About the future and privations
- ebook they are the future of the book. At least of something really unpredictable and despite what is happening, i Digital books are the heirs of print. Yet the ebook is terribly flawed. There are very important aspects of book culture which, for now, cannot be easily found in their digital heirs and will be lost. The generation that has known books will certainly miss them.
First let's put things in their proper context. More than 10 years ago Amazon kicked off the ebook revolution with the Kindle and is now selling more digital books than print books. Then Amazon wiped out all the competition and now 83% of the digital book market is theirs. As a result of this result, it has lost all interest in innovating both in terms of ebooks and books. The status quo is Amazon's Eldorado. Barnes & Noble, the historic bookstore chain, is on the verge of bankruptcy, also due to its failure to compete with Amazon in terms of digital offerings. His Nook is all but dead and Apple's books are irrelevant.
The old-time argument that the iPad and tablets would kill the Kindle is laughable today, both go along without a fuss and many have both. On one thing paper books and digital books are the same: in their own way they are "agnostic" with respect to the platform and the way of reading. Today there is the hybrid player.
But, for all the advantages they unquestionably have, eBooks aren't overpowering their paper analogues, in fact they are outclassed by them. In any case, those who continue to prefer the screen to paper for reading books should know that they are missing something. Technology is not always privative: we have enjoyed cutting the telephone wire, we have freed ourselves from spelling with SMS and we like to watch TV on our laptops, tablets and smartphones. But with books it's quite different, because technology has a privative side.
I'm not defending the tactile experience argument (the smell and feel of paper as an integral part of reading) that can be heard from those who will never go digital and end up disliking it as well.
I think books are eternal collector's items, but I also think they will become more and more of a niche media in the future. With that belief in mind, however, here are 10 flaws in eBooks that could persuade us to NEVER say "goodbye" to print media. And why should we?
The 10 activities of which the ebook they will deprive us
1. A ebook that you haven't finished reading is not a permanent invitation to finish it
In 2011, New York Times tech reporter Jenna Wortham wrote with great effervescence that she had finally finished reading her first ebook. How can such enthusiasm be explained in someone so tech-savvy? Wirham has a good explanation: She would leave any ebook she started reading halfway through, because she forgot it. So she had made a solemn New Year's resolution to put an end to this habit.
Ebooks do not exist in our field of vision. They don't push you with their physicality to finish what you started. They are not some permanent, embarrassing bedside relics of your bad reading habits. Thus the hundred bought and started ebooks that are out of sight are also out of mind. For example, I often buy an ebook again that I had already bought and even started reading. Luckily there's Amazon to remind me that I've already bought it!
A possible solution? We should invent a stalker algorithm that automatically continues to notify you that you've been on page 17 of your book for 17 days. You can be inspired by the appagonistics.
2. You can't keep all the ebook in one place
The books in your bookstore don't care which store they come from. But in tablets and ereaders, the shelves are divided by vendor — you can't have all the books you've purchased from different vendors in one place. Simply because there doesn't exist, and there never will be, an app that allows it. (With many platforms you are doubly penalized, because you cannot buy anything outside the platform store). Apple, for example, doesn't allow developers to access internal folders where ebooks are stored in order to fetch them for a single library on an iOS device. Even if this restriction disappeared, it would be difficult to bring the various vendors to an agreement, who are also competitors ready to unleash a price war at the first sign of smoke.
But there's more: the way we read digitally is the opposite of how we actually read. To choose a book to read, we take it from the shelf and immediately start leafing through it. To choose its digital equivalent, we should turn on the device, search for the reading app, open the entire library, search for the ebook with a keyword (of the title, or author), touch the cover to open the connected application — Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks. With this sequence — turn on the device, open the app, choose the book, start the app — you risk easily forgetting what else we have available. Banal? Try to imagine La Feltrinelli wanting to impose the size and shape of the shelves of your home library on you and forcing you to fill it only with books that you bought in her shop. Doesn't this idea irritate you by itself?
