[Anthem]

Lack of imagination?

A two-pronged complaint: the consumers and the producers are confusing matters.

As of this very moment e-books are print book impersonators. Undercover agents that were found out a long time ago but don't know it. The list of inadequacies when compared directly with what they are impersonating is voluminous but that is to be expected. Many performers think they do a good Arnold Schwarzenegger, but so few really do. That is the situation e-books find themselves in.

E-books, as they are right now, are probably a dead end. They are electronic versions of books that are slightly more convenient to store and retrieve but significantly less convenient to actually consume. Even something basic like turning back a couple pages (you don't quite know how many so you leaf backwards) in order to find out who it is that the author is quoting again represents a significant expenditure of time when compared with the same activity in a printed book. Even a quickly scrolling reader like the Sony can't match the convenience of keeping a finger in the page and flipping back a few or scrolling back up on a web page in your web browser. E-books, as they are maturing, seem to have settled themselves in an awkward middle zone where they fail to embody many of the conveniences of what we have come to think of as electronic media while also failing to embody the traditional comforts and conveniences we associate with their progenitors.

Thankfully nothing is set in stone at this point and we can be mystified and encouraged as things continue to develop. When I got my first Palm M105 back in high school and began reading e-books alongside printed books I was excited by the possibilities even though I was unable to see what those possibilities might be. Today, all these years later, it seems that the shadow is still vague. We are still beating away on the same drum and even though the thrumming appears to be attracting more and more people to our little tribe it isn't apparent that our war cries are anything more than ephemeron.

Running foot/end notes is still cringe inducing (even with touch screens). Flipping while maintaining your position brings a curse to my lips every time (and you never realize how often you do this until you invest more heavily). Storage turns out to be not so clear an activity (I have the virtual equivalent of four bookshelves on my computer, all staged in different places and occasionally I just can't remember where it is at (indicating I may need to start a database that merely keeps track of where each e-book is stored kinda like my book software that keeps track of where each real book is stored in my home)). Even paltry format issues (which should be a forgotten thing of the digital past) and ass-sideways "Digital Rights" management (which is an issue we really should have tackled a long time ago but foresight is rarely an occurrence one sees in relation to modern law and specifically a problem with copyright law) rear their ugly charmed heads in order to taunt us with incessant zeal. Speaking of copyright, the traditional understanding of copyright as an agreement between the content authors and the public is basically completely toast at this point and content authors seem to have the belief that their control of the content always should have and now can (thanks to the digital guard dog software potentialities) be fully enforced and every single one of our viewings of a copyrighted piece of work is now watched and policed.

It goes on forever.

So, I blame it all on a lack of imagination. We all see the digitization of books as something to be mostly desired and we enjoy consuming them in that fashion. However, we are (again!) mostly unable to comprehend them as anything but an electronic version of something we already have except loaded with its own inherent difficulties (printed books have them as well, they are just different from the ones that e-books have!). As long as that persists they may be held back.

I would love to make a distinction though: being held back in potential and being held back in popularity are wildly different things to claim. E-books as they are right now, without any modifications whatsoever, may become hugely popular without embracing any of the imaginative possibilities that we should expect from our electronic empire.

I guess I'm done for now. As you requested something thoughtful I thought it would be good to restrict my reply to a long and horribly tortuous post rather than a short "Oh, heres what I think...[list of five nearly incomprehensible problems]..." type thing.

I apologize to the world.