Atomic Fez Publishing

In yesterday’s post, it was all about introducing you to devices and the topic itself, both of them approached in their somewhat isolated theoretical forms. Basically, “these are the readers” and “these are electronic books”. Nothing elaborate, nothing particularly detailed, nice and gentle.

Let’s deal with a few things more carefully and in detail, but don’t fret as we’re going to do this one small step at a time. Honestly, it’s the only damned way to do it, as there’s a plethora of things to wrap one’s brain around, and it’s honestly taken me an entire year to get an in-​​depth understanding of both what what e-​​books are as well as what they are are not. Simply grasping what sort of printed books’ typographical and design elements are no longer possible or desired in electronic books was the toughest thing for me, but probably due to that being the most recent and freshest aspect of book creation in my awareness. Whatever the reason, I’m well aware that some people have next to no comprehension of what these things are, and that the un-​​known is the scariest thing to people. The fact it requires change to something that people feel quite passionate about already just makes things worse, doesn’t it?

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way right off the start.

Electronic Books Will Destroy Every Book in Your Home!

False. Totally, utterly, completely, incontrovertibly, incorrect in every way. No one is going to enter your residence and do something destructive to your printed books. All of you people afraid that Guy Montag and the other firemen are going to pay you a visit, resume breathing. No one is going to shove an e-​​reader device down your throat. People have a wonderful way of guaranteeing they get the products they want: they buy them. Conversely, they have a sure-​​fire way of stopping the manufacture of things they have no use for: they do not buy them.

You can still buy vinyl records. Hell, both U2 and Peter Gabriel are releasing brand new recordings  in LP format! Sure, you’re paying more for them than you would for either a CD or downloaded music files, but you are still able to get the warm sound of music wrapped in the surface noise of dust and dirt after you drop the needle on that twelve-​​inch bad boy.

You will still be able to buy printed books in any version of the future that we may arrive in. That’s my interpretation anyway. It’s not difficult to find really fancy, hand-​​crafted, gilt-​​edged, illuminated, leather-​​bound, hardback books today; they’re incredibly expensive, but you can get them.

In a few decades, it might be more difficult to locate a copy of the complete works of Dame Barbara Cartland in hardback (one certainly hopes, anyway), but if people such as yourself continue wanting and buying paperback and hardback printed books, then you can count on buying the latest titles and shoving them into your satchel.

It’s quite possible that the electronic book will come to be the preferred format for those who are simply looking for something to while away a few hours on their commute. Currently, this is the mass-​​market paperback, but for titles you want to basically read and then wonder what are you going to do with this book afterwards, the electronic book is the perfect alternative: less expensive, no requirement for shelf-​​space, and probably ¹⁄₃ of the books I’ve read and never returned to re-​​read a few years later. Sure, there are a massive number of printed books on my shelf I value enough to continue to own and so on; there’s no way I’m going to actually replace any of the ones already on the shelves with electronic books, but if there’s an e-​​book edition of a book I’m interested in, I’ll go with that one first. The last thing I need is more books in any format, but paperless books take up less space and use less money.

That said, there is far too much money in the world invested in shelves, buildings, and printed books for printed books to disappear anytime before all of us alive to day are all dead. Think of all the public libraries, their shelves and binderies, all of the machines built to monitor circulation status of all the books, and on and on. No matter what your opinion about e-​​books – or how their use suits your life – printed books will continue, have no fear.

I Hate Staring at the Computer Screen All Day!
The Last Thing I Want to Do is Read a Book Like That!

Rubbish. I won’t use the ‘apples and oranges’ simile becuase that’s not fair. Comparing reading on a computer screen and reading on an e-​​reader is like comparing apples and a pack of raging tigers. There’s no similarity at all.

Let me explain: the computer screen you’re probably reading this on is directly shooting light at your eye-​​bones (or, if Steve Jobs gets his way soon, “iBones”). The typical e-​​reader device uses “E Ink technology” which is a fancy marketing way of saying “LCD screen”¹. Unlike the iPad, a netbook, or any actual computer screen (flat screen or big CRT tube thing), there is no light in an e-​​reader; you have to turn on a lamp or light a candle to read by. This is one distinct advantage over a computer that printed books have over computer screens. Have a gander at this little example I un-​​scientifically whipped up:

The one on the left is the equal of you reading on a computer screen, because it’s a bunch of black letters on a background comprised of a bright light blazing into your face (because that’s what it is). The one on the right is about the same as what an eInk display would show you. Paper may be thought of as “white”, but it’s not as bright as a screen would be. The background of an e-​​reader is darker than paper, but it’s a damned site easier to read than from a computer screen.

The fact that there’s a hunk of glass involved in the way the words are displayed is no reason to worry too much about glare. Yes, there’s a possibility of it, but there’s hardly a guarantee of it. The image on the left is take by me at noon or thereabouts without any attempt to reduce the glare on the screen. This is a non-​​glare screen that is more successful than any ‘non-​​glare glass’ I’ve ever seen in a picture frame, trust me. Not all readers are as successful as this, but the “you can’t read using an e-​​reader except in the shade” is about a decade out of date and a non-​​starter of an argument with me. The building behind the Kobo eReader, on the other hand, was difficult to look at, let me tell you! A printed book’s purer white paper might have been more difficult to stare at as well. Behold the advantage of e-​​book reading!

The way any of these screens are set up to display letters using the typefaces that are part of the hardware’s programming, but if there’s a graphic in a book – a handwritten note, or a Venn-​​diagram, say – then the displays can also handle that using little dots too small for you to pick out with the human eye², but the real purpose of these things is to present you with words; in five sizes you can select yourself, as well as either serif (like Times New Roman or Palatino) or sans-​​serif (like Arial or Helvetica) which is again your preference. Again, this is a distinct advantage to the printed book, where you only get to choose “paperback, hardback, or mass-​​market paperback?” and even then it’s only what happens to be in print at the moment. Yes, it’s possible to make the typeface appear larger or smaller by moving the book nearer or farther from your nose, but this new technology makes it possible for me to put-​​off the use of bifocals, and that can’t be a bad thing³.

Now there’s a huge number of further matter both for and against e-​​books in general, and the next few posts will deal with some of them as part of working through the experience of using the Kobo eReader and its particular software; which I’m still waiting to get an update for; grrrrr… Tune in tomorrow for the start of that.

In the meantime, free your mind, and your library will follow (and today’s apology to a musician goes out to George Clinton and Funkadelic).

1. Okay, it’s a big development on a liquid crystal display, but all you tech geeks can just relax and remember we’re dealing with entry-​​level information here. [RETURN]
2. After working with photographs for years and being able to pick out individual bits of grain in an image, trust me, if you can make out one pixel clearly on one of these screens, your vision is record-​​breakingly precise. [RETURN]
3. Unless you’re my father and want to look all happy at getting revenge by noting how I’m getting older [RETURN]

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 18:31 (UTC) and is filed under Books, Business, Industry Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.