Which Write is Right? A Comparison Between eBooks and Their Prehistoric Cousins
I love reading, I love it more than almost anything else in the world. When I was a kid I would read Calvin and Hobbes for hours on end, and now as an adult…I have still yet to really find anything quite as good as that.
For the longest time, nothing really swayed me from my love of books. All through high school I was the kid with the generic clothes, the average car, the weakest pager (yep, pager), but the illest (the word seemed to fit with the whole pager thing) first edition of a great novel.
That is, until the dichotomous year of 2007 when the collective conciousness of techdom was rocked by the announcement of Steve Jobs’ newest brainchild. Here was high technology. Here I saw a potential rival to my singular and often obsessive love of the written word. It was to my precious books as Buzz Lightyear was to Woody!
So now, I have two loves. And the worst part is that sometimes they encroach on one anothers territory. You see, the iPhone has developed some pretty fascinating options as far as reading is concerned, but how do those options measure up against the real thing?
Reading is reading right? Is it really all that different from one medium to another? Is electronic reading a revolution on the same level as the move from the spoken word to the written, or from the self-written on scrolls to the mass-produced and bound? Probably not, for in order to really justify a change of that kind, the newer product must make the old irrelevant and unnecessary. Like the CD from the cassette tape. The CD was easily navigable, more mobile, and let’s face it…shinier. It literally made no sense to keep buying tapes, in fact it made so little sense that people bought CD’s for the tapes they already had! But I digress…
Based on the preceeding (completely fabricated) criteria, electronic books should be a huge hit! They are more easily navigable (with word searches, bookmarking, and electronic indexing), they are certainly more mobile, and yeah…they are much shinier. So what gives? Well, what gives is this: the love of books was never really about the stories. Those are incidental. Stories can be transferred through almost any medium imaginable. No, the love of books is something else. It’s nostalgia. It’s the pride of the collection. It’s being able to lend it out and sell it back. It’s the smell, the feel…nay, the taste (I just took it too far).
These are the things that electronic reading simply can’t reproduce, no matter how much it wants to. Sure the iPhone readers have cool scrolling features, but does anyone actually read at a totally consistent pace? Is this another one of those technologies that seems cool but really has no use in reality, like the internet…?
Sure it carries potentially hundreds of books, but show me the person who can read anything approaching that on one battery charge, and I will become their concubine.
Sure you can ‘zoom-in’ on the words inside the iPhone reading apps, but once you’ve reached a decent size for the words, you can only fit about half an idea onto the screen; regrettably making the reading of a suspenseful page-turner a wholly more recreational experience.
So there you go. The words and intents of the writer will come through in either instance. No matter which way you go, electronic or paper, you can become engrossed in the story (though I rarely get text message notifications popping up on my hardbacks). The difference seems to reside entirely in the readers pre-conceived notions and tastes. If the electronic book came first, we’d be compaining about how tedious it is to muck through all those piles of paper! So sure, I pick traditional books; but let’s be reasonable when we compare the two and realize that they are like Republicans and Democrats…really not that different after all.