It’s not all positive. Mostly I remember being frustrated searching for a book, being hurried because I’m on someone else’s timetable for a trip to the mall, and somehow always having to pee. What is it about a bookstore that makes me realize I need to use the restroom NOW?
Not any more. At least, not in my case.
Last fall, I took a computer class. Physical book: 150. E-book: 150. THEN, CAME THE BIG DOUBLE CROSS!
After I got it loaded, I found out: it was a rental! It didn’t say it on the outer packaging. Three months later, gone! Now, I don’t have a future reference, so I will have to go online, as I well could have before buying the book, for information that I need.
Where did you buy it that didn’t clearly mark it as a rental?
Me too. Some of my favorite books, even a few which opened up whole new areas of interest for me, were chance discoveries browsing. Computer algorithms (“people who liked that also liked this”) seem stiflingly collectivist and perhaps even symptomatic of today’s hyper-polarization problems.
Browsing book stores has been a major hobby of mine since I first read Wizard of Oz 55 years ago. I’ll rank the arrival of Kinokuniya Book Stores as Bangkok’s most important advance in the last 20 years, much more important to me than the subway system!
I agree with your sentiments. Despite the huge size of the Web, there’s still a lot that’s only found in books … and a lot of old useful webpages that are no longer on-line. However, the fragility of paper may weaken your argument.
Indeed. Some people here (I don’t remember whether in this thread or another similar one) were pooh-poohing this, saying that the Amazon algorithm was just as good!
It’s like saying minestrone is a substitute for pasta.
There are ways for people to preserve paper, or there wouldn’t be so many old books, and far fewer ways for online info. OTOH, there’s also just not shelving certain (kinds of) books, and it’s not like anyone can check out and directly read really old or valuable works (something online does very very well).
It doesn’t have to be a substitute. You can browse Amazon, B&N.com, et al., by category, just like a physical store.
The way paper is preserved is that people reprint it. The way data is preserved is that people get copies of it. Guess which one happens more often?
The thing is, the Internet is rather permanent. Not completely, of course, but it is very good at keeping itself alive. It sees any attempt at censorship as an attack on itself. That’s why SOPA was defeated, for example. There’s currently an entire other Internet available in an underground network that, due to its spread and anonymous nature, cannot be deleted.
I have a lot more information that I had stored on my old hard drives than I do information that was on paper. The copying cost was negligible, so I took it. You think I have actual print copies of my homework from fourteen years ago?
It’s not that I don’t get your concerns. I just think they are invalid. It’s just yet another old person being scared by something new without actually sitting down to think about it. At least, not without disregarding your personal biases. You like doing X, so anything that threatens X must be bad.
Not that X is really that threatened. Print books are not going away, even if they are going to become less important. People like you really do like books, and many of them are much younger than you. There will be a sort of vintage market. I know people who pay companies to print out information from the Internet (like, say, from Fanfiction.net) into book form. And, as stated, ebooks are not killing the print market as much as many other factors.
The only real concern is the same one videogame aficionados have: the decline of the used market. But that’s going to just be made up with piracy. No matter what type of DRM they put in a book, it’s easy to circumvent, same as with music.
Are you saying I’m fucking old?! 
Or worse, that you’re so old that you’re not fucking?
Unfortunately, age is NOT a factor in THAT.
College bookstore. Not clearly marked, at least not until I broke the wrapper, which, in re: ebooks w/software, at my school, equates to “No refund”.
I thought that I had neglected to read the disclaimer, immediately after I loaded it onto my computer. Nope. Not clearly marked.
And, again, in addition to transitory, NOT cheaper.
Note how many answers in this thread involve the phrase, or the equivalent of the phrase, SOL.
Granted, with more companies, you’d have less of a chance of something like that happening. But only less. And this isn’t even considering the problems with reading old data formats as technology moves on (I wonder how much of our daily lives and culture will be accessible to scholars and interested people 200 years from now, the way we today can view the culture and daily life of 200 years ago).
Oh, and “going to be made up for with piracy” above: I would wager most people don’t pirate, at least not consciously. As for the Internet being permanent, wasn’t there a post earlier about how much info that was once online is now gone forever because the site that was hosting it went down, or the guy who posted it removed it? I sure can’t find this one old fan film that was once on YouTube, but the creator closed the account. I wish the Internet was permanent in that instance, but it obviously was not.
I wouldn’t mind it if I could save a copy of the ebooks to a storage device of my own.
But I’m just renting.
