The Future of E-Books

mgozaydin suggests that the netbook is cheaper and better for reading. There are problems with that theory: weight and battery life. My kindle runs for a week on a charge, more if I turn off wireless. My netbook runs three hours or less – I can’t get through one class without an outlet for fear it will quit on me. I’m not afraid of the keyboard: the netbook and kindle both have one. Not to mention that kindle, at least, is much easier on the eyes than a computer screen.Something that should be pointed out is the market for electronic textbooks. There is still no standardization but texts purchased online come with a six-month expiration date. Kindle texts do not (you need an actual kindle to read most kindle textbooks.)

What gets me is (a) that we haven’t gotten over our habit of trying to predict the future, despite plenty of evidence that we can’t, and (b) that we haven’t gotten over our habit of trying to tell other people what they should do, despite plenty of evidence that they don’t give a good goddam what we want them to do. People who want to read books or whatever with Kindle or whatever e-gadget will do so. People who don’t want to won’t. As P. J. O’Rourke put it in a not greatly dissimilar context, “When the automobile came along, it wasn’t felt necessary to outlaw horses.” Crystal balls don’t work. And the choices, made for whatever reasons, of millions of people who couldn’t care less what we think, will decide whether e-books are the wave of the future or filling for the dustbin of literary history. But as a side bet, I would be willing to stake a couple bucks that the e-book won’t have the endurance of the codex.

This is news? The advantage e-book readers present is that they use a display technology (electronic ink) that requires little power to operate, which in turn has allowed development of devices that have ergonomics for reading which are much more comfortable to live with. Think in terms of a lap top display needing to be refreshed many times each second vs. an e-book reader needing to be refreshed only when you move on to the next “page” and you will get the idea. An e-book reader will easily operate for days on end for this reason alone. There is no free lunch here. If you make the device more general purpose, it will require more power, and so need a bigger battery, with more weight and more bulk. On the other hand, the technology has lots of room for improvement … color seems to be coming, presumably allowing a more attractive background than the gray characterizing the current crop of devices. As for price, keep in mind what a lap top cost when that technology was new. As a long time user of many types of electronic devices, I admit I was quite skeptical, holding off purchase of a Kindle until its second generation version was released. It is now my preferred device for reading, although as of yet I don’t find its browse capability adequate for reference texts. It is also lousy for any kind of image, although this may be more a limit imposed by current software than technology (and which makes many Kindle newspaper or magazine subscription versions pretty iffy). The only real question is whether Kindle will hold its competitive edge, or will its particular limitations as an e-book reader allow other, similar approaches to overtake it in the market.

Is Prof. Bauerlein arguing IN FAVOR of somehow, King Cnut-like, keeping e-readers single purpose because, if they’re multi-purpose, people will use them for things other than reading Thomas Mann? Whatever happened to the conservatives’ (and Prof. Bauerlein professes himself a “social” and intellectual conservative) belief that the market should decide this sort of stuff, that people should be able to choose what they buy and to what (legal) uses they put stuff?

I am not a social conservative, goxewu.

Sorry, Prof. Bauerlein. It isn’t a criticism, and I thought way back somewhere, in explaining that you weren’t a political conservative, you said you were a social one. Great news out of D.C. on gay marriage, right?Anyway, to the questions: What’s the harm in devices that’ll read e-books but that’ll also do other things, such as go online, make phone calls, take photographs, etc.? Or, conversely, what’s the virtue in YAD (thanks, Ms. Spangenberg) that’ll only read e-books? Surely it can’t be that the inconvenience of doing anything else on YAD will make users–like bad kids kept in after-school study hall–nominally tend to their reading to the exclusion of everything else.Questions for Ms. Spangenberg: Shouldn’t distribution count as part of the real, total cost of a book, e- and otherwise? I mean a big part of the price I pay for a banana is getting it to the supermarket. If I could just log on to http://www.bananas.com in Panama and somehow get one through my screen, shouldn’t the price be cheaper? And, if e-books aren’t really cheaper to produce, why should author royalties for them be 40 percent, instead of what authors normally receive from the sales of hard copies? Note: Is there a hyphen in “e-books” and “e-mail”? I put one in because otherwise I pronounce them in my head as “ehbooks” and “ehmail.”

