Things you can do with a paper book that you can’t with an ebook.
- Lend or borrow it easily to/from someone else (Damn DRM)
- Read it in the tub
- Quickly riffle through it to find something you want (for me at least, looking for something in an ebook takes much longer, unless I know the exact word/phrase to search for)
- Turn back/forward to/from specific pages easily
- Use it to prop up your wonky table leg
- Put flower petals within its pages, to surprise you years later when you’ve forgotten about them and they gently flutter into your lap
- Cut random letters/phrases out of to form a ransom note
- Cut out the middle to conceal a revolver
- Line up on your shelves to give your room a a bookish air, as well as provide some sound and heat insulation
- Provide an excuse for having a bookcase that hides a secret door leading to…your hidden lair, your secret dungeon, your stash of gold, an escape route for your heretic priest friend, or a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis
- Use the pages as emergency toilet paper
The boring stuff: why I made this list
I am very glad that Amazon has decided to update the Stanza reading app for iOS5, even though the update doesn’t work on older iOSes and is probably the last update ever to the app, as Amazon forces encourages people to switch to the Kindle. They want you to buy a physical Kindle, but they’ll settle for you using the app.
Anyway, I have been reading books on ereaders since…well, since the days of the Newton. (Yep I’m the one who bought a Newton.) I read them on my computer screen, and I read them on my Palm Pilot device. I remember getting through a boring couple of days of jury duty by reading Star Trek novels on my Palm. Ebooks are great, especially for someone like me who likes to read English or Japanese books, but lives elsewhere. Shipping costs for books internationally are either super-duper-slow (you’ve forgotten you’ve even ordered the book by the time you get it) or ridiculously high. I don’t have to pay shipment for ebooks.
Still, I’ve been getting quite grumpy about the ebook world lately. For one thing, why do I have to pay extra for an ebook if the reader app/program it was on, or the online bookstore that sold it, is no longer? That’s the situation people that relied on Stanza thought they were facing for a month. Stanza is now back, but now I’m wary about the status of the eReader app. It used to be the Palm eReader (before that the store itself was called Peanut Press) but Barnes and Noble bought it, and the app hasn’t been updated in zonkers, and the store itself seems to be slowly bled to death. If/when the eReader app stops working on my iPad/iPhone, what then? I have about 80 books I purchased there. I’m supposed to re-purchase them in another format? Not quite fair. (There’s a workaround, but still.)
So, I still continue to buy books, especially Japanese books (the ebook market in Japan has not taken off yet, mainly because publishers are dragging their feet). I suppose the ebook market will continue to expand, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
