I Don't Miss Paper

Of late, when I get around to posting at all on this blog, it has often been more about eBooks than about children's books. It's an obsession, I admit it, and a problem I intend to fix in 2012 and beyond. But first I need to get some stuff off my chest.

While I've been writing about and worrying about eBooks for a few years now, up until six months ago I only read them from a computer screen. In July of 2011, I finally acquired as a birthday gift an e-reader (a B&N Nook Simple Touch) of my own. Since then, I've done the vast majority of my reading on it. My one sentence reaction: I don't miss paper. I don't miss hauling paper books around. I don't miss needing my reading glasses every single time I want to read something printed on paper. With my Nook I can just bump up the text size when I need to. I can read one-handed with the Nook (try that with paper) which is useful far more often than I ever realized. I've got some reference works--the built-in (subpar) dictionary, a bible, all of Shakespeare, several collections of fairy tales, etc.--right at hand within the Nook itself. I can take notes without needing to carry a pen. And the whole thing fits nicely into a jacket pocket or even in the pocket of my baggier pants.

I don't take it in the bath tub or the hot tub, risks I'd take with most of my print books, but I'm looking into a waterproof bag to solve this minor problem.

This is not a pro-Nook review. I have limited experience with other e-readers and can't make intelligent comparisons. But I am at this point strongly pro e-reader.

Which is not to say I've stepped into e-reading e-topia. There are many problems, the first of which is that eBooks remain too expensive. I've heard all the arguments from various publishers who claim that eBooks are still, if anything, too cheap, and I have to admit I still don't get it. Publishers need to see that they are now competing in a much wider market, against video games and movies and music and other digital materials. Angry Birds is free (with ads). Most little games for my phone are in the 0-3 dollar range. I can download a movie on my computer for what it costs to by a newly released novel on my Nook. How much more information is contained in a video game or a movie than in a novel? How much more production goes into those other genres? The comparison is ridiculous. I realize that the scale of distribution is very different. Few books get the audience that Angry Birds has, but still, $15 dollars for an electronic copy of a book seems wrong in this context. Very wrong.

The e-reader is also too limited in what it can do. I don't mind at all that B&N pulled the mp3 player and the games and the web browser off the Nook Simple Touch. They were lousy additions on the old Nook and did nothing to improve the reading experience. But now that e-readers are doing a pretty good job of recreating the paper book reading experience (other than some quirks with words chopped off when I use certain text sizes and a weird habit of hyphenating after quotation marks) it's time to allow the e-reader to do more than the paper book can. The Nook has some community features allowing sharing of some titles and limited posting to facebook, but it needs to do more. If I were teaching a class, I'd like to be able to share my annotations of a text with the whole class. I'd like them to be able to share their notes with me as well, and with each other. Currently that can't be done. The Nook should be an RSS reader as well, and I do use mine that way, downloading the latest from longform.org and longreads.com, but only rather awkwardly through an open source program called Calibre. It is shameful that the functionality to access this free material is not available natively within the Nook itself.

So while I don't miss paper I hope publishers and e-reader manufacturers continue to improve the e-reading experience and don't drop the ball in pursuit of tablets more suited to playing the aforementioned Angry Birds than to reading long works of prose. We readers deserve to be treated decently in the coming electronic world.