30 Benefits of Ebooks: A Rebuttal

[Nate the great]

I came across this through Teleread. It is a rebuttal to an post on a blog called ePublisher's Weekly. The orirginal 30 reasons post is not nearly as interesting as this rebuttal.

Thanks to lifehacker I discovered that Read an Ebook Week is in early March. The Epublishers Weekly blog has a post which covers “30 Benefits of Ebooks,” which while containing some bits of truth, if you will, is mostly IMHO made of up bad logic and spurious reasoning.

I will not waste my time deconstructing all 30 reasons but will comment on a few of them.

Uh, how does this follow? We (even I) may be spending more time in front of our screens but we might just be looking at photos on Flickr, watching YouTube videos, surfing for porn or any of 1000s of possible activities which have absolutely nothing to do with reading an ebook. And while much of our online activity does involve reading it may not include reading books.

And the manufacture of all these electronic devices and the electricity to power them, including all of the many highly toxic components and manufacturing processes do no damage to the environment at all?

Ha ha ha ha ha. This is one of the funniest, utterly stupid comments I have ever heard. Digital preservation issues anymore? Format migration?

So those books I carry with me pretty much everywhere are not portable? Certainly ebooks are more portable in quantity is the point but make it more clearly then!

“Right!” said with a proper Bill Cosby accent cause my public library charges me $5 just to walk in the door. Not!

Perhaps true, but it goes against any and all conventional wisdom that I’ve heard or read about the length of electronic materials read by people. I guess one could make a 2500-page PDF but who the hell is going to read it?

All I can say to this one is “Seriously WTF are you on about?” I bet I can find everyone of those at both my public and academic library. And censorship certainly exists on the Internet.

Now clearly there is some value in this list. Some of the author’s points seem perfectly valid, although there are more I could pick on. But the ones I did highlight seem egregiously spurious to me.

I would like to see the proliferation of more widely available ebooks that are cross-platform, free of DRM, and in formats that are easily migratable to new formats when required. I would also like to see some of the possibilities that the author says may come to pass do so.

Nonetheless, this silly list will do nothing to change my reading habits. I read both online and in print and I print a lot of stuff that came to me electronically. Both have various affordances even now, but many of the affordances that the author claims for ebooks are nonexistent for most ebook formats at the moment.

I despise most marketing and spurious marketing really gets my goat!

So read ebooks if they work for you. If they don’t then don’t worry so much about some of these reasons.

from:
http://marklindner.info/blog/2008/02...its-of-ebooks/

[kovidgoyal]

Sigh why does the Internet mean that any moron with 10mins at his disposal can spout off and people care.

Here's a re-rebuttal

1. It follows from human nature. People tend to stick with things they are familiar with. Nowadays that means reading on electronic devices. Thus, by making ebooks available in electronic form, you make it easier for people to read.

2. The manufacture of one electronic device to read several hundred e-documents as opposed to paper copies of several 100 documents, is a boon for the environment. And obviously, in the future we will read ebooks on multifunction devices.

3. Even assuming that preserving digital information is as hard as preserving printouts, the availability of search in digital information makes the preserved archives infinitely more useful.

7. This guy seems to be desperate to find things to criticize.

14. The point is that they are free for the library as well. Not just for the end-user. The cost of maintaining infinite copies of a book in perpetuity is much lower for ebooks than pbooks.

21. Obviously not him.

27. Those books were banned and when the means of production and distribution of information is centralized (e.g. in printing presses) it makes it much easier to censor information.

[henrythurston]

Bravo, kovidgoyal, you are right on target !

As to number 7., let's see this Hercules carry the entire library on his back.
I'll carry the CD or the DVD -- with thousands of ebooks -- instead.

[moz]

The maintaining copies thing makes some sense to me - in the event that we lose technological continuity ebooks might be harder to recover than pbooks. But barring that... duh. I seem to have managed somehow to keep material that I first obtained on 5" Commodore 64 disks readable since about 1985 so I'm pretty confident that todays much more connectable computers will continue to make rolling forwards easier. Assuming, of course, that I avoid DRM at all costs.