And Amazon can remove a book I have bought access to anytime they want, censor it at the behest of my Government, or under pressure from another Government (say, China?).
And if Amazon goes bankrupt, my library goes POOF! And I lose all the money I put into it.
And don’t yip at me about how “silly” the idea of Amazon going bankrupt is. I’ve watched one major firm after another go belly up in my life, all due to idiotic management.
I love paper books, & will keep buying them as long as possible.
I do not own an e-reader. I have no desire to.
Um, no, they can’t do that. Or rather, the government can’t do that. That’s Civics 101, man.
Why would they do that? Do you even realize what you’re saying?
You do know you can download ebooks onto your computer, right? (I believe Amazon allows you to download the kindle software, doesn’t it? I could swear I read that somewhere) So just burn them to a cd. Easy-peasy.
I don’t have an e-reader either, but yes, that’s a ridiculous idea, Bosda.
No, it’s even worse than ridiculous.
Kindle books are stored ON YOUR READER. The amount of storage depends on which version of the reader you have, but I’ve read that there is about 3GB of storage or enough for 3500 books.
If Amazon goes under that means only one thing: that you can’t get more books from them. You will still have access to the ones you bought as long as you can make the reader work.
And e-readers are going the way of 8-track tapes. More people everyday are using their computers, or tablets, or smartphones or whatever to read on. E-readers are not the same as e-books. E-books are the future, although their form and format are still developing.
I vastly prefer reading print books myself. But Bosda’s rant is so factually wrong that it doesn’t merit discussion.
This was in indirect response to my celebration of physical book browsing, so let me clarify my earlier remark.
I walk at a sedate pace inside a bookstore, glancing at books here and there. I’ve developed a strong interest in historical linguistics, and have enjoyed almost a dozen books on the topic. It all began with a book browsed at random, a book that caught my eye as I walked between the poetry and engineering sections of the large Santa Cruz book store.
There’s a large used-book store in Singapore whose books aren’t well sorted, but where I spotted John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. This discovery was completely unrelated to any deliberate search; and reading the book has confirmed only what I already knew: writing fiction is not a plausible career choice for me. Yet that book is spectacular in its lucidity and intelligence and I recommend it for fun reading, even to those who, like me, have no interest in writing fiction.
I do realize that some of the advantages of physical-bookstore browsing can be emulated with on-line quasi-random Google search clicking. To an extent, I’m an old-fashioned “dinosaur.” But I don’t think I’m the only one who fears that faith in our “brave new electronic world,” rather than the tactile world that served primates for millions of years, is excessively optimistic.
I have Kindle apps for Windows and Android, and I can read my books on as many devices as I like. There are Blackberry, iThingy and OSX apps too.
I’m not entirely sure that you can burn Amazon ebooks to a CD because of the DRM, but you could always print a copy.
I think it’s a bit much to yearn for “the tactile world that served primates for millions of years” in the context of books. I am fairly certain that Gutenberg and homo habilus were not contemporaries.
I don’t think the Amazon algorithm is just as good. What I do think is better than browsing in a bookstore is browsing on the web. I might be reading a review of Book X, but the sidebar of the review site has 5 other books that may or may not have any relevance to Book X, but one looks good, so I read that review, and then there’s another link to a book that reminds me of that one that my friend recommended to me last week, so I go off hunting for that one, and on the way I stop at NPR’s book review page that reminds me of that book they were talking about on “This American Life” last week and on and on and on.
With a bookstore, you’re limited to the books they happen to have on their shelves, which are generally chosen based on what sells and what they want to market. I’ve had my share of fun browsing through bookstores, but I’ll take “download the first chapter free” and “read a bunch of reviews” and “you can look up just about any book that’s every been published” over “Oh, this looks good on the shelf!” any day.
If we’re going to gauge our behavior by that of our extremely distant ancestors, we shouldn’t be reading at all. Literacy, especially universal literacy, is a new thing–as the eons go.
I got sucked into the world of Kindle by getting a smartphone with a big screen. Hey, I can get the Kindle software free! Hey, there are bunch of classic books free or really cheap (the really cheap ones are usually worth the 1.99)! Hey (while sitting in a dark bar with wifi), I could have a copy of a particular favorite on my phone! (Drinking + shopping = danger!)
So I got a cute Kindle Paperwhite & have the software on my netbook & desktop PC. But the house is still filled with books. Now, if there is no Kindle edition or a ridiculously expensive one–so I get the print version; usually from an independent sellers using the Amazon storefront. And Half Price books is still handy–especially for the big illustrated books better read “in person.”