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Here to Stay…

By Kevin

Books: No Way Man!

I love books, and I guess it's obvious. In fact it's not just about reading the text on them or the intellect of the contents; I love every bit of it: the pages, the preface, the introductions, acknowledgements, the blip which almost all books would have and the book covers (hard or paperback) - in short, everything about it.

Like Megan Buskey, on It is possible to read anything serious on computer?, I'll be real sad to see real physical books go but on another hand, I'm actually encouraging people to read on computer more by starting this blog - and I'm hoping people would read serious stuff on the computer when I write here. Implicitly, I believe that news bites, short pieces of contents here and there can be published and read online but at the end of the day, long writing ought to be enjoyed on books. I do loads of parallel reading (that is, reading many different books at the same time, hopping from one to another when I get bored and so on; it works great with non-fiction because they don't exactly hold on to your attention as much as fiction), which means that I would miss out the fun of picking up another book and looking at where I last ended off if I used a device like Kindle.

Nicholson Baker, New Yorker contributor also doubts Kindle is anything superior to the good old paper-based books in his recent writing, 'A New Page'. In his account of his experience with Kindle, he cited the influence of advertisements, the story behind the Kindle development, the pros and cons of the device and the various competitors. It was a long account although not the longest I ever got to read on New Yorker, written in a story-like manner that flowed continuously - the usual New Yorker style.

But Kindle still represents a great leap from the past. In 2000, The Economist published a survey on E-Entertainment and pondered over the reasons one could spend hundreds of bucks on a device to read a limited pool of publications available and in a dozen different kind of formats. It cited the chicken-and-egg problem facing commercialization of e-books, problems with copyrights, and that the only advantage the e-books had over their off-screen counterparts was that most were free and concluded that e-books were something not many would want.

5 years later, The Economist reported on the rise of digitalized copies of books made available online (though often incomplete) by the tech giants like Google. They made no mention about e-book reader technologies although they discussed the fact that the ability to search the content of published materials is a good thing for publishers since users could preview book contents over the net and be enticed to make their orders.

Kindle is a great success today to be able to find the market of people who don't mind purchasing the gadget and to fork out just a little below the printed book prices on those virtual gray text on the gray screen of their Kindle. Nevertheless, it will probably have a long way to go before even barely resembling a book or replicating the experience of reading a real one - books are here to stay, at least within my lifetime I hope.