Junior Member
Posts: 4
Karma: 125918
Join Date: Aug 2021
Location: Belgium
Device: Kobo Libra H2O, Kobo Aura
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Has the author of this article done any research into what he's writing about, or is he simply making stuff up as he goes to fulfil his pre-existing opinions? He's an actual published non-fiction author, so surely he's done some level of research before writing with such conviction, right? Let's dive in and see.
First of all, he goes on a lengthy tangent about the history of book-binding and where it all came from. This feels a lot less like relevant information to the topic than it does like him trying to convince the reader that he is smart and knows a lot about books.
He makes the claim that "if something better were to come along, you’d expect it to have done so by now".
While I won't make any statements about which medium is ojectively better or worse, since that's naturally down to personal preference, he's completely ignoring the fact that the last century or so has seen a serious revolution in how information is shared and how stories are told.
In his mind, things like radio shows (along the lines of War of the Worlds, et cetera), movies, documentaries, audiobooks and ebooks apparently aren't mediums that exist in the same realm of existence as physical books. The elitism is real in this one.
Next, he goes back to the lengthy descriptions of the physical properties and the history of books. He makes some statements about how books come from humanity's inherent need for storytelling and the sharing of information. In the context of an article about books vs. ebooks that seems either very much beside the point and redundant, or like an implication that ebooks do not fulfil the same purpose.
He then describes the changes to the book medium over time as "refinement rather than evolution", which is a distinction without an actual difference.
He mentions some leftover artifacts of old bookbinding, first mentioning the visible properties of the spine of a hardcover book and then talking about things like title pages. These things are, of course, all completely unique to physical books.
Never mind the fact that all but the strictly physical properties have actually carried over to ebooks. Those pages at the start and end of a book do not exist in ebook format according to the author of this article.
At this point through reading the article, I was feeling a combination of bewilderment and amusement. This combination of "look how much I know about physical books, I am very smart" with misleading or simply inaccurate statements about newer mediums is truly intriguing, making me wonder what wild claims he was going to make next.
To my surprise, this was the point at which his constant switching between random information about the history of bookmaking and unfounded implications about books vs. ebooks stopped. The second half of the article actually gets relatively straight to the point.
He mentions navigation being very different in a physical book compared to in an ebook. This is true. Which of the two mediums wins out in this regard is up for discussion. The author prefers physical books, to no-ones surprise at this point in the article, although his reasoning for it seems a bit iffy and he either neglects to mention or does not know about any of the advantages of ebooks in this regard.
In fact, he mentions the ability to search, create bookmarks and easily searchable annotations, et cetera as downsides rather than features. The reasoning he gives for this is that it makes him feel disoriented sometimes.
Hidden in his description of that previous point, there's an actual advantage of physical books. In the middle of describing why he doesn't like the navigation features of ebooks, he mentions that for some people, ideas and information can be attached to the physical aspect of the book.
Some people simply retain information better when they can clearly invision the physical location in the book in which they read it. There's a lot of scientific backing to that, and lumping it in with a rant about navigation features does not do the point any justice.
Naturally he doesn't fail to mention any of the easy points that physical print scores over digital. PDF scaling on e-readers sucks. Print does not run out of battery in the middle of reading.
That said, he seems to imply that the issue PDFs face when it comes to making the text easily accessible on an e-reader also extends to dedicated ebook formats. Which is ironic, since the accessibility provided by features like being able to set the font size to suit your needs is actually one of the main selling points of e-readers to elderly people and people with bad eye-sight.
According to the article, the ability to make the experience more unique and adapt the physical medium to the content of the book is a feature that mainly provides benefits to non-fiction. The proof for this, according to the author, is the fact that the top 10 best-sellers in physical print contain more non-fiction than the top 10 best-sellers in ebooks.
I'd personally say that his comparison of the top 10 best-sellers in physical print vs in ebooks is more related to the average age of the people who are mostly interested in print vs in ebooks. Young people are generally a lot more attracted to ebooks, at least from my experience, and they're also generally more attracted to fiction than to non-fiction. At the risk of sounding snobbish: correlation does not imply causation.
The assumption that fiction does not make use of the benefits of physical print also feels wrong to me personally, since the only books I ever buy physical copies of are things like fantasy novels that offer fold-out maps et cetera to enhance the reader's immersion into the story. Another example that comes to mind is a book series I was given as a child which had pages you could rub to release an actual scent to add to the experience and immersion of certain scenes.
Of course, the majority of fiction doesn't make use of all of that. Then again, from my experience neither does the majority of non-fiction.
Next, the article claims that the ebook market hasn't expanded but has instead become increasingly niche over time. Not even going to discuss that beyond the fact that all evidence points towards the opposite.
Finally, the author claims that the foremost competition Amazon Kindle faces is from Apple and refers to e-ink devices as "dim, gray screens". Wonderful.
All of that considered, I'm very unimpressed by the author.
I didn't previously keep any sort of "blacklist" of authors to avoid, but considering the writer of this article is actually a non-fiction book author I am creating one right now. Because if he is willing to put his name under an article written with such confidence with such a lack of understanding and such little research on the topic he's writing about, I'm sure I will dodge a bullet by avoiding his other work.
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