Ebooks vs. Real Books

Kerchinga

I LOVE my Kindle and had a Sony E-Reador prior to that. I have always been an avid reader and continued to read at least 1 book per week all my life.
The problem was I ran out of room to store them all! Now with my ebooks i can have as many as I like..got to say I still buy the occasional hardback of authors I particularly love to keep on my shelves

BrettPGH

Real books. I've never had to plug in a book.

RoboLikes

I like the feel, the weight, the smell of an actual paperback. I love cracking the spine of a new book when I'm turning page after page and the look of a well worn book on my shelf cannot be replaced.

wolverine66

I'm scared to death that it will eventually be the only choice, though.

:sad:
Please don't make me read books on an e-reader! The phrase "page turner" is special to me...

Just like people will still say "I sound like a broken record player," or will still "tape a show" (on DVR), or "hang up" a phone - I think "page turner" is a safe phrase.

morganhccstudent724

I like feeling a book in my hand. Not a tablet....

therealangd

I actually started reading more once I got my ereader.

Silverkittycat

"It's the mental furniture that matters".
Just because I love that line.

The Way We Read Now
By DWIGHT GARNER

THE case against electronic books has been made, and elegantly, by many people, including Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker a few years ago. Mr. Baker called Amazon’s Kindle, in a memorable put-down, “the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.”

The best case I’ve seen for electronic books, however, arrived just last month, on the Web site of The New York Review of Books. The novelist Tim Parks proposed that e-books offered “a more austere, direct engagement” with words. What’s more, no dictator can burn one. His persuasive bottom line: “This is a medium for grown-ups.”

I’ve been trying to become more of a grown-up, in terms of my commitment to reading across what media geeks call “platforms” (a word that’s much sexier when applied to heels), from smartphones to e-readers to tablets to laptops.

It’s a battle I may lose. I still prefer to consume sentences the old-fashioned and nongreen way, on the pulped carcasses of trees that have had their throats slit. I can imagine my tweener kids, in a few years, beginning to picket me for my murderous habits: “No (tree) blood for (narrative) oil.”

It’s time to start thinking, however, about the best literary uses for these devices. Are some reading materials better suited to one platform than another? Does Philip Larkin feel at home on an iPad, and Lorrie Moore on a Kindle? Can I make a Kay Ryan poem my ringtone? Will any gizmo make “The Fountainhead” palatable?

Books used to pile up by my bedside; sometimes it now seems that gadgets do, the standby power of their LED lights staring at me like unfed dogs. Let’s talk about these machines, and their literary uses, in order of size, from small to large.


The Smartphone

The smartphone has clearly been recent technology’s greatest gift to literacy. Carrying one obliterates one’s greatest fear: of being trapped somewhere — a train, the D.M.V., a toilet — with nothing whatsoever to read.

Most of what I devour on my phone is journalism: out-of-town newspapers and links gleaned from Twitter and Facebook. Ben Franklin would have liked this palm-size medium. He’s the founding father who said, “Read much, but not too many books.”

Franklin’s autobiography happens to be an ideal thing to have on your phone. It’s in the public domain, and thus free for the Kindle app. Here’s another unlikely choice: John Cheever’s “Journals,” the most underrated nonfiction book of the 20th century. Cheever’s entries are bite-size yet profound. They are aching when not outright grim; they’ll place the soul-killing events in your own life in context, and may even cheer you up.

I frequently seem to be scanning my iPhone in restaurants, while waiting to order or eating alone at the counter. I like to read about food before a meal; it sharpens the appetite and can lead to drooling. Two favorites are memoirs: “The Raw and the Cooked,” by Jim Harrison, my true north of food writers, and “Blood, Bones & Butter,” by Gabrielle Hamilton. Scrolling through Ms. Hamilton’s memoir, you’ll find this shrewd bit of advice: “Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it the rest of your life.”

Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to ****ens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.


E-Readers

More fetching than a girl with a dragon tattoo has always been a girl with a Penguin Classic. With e-books, you have no idea what anyone is reading. This is an incalculable loss, not just to fleeting crushes but to civilization.