3. The notes in the margins of the book help you think
In ebooks, the option to highlight certain passages is not enough. An attentive reader wants to write about the book in close proximity to the original context. Books offer some white space in the margins (albeit less and less), but ebooks have none at all. They have to go a vicious circle to get us to write a comment that you don't even see at first glance. And this comment can only be shared between those who have the same app. And so does the serendipity of discovering the annotations of readers in books exchanged or purchased on second-hand stalls go away?
Replicating this experience in ebooks would require new, universally accepted standards among competitors whose technology is, unlike the book, proprietary.
4. E-books are not a property
This is easy, I would say, ultra simple to explain since it is about money and property. But until the ebook offers added value, as Hollywood has done with DVD extras, the $13 for what is, for all intents and purposes, a rental is hard to knock. The production of an ebook costs practically nothing and the cover price, set by the publisher, is just below that of a new paperback edition.
Price isn't the only problem. Ebooks cannot be lent, shared, donated to the local library or resold on Secondamano. Because they're not like books, they're like software. You are not buying unlimited ownership of an asset, you are buying a limited license to use it. This license is strictly personal and may not be transferred, assigned or sold. You can't pass an ebook to a friend after reading it. To give it to him, you'd have to give him your entire account, including your credit card. If you trust it, you can do it, but otherwise it is inadvisable. You can always crack it, but in doing so you violate the law and become, for a good purpose, pirates. There will be a reduced sentence.
5. E-books cannot be used to decorate the house
Before you widen your eyes at the banality of this observation, consider this: when in your intellectual life have you not embellished your environment with books that introduced you, without the need for a word, to your friends?
It may be a show of vanity, but books—how we organize them, how we arrange them on shelves, which ones we don't keep—say a lot about what we want the world to think of us. Perhaps more than any other household object, books are our emblem, our icebreaker, our calling card. Padlocked in the dungeons of digital players, no one can hear them talk about you anymore.
6. E-books cannot be read during takeoff and landing of an aircraft
"Sir we are in the process of taking off, please turn it off." This the flight attendant will politely tell us. No flight attendant from any airline in the world will ever ask you to close your book. Reading is a very therapeutic activity in these moments. It eases the tension and pours it into the plot of the story you are reading. If we carry an ebook reader with us we have to look these moments in the face, perhaps squinting, but it is not the same as the book. Maybe bring one of poems, which is light, to be opened after the announcement “Gentlemen, the descent has begun…”.
7. A ebook it cannot be used to shoe a slamming door
If you want to air your house on a clear May morning by opening your doors and windows, you can't use an ebook to shoe a door that slams in a draft. A book may have the right thickness or even volume, if hardcover, to accomplish this purpose. The ebook is blown away by the wind.
8. A ebook it can't be a clue to your travel neighbor's tastes
Peering at the covers of books opened by passengers traveling in the same commuter carriage, one can sense a sort of intellectual correspondence with those who share the same readings or authors. It's a feeling that gives great comfort on a cold winter morning. Observing people immersed in their devices can only measure the level of monadism to which our time has come.
9. A ebook it will never become an antique
A book can last even a millennium without losing its immediate enjoyment. Lasting this long, it becomes an antique and appreciates over time. An ebook lasts as long as the technology that embeds it, even if it is made with an open system. Content and form are totally ancillary to the medium that supports them. After 10 years any technology is cooked.
10. A ebook it cannot be wrapped with a red ribbon to be given as a Christmas gift
All platforms allow you to give an ebook as a gift, virtually pack it and add an accompanying note. But would anyone give an important gift like this? How to reuse the red ribbon and wrapping paper that wraps a book to wrap the gift of a different one to a friend.
To balance the conversation. We could list the things you can't do with the book. But there are really too many. So, as someone suggests, we should do this: when you buy a book, the publisher also gives you the ebook. That way you won't miss anything.
those who live abroad find ebooks far better than the physical books they can't buy in bookstores.