Ebooks raise complex issues concerning the ergonomics of reading, the proliferation of devices and platforms, the quality of texts, and the economics of publishing, sales, purchasing, and preservation. According to some sources, Amazon is willing to lose money on the sales of ebooks in the hope of making a profit on the sale of ebook readers. Publishers apparently make less money on ebooks than on print books, and, as result, some publishers are placing embargoes on sales of new ebooks. That is, in order to bolster the sales of the print version, they publish the book in print and do not permit ebook sales until a specific period of time has elapsed. The economics of ebooks varies wildly when one compares the possible profits for authors, publishers, and vendors on best sellers, text books, scholarly books, reprints, large sets of uncopyrighted books, etc.Rate of growth is only one measure. Hard data on the publication of new books is missing:-what percent of new print books are also available as ebooks at the time of publication?-what percent of new print books are embargoed in ebook format at the time of publication?-what percent of new books published are available only as ebooks?-how are these questions answered for specific academic disciplines?The sale of ebooks is said to have doubled in 2009, but it is still less than 5% of all book sales. As a reader and a librarian I see no reason to think that the rapid increase in the rate of ebook publishing will mean the end of print publishing. As a reader and an academic librarian I am happy to have huge sets of out-of-print materials available online. As a reader I like to try new technology, I like the convenience and portability of ebooks, and I am willing to purchasing multiple devices. As a librarian, it is much less easy to decide what to buy and when to buy it.As an academic librarian I am concerned that enthusiasm for technology and an incomplete understanding of all the economic and educational issues may overshadow the actual situation. There is a tendency to think of ebooks as a cheaper substitute for print books. But the cost of publishing scholarly books is more likely to lie in the cost of editing than in the costs of printing. In addition the vast majority of new scholarly books are not available as ebooks. In fact, even some of the most popular books, for example the entire Harry Potter series, are not available as ebooks. There is no rule of thumb that I can apply (in good professional conscience) to determine what proportion of the budget should go for print books and what proportion should go to ebooks. I can only make decisions on a case by case basis, recognizing that current enthusiasms may be significant, but they should not be determinative. There are many difficult questions. Here are a few: If both the ebook and the print book is available, which format should an academic library purchase if cannot afford both? If a the print copy is more expensive, is it a better for a library to purchase the print copy, regardless of current demand, on the grounds that there is more reason to think the print copy will be available and usable in 10 years? What about support for distance education? Should library support for distance education ever be limited to online resources alone? When should students be guaranteed delivery of both print books and online access to ebooks?

Re #16:Most of the commenters I know have at least 9 hours of battery life, unless they don’t get their coffee in the morning.

Amnirov,In a country where about 200,000 titles are published each year, most are indeed perishable and forgettable. However, we do have a few copies of some books that have survived a long time, and in many cases they did so merely because they were on shelves somewhere protected from the weather. The books in my own “purposeless mausoleum” are not corpses so far as I’m concerned. All I need to return to them is light. Batteries neither included nor needed, and “so long as men have lips and eyes can see” what seem to you corpses are friends to me.

So do sunshine, footballs, girls (for boys), boys (for girls), dressing up, fishing, swimming, music, dancing, cars, etc., etc.Anyway, what’s the point? Somehow DELIBERATELY keeping electronic reading devices single-purpose to that the young who have them can do nothing but read when they turn them on? If so, who does that? The market obviously won’t, witness the evolution of the cell phone. So, a Federal law, a State law, local ordinances? How would that jibe with Prof. Bauerlein being a “small-government” conservative?Maybe somebody should invent an electronic hand-wringer. Then both sides on this weird argument could have some tech on their sides.

