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
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.
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”
arent most ebook $10
there is not a set ‘moral’ value to prices or your work. in the long-term you prob don’t want to create the culture of piracy that exists w/ movies and music, cause it’s pretty easy to dl a book. so make things cheap and easy.
xp
The thing I love most about my Nook is that I can jump back and forth between reading on it and reading on the Nook application on my phone and the applications will sync to the last page I read if I am in a wi-fi location.
It’s also great because I used to carry 3–4 books around with me at a time and now I don’t have to because everything I’m reading is on the Nook.
Thinking about hacking it just because you can’t really hack a book.
btw lex, the Nook has a sleep mode very similar to yr average smartphone, switching it on and unlocking it takes all of 2 seconds, about the same amount of time it takes to open a book assuming you’re using a bookmark
you know he won’t be swayed by anything resembling a fact, right?
dear lex,
nook is a feeling.
sincerely,
in the long-term you prob don’t want to create the culture of piracy that exists w/ movies and music, cause it’s pretty easy to dl a book. so make things cheap and easy.
eh, i think people are going to pirate stuff no matter how cheap you make things. songs are 99 cents on itunes & people still pirate music.
big reason book piracy hasnt taken off is only olds read
music piracy took off before itunes existed. I think it’s gonna be hard to convince people to pay $15 for 2 megabytes of text in the future, but you might be able to convince people to buy lots of books for a few bucks each. or you could have some books-spotify thing.
the way people in this thread are pretending my objections are completely imaginary!
i basically feel with all of this that i am being sold shit i really, really don’t need. sold for a prohibitively high price (still smh at being told this isn’t the case)
People *are* paying 15 bucks for ebooks now though.
the way people in this thread are pretending my objections are completely imaginary!
some (not all) of your objections ARE completely imaginary
no youre completely imaginary
lol
“imaginary” isn’t really the right word, more “arbitrary”; it’s like you’re afraid your valid concerns (you don’t need it and you think it’s too expensive) aren’t enough so you keep going into things that aren’t actually true (it’s... difficult to turn on?)
yeah but ebooks still have a small marketshare, not very many people have tablets/readers, and people are still comparing the price to the price of the physical object. and as ice mentioned, mostly olds read and they don’t really think of this like “hmm could I find a torrent site for this”
ultimately “$15” or whatever for a novel isn’t some moral price that exists to give the author ‘the right value’ for his/her work. (almost) the only cost of production for an ebook is in the writing + eventually people are going to value the abstract data less than we value a physical object that also contained that data. in conclusion eventually I think we’ll be buying most books for a few bucks.
xps
i have a kindle, and when i’ve used it (reading while carrying the baby, reading in subway, etc) it has been ridiculously easy + convenient. i haven’t used it in awhile tho, and the reasons are:
a) a lot of the stuff i want/need to read are not yet available as ebooks
b) i tend to read more longform articles + online writing these days anyway and
c) i realized when i started using a kindle that i do a lot of page-flipping back and forth when i read, and e-readers are really terrible at, say, letting you flip thru the last 20 or so pages to refresh your memory on a particular detail. they’re great if you know exactly what page it was on. less good if you need to scan a bunch of pages pretty quickly
page flipping hmm, interesting how new forms reveal these hidden habits
makes you reflect on the design of a book and how well it works
It seems the least-pirated item are the apps themselves—in part that’s because (in stark contrast to music) they quickly set up an easy way to download new apps, and charged so little for them that most people didn’t bother trying to find workarounds to download pirated software to their phones and iPads.
ultimately “$15” or whatever for a novel isn’t some moral price that exists to give the author ‘the right value’ for his/her work.
I don’t think morality has anything to do with this!
(almost) the only cost of production for an ebook is in the writing +
Ebooks still need editors, marketing!
makes you reflect on the design of a book and how well it works
totally
lol i pirate apps, tho not on my ipad atm, why tf isnt ios5 jail broken yet people
eventually people are going to value the abstract data less than we value a physical object that also contained that data.
That’s. . . kind of stupid?
like u cant inscribe an ebook and leave it behind in a particularly charming guesthouse library
I don’t think morality has anything to do with this!
vs
Like if you worked on something 5+ years, would you really want to sell it for 99 cents?
Ebooks still need editors, marketing!
well marketing can presumably pay for itself tho I think most publishers are prob screwed
what does an e-book do with things like maps, to which you might want to frequently refer?
if the cost of things is what the creator thinks they’re worth, and not what buyers think they’re worth, then most books will cost thousands (if not millions) or dollars
of*
freelance editors/marketers + self publishing will prob become more common
if the cost of things is what the creator thinks they’re worth, and not what buyers think they’re worth, then most books will cost thousands (if not millions) or dollars
I don’t think the cost of things should be what the creator thinks they are worth, not by a long stretch.
