E-books

The recent release of the Kindle 2.0 e-reader has some people talking about the future of electronic books (e-books) and others talking about how regular books will never be replaced. John Siracusa's essay on e-books (The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age), which Justin Taylor on the Between Two Worlds blog page said is the best thing he's read on the subject. In his essay, Siracusa lists several virtues of e-books and follows up with the following for those still not convinced:

If you remain unconvinced, here's one final exercise, in the grand tradition of a particular family of Internet analogies. Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really)
inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.

"Books will never go away." True!

Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living
being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

Although I don't have an e-reader, I have many e-books on my computer, and I will say that I appreciate theme for many reasons. Here are just a few:

1. Space saver. I only have so much space in my house for books, and all the books I would like regular access to won't fit in my house. The availability of larger internal hard drives and external hard drives, which are about the size of one book, allow storage of hundreds of thousands of books.

2. Legibility. Many great books I want to read are published at a small font. Having those same books in digital form usually allows me to tailor the size of the text as large as I need to make it easier to read.

3. Note taking. Instead of retyping long quotes that I want to save for future reference, I can simply select the text, copy it, and file it in my software program of choice.

There are many other benefits, but those are the three that readily come to mind.