. I look up “Boston” on Kindle and get 248 instances of the word. I look up “Boston” in the print index and get 4 contexts for the word such as port economy, slave population or massacre. E is good at syntax, paper good at semantics.

Navigation: there is a whole range of haptic prompts from paper book manipulations. For example try comparing a single concept as presented in three or four different books….on a Kindle. Or try to translate the Boston search from print pagination to Kindle location. Or imagine doubling page navigations in E when paper presents two for one. A lot of the haptic prompts in paper are invisible like the fingers acting as cursors.

Persistence: for reliable transmission across time papyrus and carbon ink is a more advanced technology than computer media. Gnostic Gospels were found and they were instantly readable 16 centuries after they were put in a jar. Don’t try this with computer media or try to calculate long-term costs for digital persistence over even decades.

Books and paper are a very mature technology. We’ve been used to handling them as part of our daily lives for centuries.

Ebooks and the technologies we use to display them are in their infancy. While many of us have been using this digital tech daily for a couple of decades a vast majority of the world population still does not have much exposure to, or need for, the display and propagation of digital “stuff” – books in particular.

Gary mentions the differences between searching for “Boston” on his Kindle vis a vis the index of the printed version. One tends to overwhelm with its literal interpretation of the search (oddly I only get 86 hits for “Boston” rather than Gary’s 248 hits) whereas the print version only provides 4. The printed versions index makes some assumptions that the reader is likely looking for info on Boston as it relates to a few “likely” topic areas – port economy, slave population, massacre. That’s great if that really does match what you were looking for. Not so useful though if you were looking for something different than the editorial choices the printed book gives you.

In the digital version of the book he mentions you can easily refine your search so that rather than just looking for “Boston” you could look for “Boston massacre”. Doing that search on my Kindle version of the book shows 5 hits for “Boston Massacre” and returns the list of choices with the search terms highlighted and the sentence or two around the search terms so one can read the search result in context. To me, this is much more useful. The printed index may have an index listing for “Boston Massacre” but how many pages does the printed version refer you to and how quickly can you flip to and fro to gather the context of those index “hits”?

While the current Kindle does not offer very advanced search syntax this will change as the technology continues to mature. Being able to use Boolean, wildcards, WITHIN and other more advanced syntax elements will come in the not too distant future.

Finding a page location from the print version in the Kindle version is easy – multiple keywords (a sentence fragment) will take you right there. In the printed book form page numbers vary from edition to edition or format. Do scrolls have “page” numbers? How easy is it to go from “page” to “page” in a scroll? Is that part of the reason scrolls are no longer widely used (an obsolete book technology as it were)?

Navigation on current digital devices can be cumbersome. However, is that due to the current level of the technology – screen sizes, screen resolutions, low “horsepower” CPU’s, crappy operating system, etc? Or, is it just likely that the tech will never match the ability of a paper book?

I have no idea what the future holds but I think it is safe to believe that the technology will one day be everything we want it to be.

It is very cool that we still have and can read many books from past millenia. But how much knowledge has been lost due to the fragility of papyrus and paper? How many ancient libraries were burned to the ground? How many cultures have had their entire written existence turned to ash?

The long term preservation of digital stuff does pose a challenge. But separate the content from the media on which copies of it may be stored. The media will change as we already know from our short experience with digital stuff. As we move away from always having to get/distribute digital stuff via various types of hardware (floppies, CD’s, thumb drives, etc.) and rely on our stuff being held in multiple data depots in multiple locations and delivered to use via the net (wired or wirelessly)the media problem disappears.

Have we not already learned that the use of open formats is necessary to help our digital culture extend it’s lifetime. As our experience and use of digital stuff matures the longevity of the digital stuff itself will not likely pose a problem for items contained in universal formats (long live ASCII).

Those Gnostic Gospels survived sealed in those clay jars for many centuries and left undisturbed may have lasted a few more. However,once those jars were opened and the contents exposed to our current atmosphere and its pollution they would have soon become nothing more than dust if not for the great expenditure of money and manpower and technology to try and ensure their ongoing survival. In what form are those Gospels likely to be viewed a thousand years from now? Digital probably.

Content, not physical form, is what matters. Duh.