E-Readers (Kindle, Nook, using iPad for reading) yay or nay

re-reading Lem's "Return from the Stars" (1961) this morning, lol'd at this passage:

"No longer was it possible to pbrowse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation... The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that - as it told me - it was linkeed directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth."

this makes me realize you've never been to a paper mill.

my point was that books are largely non-toxic and easily recycled at the end of their useful life, which is typically decades after being printed. this is not the case with e-readers, which will be obsolete in a few years, and cannot be easily recycled.

also dunno if yr aware of this but paper grows on trees and you can always grow more trees. after all the rare earth metals are mined, it's not like the earth's gonna make a lot more in a few years.

there's also the kid in 'stars in my pockets like grains of sand' who has an Absorb The Entire Western Canon brain plug or w/e

w.h. smith had demo units of their version of this idea out and i had a go on one and it took somewhere over a second to load the next 'page' of text -- are other units this bad? is it just me who finds this terrible and unworkable with?

if there was one that connected straight up to jstor etc i'd die for it. to read, like, novels, seems kind of pointless.

also the death of typography and the reading environment etc etc

like: I have no interest in an e-reader; I like the feel and smell of musty yellowed paper and the faint narcissistic thrill

understates the case of this stuff somewhat. thinking of the text of a book as some platonic ideal away from all decisions as to where it physically lies on the page = colossal dud

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O1_Ky06bV30/TodrT6hyl2I/AAAAAAAAAqU/-8VkV8t8gZc/s400/Hepburn12_152.jpg

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/1405/1323/14245

I have idly wondered how material that plays with typefaces and typesetting (like, say Alfred Bester, or Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head) is handled by e-readers

gotta say, when i think of that kind of thing those are the two first names to pop into my head too

ha i just got a nook and its p cool but this thread makes me want to take a hammer to it

the other thing I idly wonder about is how e-readers handle books that aren't intended to be read in sequence - Cortazar's Hopscotch for ex.

Hyperlinks?

my point was that books are largely non-toxic and easily recycled at the end of their useful life, which is typically decades after being printed. this is not the case with e-readers, which will be obsolete in a few years, and cannot be easily recycled.

Huh? Paper mill effluent is very toxic (count the number of paper product-related Superfund sites), the ink used in printing is toxic (I write production software for a big commercial printer and we have to track, monitor, and report every bit of ink to the air quality board), then there's the all the oil used to transport everything from mill, printer, distributor, book store, doorstep, and recycler.

e-reader production is just as toxic, but you have to factor in total production cost to deliver that book to your house.

yeahh shakey's environmental accounting is v. 1-dimensional

Whenever possible, I'll purchase the electronic version of a book over the printed version - I move around way too much and moving the books that I have now is a logistical hassle.

Still, it's going to be a long time before an e-reader will be up to replacing a big coffee-table art monograph, museum catalog, etc.

the other thing I idly wonder about is how e-readers handle books that aren't intended to be read in sequence - Cortazar's Hopscotch for ex.

James Burke's The Pinball Effect comes to mind too. Reading it feels like the footnotes are the text and the text are the footnotes.

man i was in b&n today and the cheapest nook is hella small and light, looks p dope

voted this I own an iPad or other tablet but mainly do my reading in old-fashionied books but the truth is i just dont read that many books anymore cause im too busy reading the internet rip

my parents are very into their kindles and ipads

i'm not really feeling it

ipad is great for traveling, not really sure it was worth the purchase price for how much i use it tho, i subscribed to the new yorker and ive barely read it, when i got the print magazine i demolished every issue so idk

I'm pretty much an agnostic when it comes to reading formats (I'm still baffled by folks who leave email, twitter, chat, etc. up when they're reading - turn all that distracting shit off!) but at least electronic editions don't necessarily have a single point of failure (fire, flood, etc.)

Also

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/images/Twilight-Zone-Time-Enough-At-Last-e1308174702152.png

In that Twilight Zone pic, most of the visible books appear to be old law books.

when the meteorite hits and the power grid is destroyed along with modern society, then you'll wish you'd eschewed these gadgets and kept a copy of 'the way things work' in a ziplock bag

The only thing that's srsly making me consider an e-reader is the previous 3 months I've been spending trying to read Infinite Jest on public transit. That shit is heavy to carry round and I can't comfortably hold & read it with one hand while standing on a packed bus. But I get most books from the library for free so I'd have to be doing a lot of commuting to justify the cost.

amazon kinder

In that Twilight Zone pic, most of the visible books appear to be old law books.

― Aimless, Wednesday, 21 December 2011 04:34 (4 hours ago) Permalink

what this teaches us is that howsoever the production and distribution mechanisms of the written word may change the logistics of set dressing will remain pretty much the same throughout

Ha

I use an iPad or other tablet for some of my reading

It's probably about half and half e-books on the iPad and paper books from the library. I love e-books for all the reasons stated above by others, although I really like paper books, too. I just like reading, so whatever allows me to read more makes me happy.

The iPad kind of blows as an e-reader on public transit so I have thought about getting a dedicated e-reader. I don't know, though. It feels kind of overly extravagant.

If I read on public transit I just use my phone. It's only 25 minutes, so not bad at all.

It drives me crazy when books aren't eAvailable. I've wanted to read Lore of Running for 2 years now but refuse to until it is available in ebook format.

i don't see the point of ipads either

is it really that they're just smaller than laptops? i kind of feel like i don't need a halfway house b/w the laptop and the phone

I use it as a laptop.

Also good for: reading books, watching movies/TV in bed or on planes, playing games, browsing the internet, light (and I mean light - if I have serious writing to do, I do it at the desktop computer) word processing, reading magazines, looking at recipes while you cook.

yeah - i think i'd rather have a keyboard i can type properly on (simply cannot deal with touchscreens) than a slightly lighter machine tbh

We also use the iPad to control our home theater pc. Although we can do that with phones as well. Basically the iPads are a constant couch companion. I cram mine in the cushions and just pull it out when ever I need to look something up.

You can get keyboard cases for it to give it a physical keyboard, but for better or worse, MS Word is where it's at for me and Pages, which is the wordprocessing app on the iPad, just doesn't cut it. But even when I had a laptop, I preferred to do most of my writing on a desktop machine - it's just easier on my body - so that wasn't a tough transition for me.

I know some people who write extensively using iPads, but I couldn't do it, and I am okay with touchscreens generally.

xp haha yeah they are good for settling arguments about the more famous roles of Star Trek guest stars.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Mises-Economics/2011/1219/E-books-get-pricey.-Will-customers-go-paperback

I think ebooks costing more is a good thing, BTW

Why?

people are gonna be more likely to pirate $15 books than $5 books

Well, it undervalues the amount of work going into writing a book, for one.

i almost always buy used books, which are cheaper than ebooks is one thing

Me too.

the amount of work that goes into a book has never had a strict correlation w/ how much money the author is going to make out of it

True, but I still think it undervalues the work.

Like if you worked on something 5+ years, would you really want to sell it for 99 cents?

you'd want to sell it for the price that will result in the most profit in the long-run, and $39493 probably wouldn't be that price even if you feel like that's the 'value', $10 might not even be that price

you'd want to sell it for the price that will result in the most profit in the long-run,

No, you'd want to sell it for the right price. No one is in the publishing business to make a profit!

marissa marchant to thread

ticked
I don't own an e-reader but I plan to get one/want one

I agree with most of the arguments for and against them. I'm hoping that getting one leads to more book reading and less internet reading.

lol @ "switch on a whole fucking machine" - like that's harder these days than "open a whole fucking book at the last page I was reading"