That said, e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle strike me as the most intimate, and thus sexiest, of these devices. They’re the Teddy Pendergrass of platforms. On most, the text isn’t backlit, and thus trying too hard, always a turnoff. You are less inclined to cheat on one — that is, to read e-mail or surf the Web. In reading, like love, fidelity matters.

Because e-books don’t have covers, teenagers may find it easier to consume the books some parents used to confiscate — “Forever,” by Judy Blume, “Flowers in the Attic,” by V. C. Andrews. Their parents will think they are playing Angry Birds.

I’m an admirer of Jonathan Franzen, the gifted novelist who has been outspoken about his dislike of electronic books. But if you aren’t a fan of Mr. Franzen’s, I would guess that reading his novels on a Kindle, a device he loathes, might be considered a literary form of hate sex.

E-readers, excellent for singles — short, novella-length books — are also the platform to turn to when going long, when it’s time to finally pick up Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” or William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” (Shop local, when you can. Ask your local independent bookseller about buying e-books through them.)


The iPad

The iPad, for me, is thus far the place to toss the kind of big nonfiction books I’m probably going to attentively skim rather than read — Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, for example, or “Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008,” by the superb cultural critic John Leonard.

I like, too, that some of these nonfiction books offer electronic footnotes that take you straight to a source. Those sources are sometimes much better than the book you are holding. There are often more unusual things to click. The iPad app for Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” for example, is a sensorium of maps and timelines and other things, in addition to the text. “Whither goes thou, America,” he writes, here as in the paper version, “in thy shiny car in the night?”

I’m not sold on these kinds of add-ons, lovely as they are. If I want TV, I have one. But I can imagine a young person being wooed. Art books, too — many of them are available free — are a treat on the iPad. The clarity is breathtaking, like a snort of some visual drug.

I’ve tried poetry on each of these platforms: Larkin, ****inson, Philip Levine, Amy Clampitt. It’s not happening, at least not for me. There’s not enough white space, nor silence. The poems seem shrunken and trapped, like lobsters half-dead in a supermarket glass pen, their claws rubber-banded. Poems should be printed on paper, or carved onto the dried husks of coconuts, so one can hoard them.

The one bit of verse that charmed me, when read on the iPad, was Clive James’s brilliant and witty “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” This poem forces you to wonder: What will remainders look like in our digital future? Where’s the 99-cents bin going to be?

You can’t read an e-book in the tub. You can’t fling one across the room, aiming, as Mark Twain liked to do, at a cat. And e-books will not furnish a room.


Writing in The Times in 1991, Anna Quindlen declared, “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

I am so down with that. But it’s the mental furniture that matters.

DieVixen

I dont know what I would do without my kindle. I could not care less about the feel or smell of a real book. Im in it for the story,and the fact that I can get the books cheaper on my kindle. I also think an overflowing bookshelf does not "decorate" a house. I take my kindle in the bath all the time(freezer bags work wonders) have you ever dropped a real book in the tub,if you werent done reading it you will be after that.

rml_16

Silver -- While no dictator can burn an e-reader, a dictator CAN reach into it with his own technology and erase it. And he can do that to every single e-reader that has that book on it in a matter of seconds.

Which is one more reason those things scare me.

TheRoadDog

My wife has a Kindle. Each one of my daughters has a Kindle. My co-workers all love their e-books. Everyone keeps trying to get me to buy one. Finally just had to say, "I am NEVER going to own a Kindle or any other e-book! Leave me alone."

I like a paperback. Always have one on me. I trade at the local used book store. They give 25% face value on your trade ins, and charge 50% on face value (in credit) . Plus 50 cents per book.

Costs me 50 cents a book. I have never run out of credit in 20 years. Just keep trading in my books and the books everyone else has no use for. I love going down to the book store and browsing, plus I am supporting a local business. I will be sad when ebooks finally put them out of business.

Plus....the price for an ebook is just as exorbitant as a new hardback novel. It's ridiculous. No wonder our kids nowadays don't read.

