I love books. Real books. I’m not a fan of electronic “e-books” or reading lengthy passages of text online. I admit I don’t own a Kindle but I have played with one and it still just doesn’t offer enough to convince me it offers a better experience than a tangible publication.
Why would I choose to cart around kilograms of dead tree rather than have a lightweight, portable electronic version of as many books as I want? Why would I prefer to flip through pages than have access to a searchable database that can find any keyword across hundreds of publications in milliseconds?
Of course if someone gave me a Kindle tomorrow I would happily load it up with e-books – it has its uses, but it would not replace my ever-growing book collection.
There’s something missing from the experience that e-book readers offer. Not quite to the extent that Mark Pesce spoke about at the Innovative Ideas Forum; I’m talking about something more immediate, something that e-book publishers have overlooked in their rather short-sighted translation of print to digital.
There’s no doubt that having such a book collection on my desk at work has done something an e-book reader can’t. It says something about me; it helps explains to others my interests and knowledge and has started several interesting discussions … but that’s not what I’m talking about either.
I don’t care if it takes me 10 minutes to locate a passage in a text that a search engine could have completed in half a second, because every time I go looking for something I’ll stumble across something else that inspires ideas and tangential lines of thought. It’s about the serendipity and randomness of browsing through texts.
I just love flipping through books … I’ll just pick up a random book and open to a page, get some ideas and follow a line of thought. Whilst the web supports that type of unplanned trek across fields of information, individual publications don’t. Now that I think about it, maybe what I’m looking for is really what Mark was speaking about.
E-books even though virtual and thus freer, feel more restrictive and direct than physical books and that should not be the case. Why can’t the digitisation of information augment the experience of real books instead of becoming in some ways a more primitive medium?
Whilst I’ll read a book cover-to-cover initially I also read over a dozen books at a time and like to make connections between books and ideas, develop new ideas, spawn new information that I then (when I have time) share through my blogs. Just because they’re printed on dead wood and just because I own books some which are over 60 years old doesn’t mean the information feels old, dead and static. It’s a living ecology of information in my mind that’s growing and being fed by new books, re-reading old books and ideas that my mind injects into that pool by substituting, combining and rearranging things. The experience afforded by physical books surprisingly performs better in such an environment than e-books, and this should not be the case.
Publishers, fix this.
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I was thinking about this today as I read The Age online as well as in it’s in printed form. Normally I skim through the online and only buy the printed form for the Good Weekend supplement. But today I found 2 enormously powerful articles I never would have found by searching or clicking, and I only happened upon them because they were at the corner of the page I was reading – the opportunistic discovery. So I say yes to online/e-books and yes to printed serendipity. We need both if we are to foster new ideas. (And to record these ideas forever, although that’s an entirely different conversation.)
I agree with you, but there’s more to it for me. The tactile experience of turning each page, the joy of finding a favorite book in hardcover, published over 100 years ago, surrounding myself with favorite stories and studies… It’s completely lost on ebooks. If someone gave me a Kindle, I think I’d disown them. They obviously don’t know me at all.
Yeah that does it for me too – though I struggled to identify exactly what the experience was, but there’s definitely something there, even with the physical properties of books that even straightforward emulators like the iPhone Safari Backpack and Bookshelf fail to replicate the experience of.
I’m a happy fence sitter on this issue. I love both.
In terms of researching, E-Books are just fantastic. Even as an English major – sometimes especially as an English major- just being able to copy and paste the quote I need and launch straight into writing down my thoughts is a god-send. Rather than forget half of my thoughts as I transcribe, and struggling to balance the book in such a way that I can read it while typing, without damaging it, I love having google books, or kindle for my computer.
I also want a kindle or such, because I like reading trashy books, despite knowing they may have little rereading value to me. So being able to indulge that particular whim, and not be lumped with useless texts clogging up my already overflowing bookshelves, is fantastic.
However, for the books I read for the love of it, the original will always win. Whether it is the geekish thrill of holding an old edition, knowing that this one copy is only mine, the smell old books have, the handwritten annotations and dedication in second-hand finds, and the luxurious curling up to read in the sun – I love physical books, and can’t see them being entirely superceded.
Sometimes it worries me that people think that just because something is online or comes in a nice shiny, sleek plastic package its is better. Really, why can’t we have both and just be happy about it.
A’course, my biggest annoyance with the elite e-reader crowd is the fact that they think just because they have an e-reader, they are ‘greener’ than someone who has a home full of paper books. Really, is that all these people care about? You also have to take into consideration that there are just some people in the world that can’t afford to buy an e-reader. I mean, a kid wouldn’t have the money to buy a $200 e-reader on his own, but a few books, of course.
Honestly, I would be more of a fence-sitter if it weren’t for the somewhat annoyance I get from people who think that just because they own the newest e-reader, they are somehow more superb than a person who just wants to mind their own business and read a book that is made of paper rather than one that’s made of wiring and plastic…
To me, it feels like e-readers are yet another thing people are jumping into way too fast and not thinking about everyone as a whole; not everyone will be able to pay for online books or at this time afford the damn e-reader in the first place. As the person above me stated, I feel that advertiser market the things as so much easier to obtain than normal books which could be further from the truth. Kids will be unable to buy their own e-readers if they don’t have the money or parents to buy the thing for them, people without credit cards or pay-pal won’t be able to purchase books, and let’s not forget the simple fact of people who just don’t have the plain income for one, at this time anyway.
As much as this is the digital age, I sometimes wonder if there are chances that society could be detached from reality by being inticed by something that is supposidly superior just because its online or high-tech. For the most part, it sometimes feels like all this hype is builing up to be people just wanting these things to be ‘with it’ rather than using them to their full potential. Personal, I won’t be buying an e-reader because of the simple fact I DON’T NEED ONE. What use do I have for a machine when I am unable to purchase the books online or even afford it but I CAN afford my favorite book which is sitting on the shelf right in front of me; one that I can touch and no worry about paying an arm and a leg to replace if something happens to it.
Hey, I’m a kid from the digital age but there are some ‘old’ things that I think we should hang on to, even if a so-called superior digital version is created. Coming from an African-American middle-class upbringing, I try to look at things for different positions and with that, I’ve realized that the world isn’t moving as fast as a lot of people say it is, depending on where you are of course.
I don’t know, maybe its me. Maybe I’m just frustrated that it seems that people are more interested in bytes than in real life and in such, there seems to be a waning value in what happens in reality. E-book text just seems fake to me because it seems to exist only in a digital format, that’s it. It can only exist within the confines of its computer and nowhere else. Of course, if a book were to have both a physical print as well as an online print, I guess we get the best of both words but I still think that if we just limit all activity to the computer, we just lose touch which would be a step BACKWARDS wouldn’t it?
Then again, I have to take into consideration that I’ve never seen anyone reading an e-book on my campus, even though reports claim that since their ‘rise’ bookstores have had to close (excuse me while I roll my eyes) Paper is still the way to go so maybe it is just me and I should stop worrying that one day, the heads will think that in order to be truly ‘advanced’ EVERYTHING has to be done online, no other option given. Hopefully, I’m not the only one who thinks that a thought like that is absurd.