About e-booky reader-type things

I told you earlier I felt like writing... :)

So, post number three today. I started formulating this post in my head when news of the iPad was first released last week. Because the world is astir with news of the iPad, which is more than an e-reader but still, and I have personally been debating about getting a Barnes & Noble nook after getting to play with one in my local store. There's also been a huge stand-off between Amazon and Macmillan this week regarding the e-book sales model. So my thoughts have turned to e-books and e-readers of late.


One of my very first posts, just over a year ago, was on paper books vs. e-books. At that time, I was not ready to move over to an e-reader. I have since changed my mind. The sheer volume of books in our house has gotten out of control. I've also had a chance to play with both a Kindle and a nook, and I've been impressed with how they haven't at all jarred me out of the book-reading experience. I have had hesitations about the Kindle simply because they require a different format of e-book than what has become the standard and because they don't have expandable memory. Though the the memory capacity is significant and I could switch out books virtually if I ever got close to running out of room. But the nook has expandable memory, which I just like the option to have, and it uses a standard e-book file format, and it has a pretty cool lending feature.

My hesitation at the moment with the nook is that B&N isn't offering any kind of sales or discounts on it, not even to members, which doesn't jive with my frugal nature, and that it's the first generation. I've made it a policy not to buy first generation electronics - they don't have all the bugs and glitches worked out yet. Add to that the fact that I have about 45 paper books in my to-read stack at the moment. So I've made the decision to wait and get my nook after the second version is released, which may be another year or two, but I think I've quenched my initial gadget lust and can manage to make myself wait.


Now. The iPad. First off, let's just all agree that it is the dumbest name they could have possibly given to this device. Not only is it reminiscent of feminine hygiene products (did they even ASK a woman about the name?!), it's only ONE LETTER different from their most famous new gadget of recent years, the iPod. Did they not foresee how potentially confusing that could be? Anyway. Rant over. The iPad looks like a pretty cool device, all told. I'd certainly like to play with one. But from what I can tell, it's essentially a laptop-sized iPod Touch. I'd personally rather have an iPhone that gives me all of those applications everywhere, available at my fingertips as my cell phone is. My laptop does everything I want in a computer; I want a computer that's as mobile as a cell phone. That doesn't mean that I don't see the value in the iPad. I see, for example, a potential e-reader type device for my husband, the comic book reader. Today's e-readers don't display color or images, so reading comics is not really feasible. But the iPad could be a the way, provided comics publishers respond to the (already great) demand to publish comics for the device. My husband is a lover of the format, not a collector, so he'd happily stop buying paper comics if they were available in a good digital format.

The problems with it at the moment are that there is no comics publisher making comics for the iPad yet and the memory capacity is not great yet. I don't know much about computers, but I do know that 64 GB is nothing for high-resolution image-laden comics. They need to up the memory a LOT to appeal to that audience. Also, there's the first generation problem again; we'll definitely wait until at least the second generation to get it. Finally, I'm not sure how it will handle PDF files or how to put files on it that you already own. My husband has a number of digital comics collections released by the publishers on CD-ROM that are in PDF form, and he'd definitely want to be able to read those on the iPad.

So there you have it. We want to upgrade our reading technology, but we haven't quite gotten the devices we want. Maybe in the next year or two we'll do it!

No time to review, but I'm in love with The Nook!

Skipping the book review for today. I’m running a conference in Philadelphia this week, which leaves me with not much time for writing. However. I do want to offer a short rant about how absolutely ENTRANCED I am by Barnes & Nobles’ new e-reader, The Nook. If you haven’t seen much information on this thing yet, go take a virtual tour of it. It is almost everything I could want in an e-reader. It might be enough for me to buy it. I will definitely be going to touch and feel one at a B&N near me when they are released at the end of November. They have wireless downloading and free 3G like the Kindle, coupled with the ability to expand the memory with an SD card. There is also a limited lending feature where you can lend books to people for 14 days (if the publisher gives permission to do so) to anyone for a multitude of devices – not just The Nook. The things I’d like it to do that it doesn’t: have a more flexible lending feature (which no other e-reader does at all, so it’s hard to complain), allow access to Word documents, and have a full-color screen for reading comics/graphic novels (which would admittedly reduce the battery life significantly, so I guess what I really want is color e-ink!). But I absolutely believe this is the best e-reader that has been marketed so far, and I am more excited about it than I expected I ever would be about any e-reader. And it’s not just me, either – Gizmodo published this article about the eight reasons The Nook rocks. I wish B&N would send me a free one to review on this site!

Paper Books vs. E-books

I had a discussion last night with my husband and his best friend, who was visiting for the weekend, about the advent of digital media. We were particularly focused on books, because music and movies and other types of media seem to be more easily adaptable, and often have already been adapted, to digital formats. I don't know that I learned anything that I didn't already know through this discussion, but it did confirm for me that I'm not the only one with mixed feelings about books moving more and more to a digital format.

I do not currently own an e-reader, but I admit that both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle have piqued my interest in the last few years. I have my generation's love of tech gadgets, and I also travel several times each year on lengthy trips during which I polish off two to five books. In case you haven't had the opportunity to travel with two weeks' worth of reading material, books can be kind of heavy to tote around in your luggage! There are plenty of other good reasons for moving to digital books as well, not the least of which is the positive impact it could have on the environment - making paper is still widely a pretty toxic experience for our environment, and most inks used in printing are not something you want running off into your water supply. Shipping books and displaying them in a retail store is also not particularly eco-friendly.

I still haven't taken the plunge, though. For one thing, I really don't know if I can get past holding a machine and not a paper book, or pushing a button instead of turning a page. For another, as our friend pointed out last night, human nature seems to have an innate collector mentality that makes it hard for me to imagine my many, many bookshelves filled with beautiful books replaced with just a gadget. While I decidedly do NOT love packing up and moving all of those books, I have an equally hard time imagining buying them all again digitally. Reading e-books also makes it a lot harder to lend a book you loved to a friend for their enjoyment, or to trade a book that you read and don't really want any more for another one (as with sites like Book Mooch and Paperback Swap).

Honestly, I think all of those reasons are fairly universal concerns among book lovers, and if the publishing industry decides (as many industries before them already have) that digital is the way to go, they are going to have a serious fight on their hands to get most readers to switch over. Current e-book prices are only very slightly lower than prices for hard copy books, and that's going to have to change in order to gain more digital fans. They're going to have to make the price point of the digital format appealing enough to offset readers' other concerns. In addition, they're going to have a heck of a struggle with retail book stores, which will have nothing to sell without paper books. I suppose that, theoretically, they could package up DVDs of electronic books to sell in stores, but that just seems to defeat the best parts of digital media, which are not needing to leave your house to buy something and the immediacy of the download - you can shop in your pajamas and not have to wait for something to be shipped to you.

Primarily because of book stores, I have a hard time believing that paper books will be going away entirely any time in the near future. I do believe that my great-great-great grandchildren may live in a world when retail stores in general are a thing of the past and 99% of all types of shopping is done electronically. But until that day, retail stores are going to fight their hardest to prevent widespread digital book sales unless they themselves can get on the train to sell e-books through their websites.

So, I guess I'm curious. I want to know what other readers think about e-readers versus their beloved paper books. Do you buy digital books now? If so, what convinced you that was the way to go? If not, would you be willing to move to digital reading if the cost of e-books comes down? Or are your paper copies just too asthetically valuable to you? Are we all just Luddites, holding onto the past for no good reason?