e-book

An electronic book is, of course, the text (and possibly illustrations) of a book, stored in digital form. It seemed like a revolutionary and subversive idea when it was first posited--and perhaps it still is a little too revolutionary for some. There have been multiple attempts at creating e-books, none of which is terribly compatible with any of the others: Dedicated readers such as the Rocketbook, Postscript files for the PC or laptop, TealDoc or Peanut Press files for the Palm Pilot, Visor, or Windows CE machine...or plain ASCII or HTML. Or the so-called Open E-Book Format--though it doesn't seem to be used by terribly many people yet. Downloadable file, floppy disk, or CD-ROM?

But no matter what format it is, it is questionable whether people will actually read an e-book rather than a dead tree. Surveys have shown that the great majority of the people who downloaded Stephen King's much-touted e-book Riding the Bullet...have not actually read it. Many people have reported eyestrain or difficulty reading from the devices available today.

And even if the eyestrain problem were solved tomorrow, with digital ink or some other new advance, it is uncertain whether people would change their reading habits. Electronic books create new problems consumers have never faced before. Sure you can download it instantly...but should you pay hardcover or paperback price for it? And you can't sell it (the way you can a used book) if you decide you don't like it.

These are some of the problems facing selling e-books today, even without addressing the new electronic vanity presses such as Fatbrain and iUniverse, which have problems of their own.

Fortunately, there are many excellent public domain books available electronically for free, thanks to Project Gutenberg, Wiretap, and sites such as the Palmtop Library. There would be more, but for the recent corporate-sponsored copyright extension.

• They are a solution in search of a problem. There's little they can do that regular paper books cannot, short of searching and indexing, which aren't useful features to most readers of popular fiction.
• Regular books don't require batteries.
• Regular books don't crash.
• If I misplace a regular (paperback) book on the subway, I'm out five, maybe ten bucks. Less if I bought it used.
• There's a huge market for used mass market books, which are a great value at typically half the cost of a new book. I buy many of my books used. No such market yet exists for e-books.
• You can easily shake the sand out of a regular book after a day at the beach. You can probably even still read one after dropping it in the pool.
• Paper is easy to read in bright sunlight, even with polarized sunglasses on.
• When I'm finished with a regular book, I can loan it or give it away to someone else. I don't violate any copyrights by doing this, nor does it require the other person to own any special hardware, nor does it cost me much if they never return the book (see subway example above).
• One of the great joys of reading books is going to a bookstore and browsing titles. Downloading books from a website or loading them up from electronic media is an activity that carries little sensory appeal.
• Children learn to read from the printed page, and most of us have spent our lives reading that way. Many people find LCD and CRT displays more difficult to read than printed pages.
• With regular books, I can have several open at a time, and easily refer to all simultaneously. Or I can put one aside and pick it up weeks or months later from the same spot. Or I can have one book in progress on the nightstand, another on the porch, and another somewhere else. All of these methods of reading are more easily accomplished with paper books than with any e-book system requiring dedicated hardware and separate media.

I bought the e-book to fill the gap while still looking for a laptop. What I found was that 1/2 of my laptop needs are fufilled by the e-book, and another 1/3 could be ignored as long as I have near by network access.

Mostly, I wanted to be able to read electronic documents offline without wasting paper by printing stuff out, especially documentation for free software. Also, I was sick of carrying around normal books.

My e-book does less than a regular PDA, but it makes up for this with a screen about the size of a paperback book.

To address the points above directly:

• My e-book claims to have a battery life of 20 hours. I recharge mine about once every two days of heavy use. This is a lot better than a laptop could do right now.
• I don't misplace my e-book, because it is now the only thing I carry, instead of a heavy bag full of oddly shaped slipping books.
• There's a huge collection of free e-books I haven't read yet. Also, I can get the newspaper in e-book form, so I don't have to carry that or get the newspaper ink on my fingers.
• Rumor is, you can put your e-book in a ziplock bag and read it at the beach, shower, bath, pool, whatever. (I've not tried this.) Try turning the pages of a regular book in a ziplock bag.
• I picked my e-book specifically so I could read it in bright sunlight. It is far easier to read it than any laptop screen I've ever seen.
• I keep my *gasp* booklist in my e-book. I take my e-book to bookstores and libraries just so I can remember what I am looking for, and not accidently pick up a book I'd already read or already own. I use to print this list up on a regular basis, and then not have it when I wanted it. It was awful.
• Reading LCD and CRT screens is more difficult than reading paper, but I find the e-book about the same as regular paper.
• With my e-book, I can flip between several books in the e-book with ease. It remembers where I was in each book. I can even bookmark them and name the bookmarks, and the bookmarks don't fall out or warp the pages of the book.

