Friday iFAQ: eBooks
Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.
This week we dive into an oddly popular aspect of the iPad: eBooks. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
Q: I really like to read.
A: Commune with the thoughts of another.
Q: But I hate carrying huge books around with me.
A: No you don’t.
Q: So I was wondering if there was a way…what did you say?
A: You’ve never had a problem carrying huge books around with you until you discovered there was an alternative.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Oh come on. Anyone who reads is quite used to having a book or two on their person at all times. It’s not a burden, it’s part of life.
Q: Well, yeah, but it gets heavy!
A: Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of benefits to eBooks, but don’t pretend you’ve spent the past twenty years pining for your eBook reader.
Q: I totally imagined I’d have one some day, back when I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation! That was about twenty years ago! So there.
A: All right, so now you want me to solve your problems by telling you to buy an e-reader device. Specifically, an iPad.
Q: It’s kinda what we do around here.
A: Well, I’m not going to do that… Oh who am I kidding? The iPad has made reading books more comfortable than it’s ever been. The Kindle is a marvel of transitional technology1. The fact is, we live in a paradise of amazing ways to read books.
Q: Bipolar much?
A: I’m serious! You can get just about any book you want, delivered to you and ready to read in well under a minute. You can peruse chapters before you start reading, mark your books up, and be assured that you’ll never, ever be able to give them away and furthermore, you can rest in the knowledge that once your device dies nobody else will ever be able to read anything you had in your library.
Q: So the answer to my last question was yes.
A: Well, it’s a real problem, isn’t it? You can have thousands of books in a device that weighs less than a trade paperback version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but if you close your Amazon account or erase the book files from your computer and iPad2 then your books are gone forever.
Q: So there are real tradeoffs. You lose the individuality of your books: the typesetting that sets one title apart from another, the specific binding, the feel of different papers, but you gain portability and markup. You lose the ability to share, but you save some money on your purchase price.
A: I kinda feel like I should tell a joke here, or something. This kind of article belongs on Coals[2]Newcastle, not CANS.
Q: The bottom line is, we’re not there yet. We’ve created and streamlined digital content delivery, but we’re light years away from making it fair to both the producer and the consumer of the content. The old methods of checks and balances are falling away as data is abstracted from the physical forms that used to be a method of distribution control. New balances must be struck, but, as with any transition, there are still wild swings back and forth, all the power to the consumer, followed by a swing to massively curtailed consumer rights and back.
A: So, are you just writing a thesis paper or what?
Q: Or perhaps we have yet to see how truly free content can still provide a means of sustaining life to the producers of that content. There are virtual galaxies of solution space still unexplored here. But, whatever the eventual answer, we can be assured that, unless more people are willing to see this as a cooperative effort, an affair that takes the cooperation of all parties, then the polarization will assuredly lead to further deterioration of both the media and the messages.
A: Ladies and gentlemen, this has been “Wall of Text”. Friday iFAQ will hopefully return next week. Thank you and good night.
- does anyone actually think e-ink is going to last more than another three years? Really? [↩]
- and iPod(s) and Time Machine Backup [↩]
I’ve downloaded some free books from the Gutenberg Project, and have bought a few eBooks from Fictionwise (none through iBooks yet). To me, the prices aren’t that much lower than physical books.
And it seems to me that “Q” wasn’t writing a thesis as much as an op-ed piece.
Q doesn’t get very good grades, I’m afraid.
I mostly listen to audio books. Audible, FTW.
Heavy article, man.
In the last year I’ve read more than ninety books on my iPhone. Total cost of content: about twenty or twenty-five bucks. Somebody isn’t getting paid (of course, most of those authors have been dead for a long time).
Some content can’t be found found in an e-readable format. For example:
• Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright
• On the Sensation of Tone, by Hermann von Helmholtz
• Synergetics, by R. Buckminster Fuller
• Anything by Nate
So I’ll be keeping my books around for the time being.