It's coming, like it or not.
Apr 14 '00 (Updated Apr 23 '00)
I'll go on record right now by saying that I don't particularly like e-books. I am a reader and have been since I was 4 years old. I love books. A beautifully illustrated hardback, a dog-eared beat up paperback-- both of these are familiar friends from long ago, comforting presences. Despite the fact that I also love my computer, and spend more time in front of a monitor than turning pages, marrying the two doesn't work for me. Nevertheless, e-books are as inevitable as death and taxes. they are going to be big for a lot of reasons, but will not displace traditional print media.
Why E-books are Here to Stay:
1. Goodbye Printers
Authors traditionally are paid around 5% on the sales of their books. Because of the extremely low overhead involved with producing them, authors stand to make 20% or better on their works. One article I have read mentioned royalties as high as 50%! At a possible ten times the payout, authors are sure to go for this once e-books become popular enough. No printing costs at all means more money for the publishers as well. In fact the only folks losing out monetarily are the printers themselves.
Another incidental advantage e-books has is that they can easily be reedited. Print errors, once on paper, require entire new print runs, including resetting typing and sometimes in extreme cases, destroying books already printed. For instance, I am reading a book right now that includes a character named Josua. I have seen this name "corrected" to Joshua in dozens of places. A small error no doubt, but one that will certainly not be corrected due to cost constraints. In an E-book, these corrections could be made in minutes.
2. Storage
One look at my parents' basement is a convincing argument for e-Books. 80% of the books I own are stacked up on shelves and in boxes because I simply don't have room for the archives I've amassed. Yet, I have enough space on my hard drive for a good portion, if not all of these books.
A corollary to this advantage is portability. While a laptop is nowhere near as portable as a book, it's far more portable than the entire set of Encyclopedia Brittanica.
3. Searching
Without a good memory, it can be awful difficult to find a particular quote in a book, yet if you have an e-book, the search function can make this a matter of a few keystrokes, rather than endless page-flipping. For research, this beats any kind of index a print version can offer, so scholars are sure to make use of this.
4. Immediacy
Face it. Even though Amazon.com can deliver a book to your door, you still have to wait a couple of days minimum for it to show up. With e-books, the thing can be there within minutes of your order. The only wait you have to endure is the download.
5. Permanence
Buying an e-book means buying a book that will never tear, your toddler can't chew on, and whose pages won't fall out. Most licensing agreements will allow you to register as the owner of an e-book and re-download it if something like a virus or hard drive crash befalls you.
6. Public Domain
There is an enormous amount of literature out there that nobody owns the publishing rights to, from Twain to Dickens to Homer. When you buy these books, the publishers pocket the portion that ordinarily goes to the authors. A number of sites, like netlibrary.com, offer these public domain books for free download to entice users to visit their site and hopefully buy some other works.
Why Print Books are Here to Stay:
1. Familiarity
People like getting new things-- That's not the same as getting rid of the old ones however. I will never enjoy an e-book in the same way that I do a tattered paperback. No matter how good the format or readers get, they won't be the same. Part of me will always yearn for that musty old smell, or the sound and feel of cracking a new book open for the first time. Double-clicking an icon just isn't the same.
2. Borrowing
E-books are protected against unauthorized duplication, or at least they are supposed to be. Sooner or later this protection will be defeated, and new protection schemes will be enacted. Such is the way of the digital world. However, if you aren't a hacker, or willing to go looking for software cracks, the e-book lives on your computer, and there it stays. "Hey, can I read that when you're done?" will be a resounding "No" if you are asking to borrow someone's laptop to do the reading. As far as cleaning out your shelves for a garage sale or donating old books to the local library, forget it.
3. Access While you have instant delivery, access to your book isn't always so simple. For one thing, many folks out there don't own a computer at all yet, and others have to share their machines with other family members. If big brother is playing a six hour Quake session, you don't read. Similarly, if you have only a desktop, you aren't taking that book to the beach, the bedroom, or on that long car ride.
4. Easter
By this I mean: "having all your eggs in one basket." Think about the possibility of losing all your books, gone in one power surge? Sure, you may be able to get them back eventually, but only after spending hours and hours downloading them. And if you've forgotten where you purchased them? Or you weren't smart enough to check out the replacement terms and do have to pay a fee to get them again? Ouch. Sure, a fire could do the same thing to a normal library, but how many times have you lost computer data compared to how many fires you've had? Besides which, a fire doesn't do a computer much good either, nor the fire hoses.
5. Mature Format
While the book is a simple, workable presentation of the written word, e-books still have clunky interfaces and incompatible software versions. While this may change in the future, it's by no means certain that a standard format will ever be arrived at. Witness the number of competing formats for audio, video, and picture files that coexist on the internet today. Reading a computer screen is hit and miss. Sometimes to make the print legible, you have to make the page too large to fit on the screen, necessitating scrolling around with every page you read. Add to that the fact that current formats (like .pdf files) handle pictures very poorly, and you can see that the experience of reading a computer screen is far less pleasing than reading an actual page.
6. Specialty Books
There are some things an e-book just can't do. There are no pop-up e-books. There may someday be coloring e-books, but that won't hone your child's hand-eye coordination, and a printout of your child's artwork won't be the same hanging on the fridge. No sticker e-books. No coffee-table e-books. No scratch-n-sniff e-books. No big, puffy, chewable, toddler e-books. For our kids' sake alone, print books will have to stay.
So what we end up with is a mixed bag, bad and good, plus and minus. E-books are definitely going to be around, increasingly so as they gain gradual acceptance. They will certainly take a portion of the market share away from the traditional publishing industry. To declare "Print is dead!" though, is foolishly unwarranted. E-books are a part of the future landscape, but they are not going to bury print anytime in the foreseeable future. It's a darn good thing too, because I don't have any desire to curl up in bed with an e-book, let alone fall asleep with my computer on my chest.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Chuck_Hansen
|
|
Member: Chuck Hansen
Reviews written: 128
Trusted by: 357 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.