I have used a netbook, a notebook, a 30″ monitor, an iPhone and now a Kindle DX. I’ve done a lot of reading on all of them. The Kindle DX is the only one that makes reading fun again. You can’t believe the difference until you use it for a bit. I know, on paper it makes no sense but it’s true. This is not to say it couldn’t use improvement in many of its functions. I wrote a review of it here:http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000733.html

Prof. Bauerlein still evades the obvious question of what, exactly, to DO about this alleged damage to reading habits wreaked by electronic devices? To say that I “trivialize” the issue with such remarks as “So do sunshine…” is, in turn, to trivialize my argument. So, to reiterate:a) Lots of things take away of kids’ reading time. Why pick only on, in essence, the Internet and devices that connect to it?b) “You steer people’s tastes and habits by words and illustrations, not by laws,” begs the question, “To where do you steer them?” I was, I thought obviously, being facetious about laws. I know full well that Prof. Bauerlein, among all people, would be against any kind of legal prohibition of multi-purpose e-readers. So would any sensible person. The only other alternative is the market, isn’t it? And there, no kid with a three-digit IQ is going to stick with books-on-paper because he or she knows that, no matter how much better (physical convenience, customization of font, search capabilities, etc.) e-readers might be, there’s a responsibility on his or her part to help preserve ink-on-paper culture. And no kid with the same intelligence is going to pass on an electronic reading device that does a whole lot of other things in the bargain (connect to the Internet, make telephone calls, play music, etc.), in favor of a single-purpose e-reader because he or she knows that the temptation to do other things than read will be too great. Other than hand-wringing in the face of the inevitable (more and more people, possibly an eventual majority of college students, are going to read on a screen and not on paper; and multi-purpose electronic reading devices will win in the marketplace), and the self-satisfaction of making noble statements, I don’t think this “steer[ing] people’s tastes and habits by words and illustrations, not by laws” in the matter of electronic reading devices is going to accomplish anything at all.

I’m the only “people” to invoke “hand-wringing,” so the blame is all on me. Since it’s my responsibility to come up with something else, how about “wailing,” “whining,” “baying at the moon,” “commanding the waves to roll back,” “crocodile tears” (if you think all this futile back-to-books stuff is mere posturing), “filibustering,” “crying in their beer,” “beating a dead horse,” “pounding sand in a rat hole,” “shooting himself in the foot,” “living in the past”? None is precisely on the mark but, taken together, they give you an idea of the futility of Prof. Bauerlein’s position.Prof. Bauerlein uses “steer” like President Obama uses the phrase “make sure.” Obama says something like, “We’ve got to make sure every child in America receives a decent education.” That sounds fine and dandly until you wonder how, exactly, we “make sure” that happens. Then you figure out that we cannot, in fact, “make sure” of something like that. When Prof. Bauerlein says, in effect, “We’ve got to steer students to books on paper,” you naturally wonder how, exactly, the “steering” is to work:* Laws and rules restructing the use of e-books and the worse villain, e-reading devices that connect to the Internet? No, libertarians and social conservatives wouldn’t want Big Government (or invasive Little Governments) to coerce market behavior.* Essays, op-eds, blogs, memos, etc. “pointing out the hazards of screen time”? Right, that’ll work. What’re the odds of a student saying, “I can either spend $16.95 on the hardbound-size paperback of the novel I have to read for class and add it to the tons of books I’ve already got and which I’ll have to break my back moving out of the dorm in June, or I can download it for $9.95 onto my e-reader, where I keep most of my books-for-class. Hmmm, I think I’ll go for the paperback because I well know ‘the hazards of screen time’”? Slimski to none-oh.* The same propaganda’s fallback position of, “Well, if you insist on reading on a screen, at least read on one that won’t allow you to follow a hypertext link to the Internet, or look up a book’s puzzling term on the Internet, or make a phone call to ask somebody something about the book. Just buy Yet Another Device to go with or iPhone, iPod, laptop, etc.” Right, that’ll work, too, when multipurpose e-readers hit the market.* Simply tell students, “If I find you’ve read the assigned novel on a screen instead of paper, I’ll flunk your paper on it.” I don’t think this will happen except in the darkest corners of Ludditism, but desperate professors do desperate things.