E-books trend is paradise lost for book nerds
Angels tease Satan because he doesn’t
have the latest e-book reader gadget.
The experience of finding an unexpected treasure in a used book store always gives me a buzz.
Guess I’m a book nerd.
This summer, at a dusty old shop in New Westminster, my attention was captured by an ugly, leather-bound monstrosity on the bottom shelf in the poetry section. Burned into the thick leather cover by an amateur hand was a picture of a log cabin in a forest by a river, with the word “Milton” underneath.
I sat down in the aisle, my back resting against a stack of dog-eared Beatles records, and opened the stiff leather cover. Inside was a homemade leather bookmark attached to the cover, as stiff as a steel-toed boot. I flipped it out of the way to discover a rare treasure – a 125-year-old printing of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
The pages were gilt, like an expensive Bible, and the engraved illustrations exquisite. The words appeared to gently rise off the page, a side-effect of the printing techniques and quality paper used in making books a century ago.
But that wasn’t the best part. As I flipped through the pages, I came across an unusual bookmark – a carefully-clipped piece of newspaper, an 1897 birth announcement for Nellie McClung’s first-born son. Nellie McClung, who Canadian women can thank for fighting to get them the right to vote in 1916. It made me wonder whose book this once was.
I looked at the home-made cover again. Obviously someone loved this book enough to recover it once the original cover tore off. I imagined McClung, or her son, sitting by the woodstove on a freezing cold Manitoba night, reading by flickering firelight one of the greatest works of English literature.
I caught a whiff as I closed the cover again and brought it to my face to take a sniff. My nostrils filled with the aromatic smell of pipe tobacco. I again imagined one of the McClungs sitting on their porch at dusk, reading the book and smoking a pipe.
Guess I’m a romantic book nerd.
Fighting to keep a neutral, disinterested expression on my face, I dropped $8 in toonies into the hand of the bored-looking store owner and carried my treasure out of the store, striding nonchalantly around the corner before I felt it safe to crack a huge grin. I have no idea if the book’s actually worth anything and I don’t really care. To me, it’s priceless.
That’s why I think e-books are stupid. Once we’re all reading disposable Word documents on yet more Internet-enabled glowing rectangles, who will go into used bookstores looking for priceless treasures?
I also wonder what will happen to our libraries. It seems people would rather spend $300 to $400 for an awkward Star Trek display pad device that lets them read Dan Brown books electronically, looking like quasi-futuristic idiots in the airport lounge, than go to the library and borrow a book for free.
I suppose there must be some good reason to drop that kind of cash on a device to read books you can get for 50 cents at the thrift store, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried e-books. I’ve read lots of books on my Palm Pilot, mostly during city council meetings. It’s not fun, and not just because I’m at a council meeting.
The only good thing about e-books is the massive amount of classic books available for free through Project Gutenberg. For some of them, it’s worth staring at a glowing rectangle. Other than that, I can only think of two reasons why paper books will someday be replaced with e-books: one, humans are technology magpies who will adopt anything that looks futuristic and shiny, and two, there’s a lot of money to be made from them. Ergo, the powers that be will do whatever it takes to make them the de facto standard.
And there is a lot of money to be made. E-books sell online in Sony’s e-book store from 50 cents on a special deal to $10 for a new bestseller, to up to $20 for other “specialty” stuff. What a ripoff, it’s all the same to the publisher. Once the book is electronic, it costs them pennies to host a server somewhere for you to download it, regardless of whether it’s on “special” or not. A quick look through the store shows it’s actually cheaper to go buy a paper version you can read without charging the battery.
Out of curiousity, I found an electronic version of Paradise Lost in the store for $2, but I wouldn’t buy it. It’s just 3.5 megabytes of ones and zeros, and I’d never remember or absorb any of it by staring at a screen.
But I will remember and cherish the passages I read by firelight from my ugly, leather-bound monstrosity.
A deeper look: why e-books are stupid
As soon as you enter the electronic world, you quickly discover that not everything works the way you think it should.
I downloaded a pile of interesting (and free) books from Project Gutenberg, classics of religion, philosophy, archaeology and science. But some of the books displayed with errors on my Palm Pilot, and I had to mess around with changing settings, installing better reader software and formatting the downloaded files to work properly. Some of them were worth the hassle, others were not.
With a boring old paper book, you just open it up and start reading. It works on any platform, from tables to pillows to floors to your lap.
Holding an electronic device is just not as comfortable as a paperback, although engineers have tried valiantly to overcome this. You can read a paper book from any angle, and your eyes miraculously adjust in almost all lighting conditions to make reading comfortable. With an electronic device, you are stuck looking at a small, glowing rectangle which – at least in the case of my Palm – emits a slowly-maddening buzzing sound and is hard to see from even a slight angle.
Paper is the standard, whether e-book reader makers like it or not. I find it amusing that Sony’s e-reader offers “astonishing” paper-like display.
Why not just read a paper book, instead of an electronic device painstakingly designed to look like paper? What’s the appeal?
I guess you could argue that an e-reader lets you carry a whole library with you. But why? You can only read one book at a time anyway. When you’re finished the book, put it back on the shelf and take another one. Easy.
And be aware, e-books are not cheaper. A quick look through the e-book store run by Sony shows that while some books are available for 50 cents, and bestsellers are often on for about $10, the average price is the same or more than what you would pay for a paper book. This is absurd when you think about it. When books are first released, hardcovers are always more expensive, but those are the best quality. Wait six months or so for the $10 paperback if you don’t want to pay $30 for a hardcover. The price point for an average new e-book seems to be $13-14. Pretty pricey for something that only exists as ones and zeros.
I shouldn’t pick on Sony. There are other e-book sellers out there, but even if I wanted to buy an Amazon Kindle and download and read e-books, I can’t do it in Canada. Brilliant! Hooray for international copyright and digital rights management!
But I guess I must be one of a small number of people who think that paper book technology is just fine, thank you, and needs no electronic upgrade with all the headaches that brings. Even Disney has launched an e-book store which, for an annual fee, lets kids read “interactive” books featuring all their favourite Disney characters. Now, you don’t even need to read with your kids anymore, or encourage them to use their imaginations while reading a story. Disney will do it for you.
Do your kids a favour. Read with them. Read real books from your local library. Don’t just hand them another glowing rectangle to keep them amused while you watch TV.
