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I'm one of the people with a car that is, well, older than some MobileRead members. And every time I realize that for what someone who buys a new car is paying in car payments and insurance I could buy a car like mine every two or three months, I just smile and think of how many extra books I can buy with the money I'm saving.
Cars do make a good parallel. Some people absolutely have to have a new car because it's new. 2011 model year, that's gonna be outdated soon, gotta be the first on the lot for the 2012s. Then there are the people who have a car that works, and still does the job they bought it to do, so they feel no compulsion to get rid of it and buy a different one. Sure, there's a newer car ... there's always a newer car ... even if you buy one brand-new, the one you didn't drive off the lot is newer than the one you did. But if the one you have does what you bought it to do, isn't it more productive to allocate your resources to getting something you need but don't have yet than to getting a different version of something you already have?
The big thing I see in these rants is a lack of tolerance for other people's opinions. One the one hand you have people saying "I don't see a reason to buy an ebook reader, so nobody else needs one either" and on the other, "ebook readers are new so everybody should embrace them." I wonder if some of those people think everybody should love broccoli because they do, and the others think everybody should hate broccoli because they do? Because, really, that's what it comes down to. Some people like hardcovers. Some like trade paperbacks. Some like mass-market paperbacks. I don't see any of them proclaiming their superiority based on the format they want their pbooks in, so why do they do so depending on whether they like their books p- or e-? And we're not immune to it, either. Sure, by nature we're early adopters ... most people still don't have ebook readers. But we're not saying "everyone should love that green cauliflower stuff because it's new" so why should we be proclaiming the same of ebook readers? Why aren't we all doing molecular gastronomy and eating strange food prepared in even stranger ways instead of peanut butter sandwiches? It's newer, after all, and definitely high-tech, so isn't it by definition better?
Of course I think ebook readers rock. I have one, after all, and I'm here on MobileRead. But I don't think everyone is obligated to agree with me, any more than they are about my fondness for fountain pens (I like the way they feel), or my elderly car (saves money for more books and the occasional fountain pen), or my electronic remote weather station (I'm aware I could just step out back and look up). Ebooks are a format I like my books in, and one I prefer, just like hardcover is my least-preferred format. Other people have different tastes. I'm not about to tell them they're wrong, and they have to do it my way.
That's what the author of this article is missing: he's equating everyone's opinions to his own, and declaring that everyone who disagrees with him either isn't as smart as he is, or is being deliberately wrong. And that's what some of the responses are missing, too: they're doing the exact same thing as the author of the article. They're both wrong. Neither clinging unquestioningly to the old nor racing blindly in pursuit of the new is progress; they're both the same kind of failure, judging things on their age and familiarity instead of their utility. That's the part they don't get. We shouldn't be as foolish.
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