Grandysl

I love my Kindle. I was able to buy some books for my masters classes on it. Much cheaper. Will have paid for itself in a few more classes. It is a lot easier to carry around them the text books too. I have download .pdf files for work on it. I have started using it while on the stationary bike and elliptical and it is easier to sit it there and only touch the button to turn the page than it is to hold a book, With the way I sweat a regular book would be ruined before I could finish it.

I would like to get the Kindle Fire.

rml_16

My wife has a Kindle. Each one of my daughters has a Kindle. My co-workers all love their e-books. Everyone keeps trying to get me to buy one. Finally just had to say, "I am NEVER going to own a Kindle or any other e-book! Leave me alone."

I like a paperback. Always have one on me. I trade at the local used book store. They give 25% face value on your trade ins, and charge 50% on face value (in credit) . Plus 50 cents per book.

Costs me 50 cents a book. I have never run out of credit in 20 years. Just keep trading in my books and the books everyone else has no use for. I love going down to the book store and browsing, plus I am supporting a local business. I will be sad when ebooks finally put them out of business.

Plus....the price for an ebook is just as exorbitant as a new hardback novel. It's ridiculous. No wonder our kids nowadays don't read.

Another good point: Bargain books and used book stores where you can get books for pennies will be gone and you'll be paying full price for your e-books.

melg126

I actually started reading more once I got my ereader.

^^^ this ^^^^

DieVixen

I love my Kindle. I was able to buy some books for my masters classes on it. Much cheaper. Will have paid for itself in a few more classes. It is a lot easier to carry around them the text books too. I have download .pdf files for work on it. I have started using it while on the stationary bike and elliptical and it is easier to sit it there and only touch the button to turn the page than it is to hold a book, With the way I sweat a regular book would be ruined before I could finish it.

I would like to get the Kindle Fire.

My kindle paid for itself a month after I got it

DieVixen

grrrrr double post

rileamoyer

I like both. I love my books, my house is cluttered with books, kids books, college texts, paperbacks, antique books. They are precious. It is the one thing that is hard for me to get rid of, even if I never open it again. (I come from a family of educators). I even struggle with the act of tossing a magazine in the trash. That said, I love the convenience of my kindle and find it is great to take places (waiting at the dr.s office etc) and the ability to take several books with me at once when I travel in one small package. I expect I will even like hearing it read to me by my car when traveling. The written word is an awesome thing and I will continue to enjoy it in what ever format I can.

allifantastical

I like the feel, the weight, the smell of an actual paperback. I love cracking the spine of a new book when I'm turning page after page and the look of a well worn book on my shelf cannot be replaced.

Real books. I've never had to plug in a book.

I agree with both of these. I have actually been wanting a kindle for a while to see if I would like it, and that way I could get books I wanted instantaneously and a little cheaper, but it is something about physically having something. Just like DVD's....I am a huge movie collector and now everyone is buying them and saving them to a device.

I can throw a book in my purse and I can read it until I am done with it. A kindle, you will eventually lose battery life.

So I am torn. I think they should offer books with a digital copy, just like DVD's.

rungirl1973

I travel for work. I like reading a real book, but I will probably never go back. It's nice to carry the Kindle and not worry about what will happen if I finish the book I'm reading while I'm on the road.

Laces_0ut

Silver -- While no dictator can burn an e-reader, a dictator CAN reach into it with his own technology and erase it. And he can do that to every single e-reader that has that book on it in a matter of seconds.

Which is one more reason those things scare me.

all you have to do is turn off wifi, 3g....and the Dear Leader wont be able to touch your stuff.


ebooks are better in every way i'll never buy a paper book again.

srp2011

I used to think there was no way I would ever choose an electronic book over an e-book, but I travel a lot, both for work and fun, and it was such a pain to carry enough books to keep me going on a long trip, or I'd wind up having to buy a new one at the airport, which was invariably something that I didn't want to read, and I already had a box full of unread books at home... so I got a Kindle and loved it - so small and I can carry hundreds of books... and the screen was just like a printed page, no glare, grainy texture... Next I got an iPad, and now I can read or watch movies or tv shows or play games while I'm traveling carrying 1 device that's as big as a magazine. The only use I have for printed books now is reference books, where I want to be able to go back to certain pages, particularly figures and tables.