[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by nomesque

- rows and rows of pbooks inspire awe. That might just be me too.

This one has some validity, I think. While a library could have a computer interface with file listings, a screen full of icons, even if they all have book cover images (and not "Fictionwise Classics" pictures) doesn't carry the information that a row of books does:

- How long is the book? (not that every thicker book is longer, but comparing a 700pp blockbuster novel to a young adult 145pp novel is easy, and identifying dense info nonfiction vs pop-reading nonfic is also easy. Filesize doesn't accurately give this info, and word count isn't part of any standard book listing display method.)

- Light entertainment reading, research, or browse-and-explore art book? (Again, icons just don't indicate these categories.)

- What era is the book from? (While reprints can make an older book look new, classics are often printed with covers that indicate their age/status.)

- What's the intended reading audience for this book? (Cover icons indicate some of this, but there's a sameness to them that misses the variety in pbook covers: plain color paper, raised text or cut-out sections for supermarket bestsellers, fancy dust jackets, printed glossy hardcover, plain durable cloth cover.)

Seeing a row of books on a shelf gives me a wealth of information we haven't figured out how to display well on a screen. And that's assuming the screen can show pictures at all--Sony's interface doesn't give me any reminders about why I loaded this book onto my reader.

I'm okay with this. But I acknowledge it could be better, and it will need to be, for ebooks to reach mainstream acceptance. This is a problem (set of problems?) that doesn't compare to music; album covers never had the variety of book covers, and they were all the same size & shape.

- I like knowing how far through a story I am. Computers don't tell me that.

Some ebook readers are better at this than others. The Sony's page count works great for LRFs, txt and rtf, and PDFs shown at their original size. It works less well for reflowed PDFs and ePubs, where it shows the original page number, rather than the number of pages you're going to have to click through to get to the end.

It did take some getting used to, for that to mentally connect the same way that pbook sections did. (On the other hand, I no longer have to deal with trying to hold open the first and last thirty pages of the book, when it kept trying to close itself, nor the book *not* closing after it's been read because the spine is damaged.)

- ebook readers need to be recharged

This is a serious issue. E-Ink has nice long charge rates (if wifi is not involved), but other ebook readers don't, and for people who aren't daily readers, it can be a real problem.

However, this is a technical issue, and batteries are improving all the time. When someone figures out how to run an ebook reader on the solar cells they use in cheap calculators, this problem will effectively vanish.

- ebook readers can be hacked/file-modified

Feature, not bug. However, it could cause problems with discussions of the book, if you can't be sure everyone's reading the same version. Also, the number of badly-edited ebooks, pro and pirate, are part of this problem.

I suppose eventually (after DRM goes away), some bright company can put up an "ebook verification website," where you upload your book temporarily and they check the contents against the "official" version. It would scan your book and report "all text identical" or "less than .5% difference" or "your book contains 235 differences from our archive version" or whatever. (If it could check for italics, that'd be incredible. But I wouldn't expect it.) It might or might not return a list of the differences.

Might be free to use if you can offer them legal copies of books they don't have in their database.

Could potentially even do this with books with no legit public ebook version--because copying for personal use is okay, and archiving a non-publicly-accessible version for research purposes might be okay too.

- I hope all libraries don't do this

Me too; pbooks are a big part of our heritage.

However, art museums and galleries didn't vanish when photography got big, nor have they vanished with the introduction of digital artwork. I don't want pbooks gone, but I won't mind them gradually becoming an artistic and historical sphere, rather than a day-to-day life one.