Until just a couple years ago, I wouldn't have bought an eBook for any reason. I hated reading on the screen -- and it still isn't preferable to having a solid book in my hands. My old friend Chad Eby and I held diametrical views on the subject: to him, print was dead and only the words on the screen alive, but to me the screen was only buzzing pixels. The book was what was "real."
So although I now buy and read eBooks from time to time, I'll still have to cast my vote onto the side of tangible books with glossy covers and pages you can turn. (You know, don't you, that the book was as evolutionary a leap in its day as the eBook is for us; before that, all you had was scrolls, and if you wanted to find a certain spot in the story, you had to unroll the scroll till you got there. A book with cut pages was a leap forward comparable to our "find" function with computers. Now we have the best of both worlds, *searchable* scrolls.)
Books have investment value; if your computer crashes, your eBook is a phantom. Books are mobile. Unless you have a laptop, eBooks sit like stones waiting for you to come to them (and most laptops are still slightly more burdensome than the book you can slip into your backpack or back pocket); also, I feel on occasion that books are an endangered species, like some rare South American species of hummingbird nobody hears much about, and so I buy books the way I'd spend a few bucks to protect some endangered hummingbird habitat.
On the other hand, if you're broke as often as I am, eBooks are often if not always a lot cheaper than the hard copy version. Plus no shipping & handling.
Fortunately, most of the recent S&S publications and anthologies offer both formats, so that makes it an aesthetic choice, but not a complicated one.
About Me
- Don
- I teach English at a great state university in Arkansas: formerly a newspaperman, cab driver, cook, teacher, single father of one remarkable son, und so weiter. Writing a space opera at the moment.
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4 comments:
I think computer screen book reading is hard on the eyes, but devices like Kindle are intriguing.
Not only are Kindle books inexpensve, or in some cases--like classics--free (minus initial cost of device,) they have lots of options that aren't in print anymore. Like iTunes, I hope more and more out-of-print can be made available through eBooks.
But, you'd still need a print book if you were stuck on a desert island with no charging device for your Kindle!
I hope the prices of Kindle go down. They're kinda steep at the moment, non?
Yes. I'd like to get one but 1.) my physical to-be-read pile is enormous already 2.) I want one at a lower price.
I like my Kindle quite a lot because it allows me to read quite a few books that I've been unable to get otherwise. I prefer reading hard copies but when I can't get those I can use my kindle. It is remarkably easy to read on.