• Normal books are annoying to read in the dark. My e-book is backlit. (And will run 20 hours with the backlight on.)
• Normal books are annoying to hold open when you are doing other things with your hands. Turning pages can be even less fun with a regular book when you're short on free fingers.
• You can fit the text of multiple normal books in the flash ram in an e-book. Adding another doesn't make it heavier, so you can carry things you might otherwise not have.
• Things like phone lists that get updated frequently don't have to be reprinted and won't wear out if you carry it with you all the time. It's better than a written book, because you won't have to copy it over when the book fills up and gets out of order. (And you can search and index it in the e-book!)

N.b. I still read regular books. I do enjoy their feel, and not everything I want to read is available in electronic form. I got my e-book more for the reverse problem -- I had too much to read in electronic form that I just didn't want to print, and didn't want to read tied to a computer instead of outside enjoying the sun.

Ideally, in the future electronic paper will show up on the market, and you'll be able to take your e-book out of your pocket and unroll the screen to its full 20" size, along with a full size keyboard....

The e-book has a place in my life, quite different from the place that tangible books have in my life, but just as important. Neither can replace the other (yet).

Just to emphasize the correctness of diotina's excellent writeup (below), my e-book supports a subset of html, so it is fully capable of handling a fully hyperlinked document. Even so, the best linked document I've found is the jargon file. Even though 90% of what I put in it originates as hypertext, very few documents have much more than the table of contents linked to anything. Even online FAQs have this problem. (The perl and samba documentation seem to be well internally hyperlinked, but most of the rest is just linked table of contents with references I still have to search to find.)

The real failure of the e-book is in commercial content. I don't think anyone (consumer or publisher) has been happy with the copyright protection schemes or distribution methods used by e-books. Also, most e-books are not programmable, which severely reduces their usefulness. The success of e-books and continuing shrinking computer have inspired the tablet computer industry.

The advantages of electronic publishing mainly cited are its accessibility, more reasonable pricing and that it can present text as hypertext. The first two advantages are not yet evident, as it is still cheaper to buy books than to purchase an e-reader (a special handheld device for reading e-texts) and that the texts that one desires may not be available in electronic format. Contingent to these developments of course, is the booklover’s eternal and justified complaint: the material form of the book that enhances much of the experience of reading, is lost forever. The potential of hypertext however remains unexploited in a market where publishers are resorting, rather randomly, to pre-existing popular texts or texts, though written for the medium, could just as well be published as a printed book and there would be no evident difference. An example of this was the online publishing of Stephen King’s e-book The Plant – an experiment based on the ideal and rather naïve assumption that this would lend a democratic aspect to the book – it could be read anywhere and for a pittance. But the failure of this experiment lay in the shortcomings of the screen as medium.

Hypertext then remains the trump card of the academic e-publishing industry. Educational institutions all over the world are benefiting from its applications: built-in dictionaries, search, bookmarking, highlighting, annotating capabilities and multimedia enhancements. McGraw–Hill’s Encyclopedia of Science & Technology is but one example of how non-fiction publishing can revolutionise the e-publishing market. Along with all the original print matter – over 7,000 articles – the online version incorporates 60,000 article-to-article hot links, 1,500 Internet links, as well as an electronic "suggestion box" for users, be they librarians or individual customers.

There is absolutely no doubt that hypertext has impacted literary studies in profound ways – increasing scholarly communication, accessibility to both canonised and unfamiliar texts, and as a natural progression wreaking havoc with the very concept of the canon itself. The technology spoken of earlier is capable of encapsulating hundreds, or even thousands of books, to be stored in a single volume. But literature itself, in its original avatar which gives pleasure and is appreciated for its own sake, is being bullied into being a digital presence. Sufficient attention is not being paid to the opportunities that the medium offers to today’s author. Instead of digitising existing backlists, publishers should exploit hypertext as a new way of seeing/reading. A radical hypertext equivalent of Joyce’s Ulysses or even Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with the support of a major publisher is yet to find its way onto screens everywhere. The anxiety regarding the death of the printed word is baseless, as the e-book tends to fall, more or less into the category of an imprint, and is still far from creating a new literacy.

This writeup was triggered by an article in The Economist, dated December 9th, 2000, 'Digital Ink meets Electronic Paper.'