Like if you worked on something 5+ years, would you really want to sell it for 99 cents?
if i could sell 10x as many of them id be overjoyed to, itd be interesting to see what falling prices would to to volume of sale
right if I were an author I would just want to make as much money as possible, if that meant selling my book at 10 cents, who cares
also getting it into as many peoples hands as possible, like would you take a 50% cut in profits if five times as many people read yr book, prob worth it from a career and personal satisfaction standpoint
lol ‘personal satisfaction standpoint’ get me to a ted conference asap people
not 50%
This writer has some interesting things to say re: 99 cent ebooks
http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-things-that-need-to-be-said.html
Which brings me to another point. As much as my name has been thrown about, I haven’t seen J. L. Bryan’s name mentioned. He’s the author of a fantastic young adult paranormal romance called Jenny Pox. Like my books, his is priced at $.99 EDIT: It’s $2.99 now. But it was $.99 earlier. Like me, he has several other titles out. Also, like me, he has paperback versions of his book available and he reaches out to book bloggers. In fact, he just did an intensive blog tour for the release of his latest book The Haunted E-book. I even included an excerpt of Jenny Pox at the end of my book Ascend, because I like his writing so much, and I want other people to read it.
With all of that said, Bryan sells less books than I do. I don’t know how many exactly, because I haven’t asked, but I can tell from his rankings that it’s not as many.
What’s my point in all of this? By all accounts, he has done the same things I did, even writing in the same genre and pricing the books low. And he’s even a better writer than I am. So why am I selling more books than he is? I don’t know.
That’s the truth of it. Nobody knows what makes one book a bestseller. Publishers and agents like to pretend they do, but if they did, they would only publish best sellers, and they don’t.
blog tour
xp I actually haven’t jailbroken my iOS 5.0.1 yet as there’s nothing non-approved at the moment that I want (that will change as soon as someone finds a reliable way to use Siri on pre-4S devices though). I’m fine with paying $1.99 for some awesome apps that are better than the boxed software they used to sell for PCs and Macs for $50 or $200. Something like Instagram would never have legitimately sold for pocket change in the old days.
Makes me wonder if 99-cent books would ultamately make more money for the publishers because anyone with even a passing interest would download the book.
eh publishers aren’t dead cause that woman sold a buncha ebooks, they’re dead cause they don’t have a unique service to offer anymore.
i know i am an immoral barbarian for pirating 99¢ apps, tho tbf many ipad apps are as much as $20!
also most apps are shit and youre all welp there goes another dollar, and tbqh im just habituated to never paying for anything that goes on a computer
I know this has been said before, but my only problem with e-readers is if they replace the book, they will replace the bookshelf. Already we’re seeing CD and DVD racks banished from living rooms, and soon there’ll be no way of expressing individualism through taste. I guess you can learn a lot about a person through what they read, watch and listen to—the bookshelf can become a talking point or the root of a common interest—especially for fellow literature/music geeks. I guess some people will be like “Hey, who cares? I’m not fussed about displaying my tastes, and I’m not interested in others”, but I think it’s a shame that all this extra-personal information could one day disappear from homes to be replaced with a list of favourites on Facebook or whatever. Taken to its logical conclusion, the advent of the e-reader and the death of the book means there’ll never be an “Oh man, you like [insert author/musician/director] too?” moment.
bookshelves are visually v nice too, give off great vibes
on the other hand books r heavy when u move
fb etc. is prob already the primary way people do that
it’s easier than ever to ‘display your personal brand’
lol the whole displaying your taste aspect of physical book ownership is the worst part! it stresses me out.
totally^^^
but I love looking at people’s bookshelves! :/
Just ask me what I like.
yes, then i can lie and pretend to have higherbrow reading habits than i actually do
But I want to see stuff you might not have liked a lot or stuff you havent read yet!
i mean, i don’t have an ereader and i adore physical books; i’m just saying
maybe it’s from going to a library science grad program but i think people who fetishize books as objects are weird. i love reading, don’t care that much about books.
yeah, i love having a nose about people’s bookshelves (and formerly cd racks). It definitely tells you a lot about a person than someone simply listing “Donnie Darko, A Secret History, dubstep” as their “Favourites” online. And book spines look lovely.
there was a guy on telly last night talking about “The Death Of The Book” and how he thought it definitely won’t ever happen, but he wasn’t very convincing.
was he strictly defining “book” as the physical object?
yeah
i love reading, don’t care that much about books.
I love reading, but don’t see the big deal people are making about e-readers. Yeah they are convenient and all, I can see them being cool on vacation. . . but a physical book works fine, I don’t see that changing any time soon. E-readers seem too weird (for me) to read on, there’s just something about the one page at a time, waiting to flip back and forth that seems alien to me. I don’t make a fetish out of my book love, but I do enjoy the feel and ease of reading one.
I also think it’s good to have options for reading, and if people want to use ereaders, fine by me, and I think it’s cool if people are super into them or whatever.
I don’t think physical books are going anywhere anytime soon.
i have you used one tho
not sure where that ‘i’ came from ~ihave~
Yup!
he was being asked why he believed the book wouldn’t be replaced by an e-reader and his response was “I’ve been to lots of lectures talking about ‘The Death Of The Book’ and the more I attend, the less I’m convinced it will happen” and then he immediately said “What we’re seeing is that most people are using both books and e-readers; so what this means is we’re at a transitional stage where people like one and the other”.
ok fine i swear every time i hear someone bitching abt how ereaders are an inferior experience to books theyve never actually like read a book on one xp