who needs an e-book?

[dichroic]

There are lots of reasons not to buy an e-book. The foremost one is that you’re not much of a reader – if you aren’t, then it’s no more than a brick, a money-costing device you won’t use.

Price isn’t much of a reason any more, now that e-books start at $139 (for the cheapest Kindle; I am sure others will match that price point soon). If you are a reader and you buy new or used books then the cost of one will amortize quickly, because new ebooks are generally a bit cheaper than paper books and then there are all the many free ones. If you are a reader and you don’t buy books, then the point is moot because one of the conditions below should apply. (And if they don’t – if you don’t have a library of some sort available, whether a public one or borrowing from friends – then I feel sorry for you, because it sucks to have a book habit and no books.)

Assuming that you are a reader, reasons not to buy an e-book include:

• You don’t primarily read in English (there are books available in other languages, but I don’t think there are enough at this moment to justify purchase
• You have an excellent English-language bookstore nearby and pleanty of time and money to patronize it

OR

• You have an excellent English-language library nearby and you have time and transportation to go there

OR

• Paying and waiting for shipping of online orders is no problem (obviously less likely to apply if you don’t have a local version of Amazon or equivalent)
• You have plenty of room to store all the books you want to have around
• You have no problems with transporting books, meaning you don’t travel a lot, you don’t feel the need to have more than one book with you on your errands, you don’t move often, and you don’t have to carry a lot of textbooks
• You don’t tend to do anything with your hands – cook, eat, brush your teeth, knit, crochet – while reading. It’s possible to do most of those with a paper book, but it’s much easier with an e-book that doesn’t have to be held open and whose pages can be turned by bumping a button.
• You either don’t care about reading the thousands of free and sometimes out-of-print books available on the Gutenberg project or elsewhere online, or you don’t mind reading on a computer screen.
• You don’t have any vision issues that require you to be able to increase type size or to listen to books instead of reading them.

If all of the above conditions apply to you OR if this one does

• You prefer paper books so strongly that you are willing to deal with any purchasing, storage or carrying issues they give you.

then an e-book doesn’t make sense for you. That’s perfectly reasonable; I don’t believe trendiness is a good reason to do anything you don’t want to do, and it’s silly to buy a gadget you don’t want or need. However, I’m getting a little tired of “real book lovers like paper” comments. I give fair notice that I’m going to react to comments like that by assuming the commenter doesn’t have either the imagination or the empathy to realize that other people’s life circumstances or preferences might be different than their own.

If anyone about to embark on an expat lifestyle to ask me which two items in my possession have made the biggest contributions to my quality of life these last several years, I’d have to name the Diva Cup and the Kindle. Neither one is appropriate for everyone – most obviously, between males, women above and below childbearing age, women who don’t menstruate for other reasons, and women who for some other reason can’t use them, the Diva Cup is no use to the majority of the human race. But for those who have need of either item, they can change your life.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Comments

[jonquil]

I have and love my Kindle. Not only do I have eyesight problems, I have serious bookstack problems; having my unread backlog in one thin volume is a Godsend.

However, there's one anti-Kindle reason you haven't addressed: Amazon's near-monopoly, which it is using in restraint of trade. See the recent temper tantrum in which Amazon pulled all books by one publisher completely out of sale because they couldn't agree on terms for e-books. That was scary. Going Kindle right now is like going iPod before Apple caved and stopped encrypting: your books belong to Amazon, not you, and what you do with them is up to Amazon, not you.

And if you don't go Kindle? Your selection of e-books just shrank enormously.

[dichroic]

I deliberately used the word Kindle only once in this post, in mentioning the one I have. Elsewhere I said e-book, because I just wanted to make the point about electrons vs paper. Back when I was deciding what to buy, the Nook didn't exist yet and Amazon seemed to have more of the books I wanted than Sony but not enormously more. I really don't have a feeling at all for how the availability of books is at Amazon vs B&N vs Sony (though the linking of Sony to Google Books should help a lot - though personally I have more issues with Google Books than with Amazon).

But I know one thing: any one of them has *far* more books available than I could have bought at any time before Amazon first opened, and that includes my time on campus and the first few years I had a Borders nearby. (The pitifulness of the nearby bookstores in my youth - despite being in a city once reknowned for its bookstores, though certainly not in *my* neighborhood - is the reason you will not hear anyone in my family lamenting the takeover of the big bookstore chains. We remember Marlo's with little fondness - fortunately we had great libraries.)

[jonquil]

Yes, every time somebody gets nostalgic for the Death of the Local Bookstore, I remember all the Local Bookstores I patronized that saw it as their job to patronize *me* -- "Oh, *we* don't carry that sort of thing", where "that sort of thing" ran from romances to science fiction to !!!! Patrick O'Brian!!!.

Give me a chain store that thinks whatever I want to read, they'll stock and sell me.

[apis_mellifera]

The restraint of trade issue is why I decided to get a Nook instead of a Kindle--even though it means that I have fewer e-books to choose from. I also liked the fact that the Nook supports a lot more formats than Kindle; since I review books and publishers are slowly but surely moving towards electronic galleys/ARCs in a variety of formats I need to have a device that can handle as many of those formats as possible.

[antisoppist]

I have an e-book reader, a Sony, and I use it for reading free out-of-print books that I would otherwise have to print out on reams of A4 or sit at the computer to read. That's enough to keep me going on rare train journeys. I can't at the moment see myself buying new books for it because I just prefer them on paper and I also find the constant page turning refreshing gives me headaches if I use the reader for too long. I wouldn't like to be using nothing but a screen all the time.

But when I lived abroad in the early 1990s my English books were restricted to what I could fit in my rucksack each time I went home once a year (an ancient copy of Barchester Towers on very thin paper offered the most words for its size). The nearest bookshop stocking English books was a 12 hour train trip away. E-books (and the internet) would have completely transformed that experience, though possibly I would have learned less Finnish in the process. I can certainly see how e-books could be a life-saver if I was in that situation again.

[aedifica]

I saw this post on Latest Posts, and I enjoyed reading it, and I keep seeing your comments on the entries of various of my friends (mostly on LJ), so I've subscribed to your journal. Hi!