I'm over at Romancing The Blog today shooting my mouth off on why I don't think ebooks are going to be taking over the world anytime soon. In other words: don't start singing any funeral dirges for Dead Tree Books just yet.Yeah, yeah trolls....I'm an ignorant slut. But c'mon - some of y'all are thinking the exact same things!
Also, a reminder that you have one more day to enter the Old School Romance Lurve contest for a chance to win my beat-up copy of Lightning That Lingers by Laura London. Winner will be announced tomorrow! Good luck!
10 comments:
You're right about the digital divide and book sharing. I am not even 40 yet and I don't know/don't care about 80% of the technology out there. I don't even have an MP3 player or digital camera yet! Plus there's been lots of times I've swapped books with a friend, I'd miss that.
Paper books are not going anywhere.
If for no other reason I don't like the potential for subtly editing (read as censoring) the text of a e-book.
You know that part of syncing the reader to the e-book site when downloading a new one? Are we really sure it's typos they are fixing?
At any rate I prefer a book in my hand to text on a screen. (odd since nothing I have written is on paper)
Also, I seem to remember e-mail killing the postal service forever ago, yet somehow they are still open.
At any rate, nice article.
Well, maybe not for the books you read, but for the rest...
You're exactly right, IMO. I know so many people at my library who can barely function with a flash drive, so there is no way they'll be breaking out the ebook readers yet. And for me personally, I just can't afford a dedicated reader yet and I don't know if I want the hassle when it's easier for me to pick up a real book.
There's something about holding a book - sorry, I can't go digital. Plus I know people will say, "well, textbooks..." but look at Oz. He has ZERO digital in his enormous library - we have 30K (yes, that's right he priced them all in the move...) worth of textbooks/manuals for him. He loves having the real thing. :)
Lil' Sis: Sometime you'll have to try reading a short story on my Sony. It really doesn't "detract" from the reading experience at all (IMHO).
The big reasons why I haven't gone 100% digital is 1) I own a crap-load of Dead Tree Books and 2) The trading and swapping issue. I love, love, love sharing my Dead Tree Books - which you are more than well aware of.
As for textbooks - I can see them being handy because of space issues - but most people who use textbooks like to highlight, write in the margins and flip back and forth between pages. You can highlight and write notes with some readers, but I don't think it's quite as convenient to flip back and forth between pages. Especially if those pages are several hundred apart from each other.
Not even if we get Star Trek like PADDS for reading will books ever go out of style. Hey, remember Captain Picard's ready room? Big old Shakespeare book right there! Q even read from it one time! There's something to be said for the feel of pages, the musty smell of a really old book, the sound.... reading a book is as much a textile, sound, and olfactory experience as a reading one.
Jami: Yeah, as much as I love the convenience of ebooks - they just will never have the same "punch" as say....a Gutenberg Bible or the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.
Books can not only be "just books" - they can also be works of art.
That monkey is sooo cute.
WTF on these trolls!
Janicu: Everybody likes my monkey :-)
I was mostly being a smart-ass about the trolls. Whenever I post anything remotely "controversial" I like to head them off at the pass. But my RtB column seemed to be fairly well-received. Lots interesting comments over there - which is what I always try to aim for.
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