E-Book Love/Hate

I have been avoiding posting on e-books for a while. Strangely, reading article after article about them and how they are taking off and what the newest sales figures are and what new reader is coming out and how publishers are making more books available but how they've been around for ten years and haven't gone anywhere, and what possible obstacles there might be, and who likes then and who doesn't, has inspired more exhaustion than interest in the issue. This has been a strange kind of exhaustion, fueled, I suspect, by deep-seated conflicts within my reader's soul. Recently, though, I had a mini-epiphany about the subject, so I thought I'd try a post.

I was at the airport with my sister, looking for a last minute gift for her Irish boyfriend's parents. We went into a Brookstone-like store, maybe it was a Brookstone's, and I saw it. A Sony reader. Wuthering Heights was up on the screen, as if the express goal of this display was to draw someone like me in. And I liked it. A lot. I can say now that an e-reader, even for someone who loves books as objects as much as I do, is not out of the question for me. It didn't seem foreign or inconvenient in the least--it seemed like a perfectly natural way to read something, in fact it seemed like a great way to read something especially somewhere like the airport. In the spirit of this new openness to the technology, here is a list of reasons I think e-books are about to take off. In an honest nod to the drawbacks that still make me hesitant about the technolgy, and that probably inspire the sense of intertia and reluctance I have to talking about the topic, it is followed by a list of reasons why e-books and -readers still kind of suck.

Why I Love E-Books and Why They Will Take Over the Book World
1.Convenience: Having oodles of books at your command in one little book-shaped package can never be a bad thing. You can easily draw up a recent read to look at a particular passage, you can load enough books to have one ready no matter what mood you're in, you can amass a small library without cluttering up your house, you can buy "books" and have them in your possession instantaneously, and so on.
2.Tech Cred: Books are inherently old-fashioned, and they can never really be exactly in line with modern textual forms without completely losing their identity. A book is not an internet article is not a piece of fanfiction is not a series of text messages is not a blog. However, e-books are on a more level plane with these forms, and could make it easier for the tech-obsessed to cross over into the Wonderful World of Books. It seems a bit trivial, but this is probably the most important factor pushing e-books ahead. As people get used to consuming all of their other information in a certain way, it will only seem natural to bring books into the fold. As for what will help devoted techies develop the sort of attention span that books demand, I don't know.
3.Enriched Possibilities: Just because books are happy anacronisms doesn't mean they have to be completely walled off from technological development. They can retain their character while being enriched as e-books by such features as searchable text, hyperlinks, easy e-dictionary access, etc. The electronic medium, especially when combined with internet access, offers hosts of opportunites to make reading easier, deeper, more in touch. There is some danger here too--I can see excessive distractions interfering with the essentially private, concerted nature of book-reading, but there is good possibility.
4.Environmentally Friendly: I guess. As in no paper. And no planes and trains schlepping everything to bookstores. Though I'm not sure those batteries and microchips and such will be very landfill friendly.

As you might have noticed, I couldn't help myself from qualifying many of the positives above. In addition to those drawbacks, here are some sore points...

Why I Hate E-Books and Why They Will Never Succeed
1.Cost of Readers: During my little airport encounter I was probably equally struck by the insane price tag on the reader as I was by its loveliness. More, I guess, since the price tag overcame my appreciation for the object and caused me not to buy it. Readers are too expensive, period. I guess in theory it should be okay for them to cost about the same as an iPod, but somehow it's not. With the advent of e-reader apps for cell phones, this is becoming less of a problem, though. I have yet to see or be bowled over by an iPhone e-reader, but with the likes of Joe Wikert of Kindleville turning coat, and even though the iPhone is backlit, and isn't book-shaped or specifically designed to make e-book reading convenient, I think its a fair bet that such apps will solve the e-reader problem before we have to worry about Sony and Amazon slashing prices. Still, this might remain an obstacle to serious readers who'd prefer e-ink, features specially adapted to book reading, dedicated and safe hardrive space, etc. Combined with other book-lover qualms, this could sentence e-books to permanent casual-reading status. Which I guess is not a terrible thing.
2.Cost of Books: However, the cost of books will remain an issue. There's been a lot of talk about this at GalleyCat and TeleRead. I remember being offended when I learned that the average cost of an e-book was ten dollars, and just plain scornful when I saw that some publishers were trying to charge more than fifty. I don't care if it's a textbook! People are used to paying a dollar for an mp3. They are used to having a pretty physical book when they pay slightly more than ten dollars for it in a store. Ten dollars is not going to cut it. I don't know the reasoning behind this figure, and I don't really care. All I can think of is how you didn't have to pay to print and distribute the physical thing. Intuitively, this leads to a big price cut--whether or not you can come up with reasons why an ephemeral file is almost as expensive to get to me. My intuition tells me I don't like it. And I'm not going to buy your book.
3.It's Just a File: Like I said, it's ephemeral. I don't like the idea of paying solid money for something I can't touch. I don't have to pay for things I read on the internet. And while I won't have a physical book taking up space, I will have this digital one clogging my hardrive and likely bulking up my iPhone, so I will erase it soon, and then I'll have nothing. And I don't like that. Have you seen how big houses have become in this country? For a lot of people, eliminating book clutter is not a huge issue. And for many more, to lose it would be a sad thing. What could be better than a rich tapestry of book spines shelved on your wall? Pulling them down, loaning them to people, appreciating their feel while you read. I don't think this fetishism is an impenetrable barrier to e-books. I could see myself, as I toyed with the e-reader in the store, taking in my books this way while maintaining an appreciation for traditional books. On the other hand, I don't think the wish to elimiate book clutter is a big enough incentive to mass e-book acceptance as long as important drawbacks remain. Such as their dubious value over time and their troubling impermanence.
4.But My Books!: I'll just say it: they're not books! Strange as it seems to say, books are pretty amazing pieces of technology themselves. They're ideally sized, they couldn't be more intuitive to use, and they present their content in a highly efficient maner. And they're also pretty to look at and nice to hold. As I said before, books are old-fashioned. Maybe it's appropriate that they retain their old form, instead of trying pathetically to mimic the trappings of their flashy new cousins. You can read a book in short installments on the subway or while standing in line, but at bottom books aren't really meant to be consumed like the easily digestible blog posts and online articles that are more appropriate for such times. Books are special. They require commitment, perserverance, private reflection, and prolonged attention. These are valuable things to practice, and they could get lost if we try to make books fit in too well with modern media.

I have tried to make this list more than just a reactionary book person's cry for the past. I didn't succeed, entirely, but I doubt such objectivity is possible for me. I get all frazzled thinking about this, so I don't think I'll be saying much more about the topic, but this has been a good cathartic roundup of my various reactions to all those masses of articles I've read on the subject. I'm sure others will continue dissecting e-books, so I will leave them to it.