# What is holding back electronic books? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 18, 2008, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372 "2008-11-18T22:38:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Strassia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e8c25b/32.png) [@Strassia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Strassia)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2008, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/121 "2008-11-24T19:15:37Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Another thing to remember is that we haven’t even reached the generation of kids yet that has “grown up” on electronic reading. Few kids spend any significant time on the computer reading anything. Sure, there’s plenty of educational games out there that kids love, but they’ll equate that to game playing, not reading. > > By the time they begin using a computer to actually read articles or stories or their best friend’s Facebook page, they’ll be old enough that reading stories is tied firmly with books. So it will be a very long time before the “old book readers” die off because they’re still being born. How many of them will have Gameboys (or Leapfrogs) before they learn to read? Go to a toy store or look on line at how many electronic reading tutors are out there. Some children born today may come to see paper books as only for young children and babies. Jonathan ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Moto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de0a6/32.png) [@Mr.Moto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Moto)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2008, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/122 "2008-11-24T19:43:24Z")
> [@Pork\_Rind](#): > > The screens are the same. The Kindle is a little bigger and has a keyboard. I’ve heard that the page turning buttons on the Kindle are awkward depending on where you hold the device. > > The Kindle has always-on wireless access to the ebooks on Amazon, the Sony connects to its online bookstore via your computer. You can also get content onto the Kindle via USB or direct write to the card. And the wireless can be kept switched off until needed. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2008, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/123 "2008-11-24T22:30:23Z")
Does the wireless on Kindle access any site other than Amazon? And is either Kindle or Sony compatible with other ebooks? ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/124 "2008-11-25T01:11:39Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Another thing to remember is that we haven’t even reached the generation of kids yet that has “grown up” on electronic reading. Few kids spend any significant time on the computer reading anything. Sure, there’s plenty of educational games out there that kids love, but they’ll equate that to game playing, not reading. > > By the time they begin using a computer to actually read articles or stories or their best friend’s Facebook page, they’ll be old enough that reading stories is tied firmly with books. So it will be a very long time before the “old book readers” die off because they’re still being born. Young readers are not going to fetishize print books like older readers. Due to my job, I sit in on a secondary ed class about adolescent literacy. Something that comes up again and again is the fact that there is a growing technology gap between teachers and students. This isn’t a group of people discussing a potential problem–these are all teachers who are working on their Masters in education and who are dealing with this technology gap every single day. These students are attached to technology 24/7, and while they treat cell phones like extensions of their own bodies, they are not big readers. If teachers view ebook technology like some of the people in this thread, that technology gap they’re sensing now is only going to get worse. Kindle is only compatible with Amazon. Sony readers, however are compatible with a wide variety of formats, I believe, and you can easily get programs that will read other formats. You can also convert formats. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Moto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de0a6/32.png) [@Mr.Moto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Moto)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/125 "2008-11-25T02:41:00Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > Does the wireless on Kindle access any site other than Amazon? And is either Kindle or Sony compatible with other ebooks? **Pepperlandgirl** is mistaken - there are other sites providing both free and paid content for the Kindle. For one thing, Kindle has a browser that while not perfect does pretty good with text-centric websites - I’ve posted to the Dope from my Kindle. Any content the Kindle can easily handle (Amazon formatted ebooks, Mobipocket formatted books, text and doc files) can be downloaded just by clicking a link. Feedbooks has done a lot of work in this area - any of their books can be downloaded wirelessly, as can Project Gutenberg .txt files from their website. Most ebook sellers sell books the Kindle can easily read or read after conversion. The free Mobipocket Reader software has a great rss feed reader that will write the articles to the Kindle in a wonderfully formatted form - the blog entries or articles show as selectable entries in a TOC. This does require a USB connection - but a good wireless feed reader is maintained by the aforementioned Feedbooks. Long and short - there are lots of choices and more all of the time. ---
**Author:** ![lizardling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f4b2a3/32.png) [@lizardling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lizardling)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/126 "2008-11-25T02:53:11Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > How about something like goggles you could put on where the motion of your eye scrolls the text? Hands-free, portable, usable in complete privacy, and usable in the dark. Eyes tend to move in a sort of cris-cross pattern across the page – zoom back and forth, and then shift back up a bit to take it in again. So eye motion sensitive goggles would need more work. Maybe if they had a sensor for specific muscle twitches, that would be better since it’d be less likely to mix the lot up. That said, I’ve been a Fictionwise member for almost as long as they’ve been around. I had a Visor (man, I miss being able to read in the dark without burning out my retinas and its battery life!) at that time – now I have a T-Mobile Dash with color and much less impressive battery life – but I still read books on it from time to time. I haven’t bought a dedicated ebook reader though, because of price/utility. Plus the breakage factor. 😕 ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/127 "2008-11-25T05:25:40Z")
> [@pepperlandgirl](#): > > Young readers are not going to fetishize print books like older readers. Tell that to the hordes of kids obsessed with Harry Potter and Twilight. Child and teenage readers hav eno reason to turn away from books right and no amount of technology will be widespread enough to change that for a long time. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/128 "2008-11-25T05:37:58Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Tell that to the hordes of kids obsessed with Harry Potter and Twilight. Child and teenage readers hav eno reason to turn away from books right and no amount of technology will be widespread enough to change that for a long time. I didn’t say that young readers won’t ever want to read again. I’m talking about people who are intimately tied to the actual physicality of a book. Look at the responses in this thread. One of the most repeated is that a book has to smell like a book and feel like a book and probably taste like a book in order for people to get the complete reading experience. I love to read. I own hundreds of books. But for me, the important thing is the _content_, not the delivery device. I honestly do not care about physical books at all. Nobody should ever lend me one, because I’ll probably accidentally destroy it (that’s why I just buy books I want instead of messing around with libraries). I’ve been around a lot of young people–smart, mostly well-read students, and the be-all and end-all is not holding a book in hand. They’d be just as happy to embrace a technology that gets them their HP or Twilight without the wait and purchase price of a hardback book (or the vulnerability of a paperback). ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/129 "2008-11-25T06:30:46Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > There is one thing I forgot to mention. I can stand on a station platform and read a paperback and be invisible. I would feel a bit of an attention-seeking tit if I stood there reading from some futuristic-looking tablet device. > > This will no doubt fade away as ebooks grow in popularity, but I’ll let someone else bear the brunt of public curiosity and ogling. I do this every day on BART (San Francisco). So far as I can tell, no-one notices. I did have one nice young lady ask me about it once, after we were on the train. As someone noted, the Kindle is a lot easier to read while eating, but I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that it is easier to use while doing some kinds of exercise (compared to a paperback). You don’t have to hold the pages down; you just have to flick the Next Page button every so often, and you can do that with either hand. I used it on the elliptical and on the stationary bicycle. Roddy ---
**Author:** ![Gukumatz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/74df32/32.png) [@Gukumatz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gukumatz)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/130 "2008-11-25T16:09:06Z")
I currently have my entire collection of legal material, including case files, precedents and court recordings, as well as about 5 years worth of published articles, at the tip of my thumb. Nearly all of it is word-searchable, I can add and edit margin notes, set up bookmarks and flip between the texts on the fly. It’s made the legal side of my exams so incredibly much easier, I don’t know how I ever stood without it. ---
**Author:** ![Strassia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e8c25b/32.png) [@Strassia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Strassia)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/131 "2008-11-25T16:38:03Z")
> [@lizardling](#): > > Eyes tend to move in a sort of cris-cross pattern across the page – zoom back and forth, and then shift back up a bit to take it in again. So eye motion sensitive goggles would need more work. Maybe if they had a sensor for specific muscle twitches, that would be better since it’d be less likely to mix the lot up. > > That said, I’ve been a Fictionwise member for almost as long as they’ve been around. I had a Visor (man, I miss being able to read in the dark without burning out my retinas and its battery life!) at that time – now I have a T-Mobile Dash with color and much less impressive battery life – but I still read books on it from time to time. I haven’t bought a dedicated ebook reader though, because of price/utility. Plus the breakage factor. 😕 FYI, the MobiPocket reader allows you to set the background color to black. I use white text on black to read in the light and dark read on black to read in the dark. I keep my brightness at the lowest level and my battery on my new Palm T|X lasts longer than the one on my Visor did. > [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > I do this every day on BART (San Francisco). So far as I can tell, no-one notices. I did have one nice young lady ask me about it once, after we were on the train. > > As someone noted, the Kindle is a lot easier to read while eating, but I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that it is easier to use while doing some kinds of exercise (compared to a paperback). You don’t have to hold the pages down; you just have to flick the Next Page button every so often, and you can do that with either hand. I used it on the elliptical and on the stationary bicycle. > Roddy I read my Palm everywhere. On BART, waiting in line at the grocery store, eating. It is small enough that it is not obvious. I got comments on it at first, but I think now people assume I am checking my email or web surfing. I also use it exercising and it is much easier than a book. It is also less likely to get damaged. > [@Gukumatz](#): > > I currently have my entire collection of legal material, including case files, precedents and court recordings, as well as about 5 years worth of published articles, at the tip of my thumb. Nearly all of it is word-searchable, I can add and edit margin notes, set up bookmarks and flip between the texts on the fly. It’s made the legal side of my exams so incredibly much easier, I don’t know how I ever stood without it. At work, I prefer all my manuals and technical documents in soft copy. It makes it easier to search for spec or procedure. I tried loading them on my palm, but it does not work well with all the diagrams and tables, so I just use my laptop for that. Jonathan ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/132 "2008-11-25T19:54:04Z")
> [@Strassia](#): > > At work, I prefer all my manuals and technical documents in soft copy. It makes it easier to search for spec or procedure. I tried loading them on my palm, but it does not work well with all the diagrams and tables, so I just use my laptop for that. > > Jonathan This is _entirely_ my point about my Dungeons and Dragons books. Sure, my PDFs may have links, but most of the time, I need to flip five pages forwards and back repeatedly to deal with issues. They don’t work so well shrunk down so far. ---
**Author:** ![Gangster\_Octopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a8b319/32.png) [@Gangster\_Octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gangster_Octopus)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/133 "2008-11-25T20:07:01Z")
What’s hiolding back electronic books? Price price price. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/134 "2008-11-25T20:39:38Z")
I think the devices will come down in price and gain in capabilities. Give me a device which is a book reader plus basic computer with wifi, internet browser, word processor, spreadsheet and a few other basic applications for $200 and I’d buy it. In other words, an oversized Blackberry. I find the blackberry is not too useful for those things. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2008, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372/135 "2008-11-25T21:07:29Z")
Thought I’d do a gonzo and post [this](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1861484,00.html?cnn=yes) drive by link, as it has to do with the thread. It’s a Time article which talks about digitizing books into electronic format. I still think that we won’t see wide scale adoption of specialized e-books until the readers are cheap enough to make it easy to buy coupled with a wider range of features such as WiFi or other wireless periodical services. Still, the article should be interesting to anyone who likes digitized media and is happy with their current reader technology. -XT [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-holding-back-electronic-books/473372.md?page=6)