Books versus E-readers

I'm sick of seeing the absolutely unnecessary (and frankly, retarded) glut of "e-readers" out there. E-readers are little hard drives that display text on a screen and that try very hard to look and feel like books. I never liked them even though I could not quite put my finger on why, and lately I've heard more and more about how they are going to "revolutionize" reading and how they are so much better for the environment because they don't use paper. I'm sick of them, though. I'm sick of seeing them for sale in stores. I'm sick of seeing advertisements for them. I'm sick of people talking about them. I'm sick of their very existence.

So let's examine the difference between actual books and e-readers, shall we? These are in no particular order, just as they come to me:

- Books can last a pretty long time. I own books that were printed before my grandparents were even born. There are many books that are hundreds of years old and are still perfectly readable. I don't have any electronic devices that old. The oldest electronic thing I own is probably my Nintendo. It's a tough little guy, but it's also a relatively simple computer compared to the other, deader, electronics I have lying around (dead laptop, dead iPod, dead computer, dead digital camera, dead router, dead cell phone, dead CD player, etc.) Granted, maybe these other devices didn't just "die" because they were old, but time takes a much bigger toll on complex electronics than it does on books. Let's just say that in A.D. 2071, I'll be surprised if I see my great-grandchildren reading a book off a Kindle manufactured in 2010.

- Books are durable. They can be dropped, stepped on, thrown across a room in frustration, etc. and still be very readable. You can't do that with e-readers.

- Books are relatively inexpensive, and so they're much more portable than an e-reader. You can toss a book in your bag or your purse, toss a book in the back seat of your vehicle, take a book on a camping trip if you like, take a book to the beach. You don't have to worry about leaving a book in a hot car or your front porch most of the time.
 

- Another good thing about books being cheap is that you don't have to worry as much about them being stolen, or losing them. You can put a book down in a public place like a park bench or a seat on the subway or the ledge of a sink in a public bathroom and generally not worry about it being swiped the second your back is turned. You can't do that with an iPad or a Kindle.

- A third thing about the inexpensiveness of books is that you can easily replace them in the off chance that they are lost or stolen or ruined. (You can get a lovely new copy of Moby Dick for less than five bucks on Amazon!) E-readers cost hundreds of dollars to replace. 

- Books can handle foreign particles. You can drop a book in the sand and not worry about it being destroyed. You can keep it in a humid place like a bathroom for a long time. You can spill a root beer on a book and have it still be quite readable. You can't do that with most e-readers.

- Books do not require energy to read. You can blissfully enjoy a book nearly anywhere on the planet, regardless of whether you have access to electricity. E-readers require a working electrical outlet to recharge (although I guess you could have some kind of solar panel attached to your e-reader... But even then the battery would slowly lose its ability to retain a charge over the years). You can read a book in a forest or in prison or on a deserted island or during a zombie apocalypse or in the aftermath of a nuclear war, even. All you need is light, and if you learn braille you don't even need that.

- I wonder what book I might take with me if I had to leave civilization all of a sudden. The nice thing about books is that they are ready to use, instantly. You just pull one off the shelf and it's ready. If I had to escape the country because the Mafia was after me, I could grab a couple of books and get in my car and drive away. An e-reader would require a power cord, a charged battery, a USB cable to upload the files from your personal computer (or if it uses Wi-Fi, then some kind of internet connection) and somewhere along the line it's going to require the use of someone's cable modem and router of some kind. It's not the kind of thing you could just grab and go. 


- Books, again due to their cheapness, are easier to lend out than e-readers. If I want to read a book I can borrow a copy from my friend or from the library. I've lent out many books that I've never seen again. Keeping hundreds of books on one device makes it impractical to lend out to others.

- Which leads me to my next (tangential!) point: Books are better for writers and better for business. Because if a book becomes just a PDF file to display on an e-reader, how much easier is it to copy it and distribute it without paying the author anything for it? You might say, "But libraries let you read books for free, too," which is true, but the point is that a library loans you a physical self-contained object that only one person can own at a time. If you want to keep that object, you have to pay someone for it. As e-readers try harder and harder to replicate the look and feel of actual books, though, what will be the motivation in anyone paying for a book when they can get the exact same thing for free as a PDF file?

- You could say that this is a lot like what happened to the music industry when computers gained the ability to replicate music, but in some ways it will be way worse for writers. Some say that musicians don't make money like they used to, but at the very least musicians can always perform their art on stage and make money from live shows, or perform on television, or license their music for films and commercials and video games or even for crappy products. Plus, there are more people that pay for digital music on iTunes than there are people who have read an entire book in the past year. What will authors get from the world going digital?

- PDF files and text files are way, way smaller than movie files and music files. I think you can fit the entire Old Testament on 3.5" floppy disk. You can already download gigabytes of music and movies in a matter of minutes. Imagine how easy it will be, then, to copy books, which are tiny tiny little files. I bet you could download entire book stores onto your Nook in a matter of seconds without having to pay a penny to anyone. In some ways I could see this as a good thing for writers, in the sense that many more people might be exposed to their work. In other ways I see it as something that could easily destroy the entire publishing industry, putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work. Maybe then the only writers that will exist are the ones who aren't in it for the money, since their work will be quite worthless..? I can see that as a good thing, but it's also sad that people won't be able to make money from writing anymore.

- Looking at the ecological side of things, books are made from trees which are renewable resource. According to industry reports, paper companies plant five to ten times as many trees as they harvest. E-readers require complex computer parts that are made from ores and minerals that have to be mined out of the earth. These ores are non-renewable. They are also toxic and costly to extract. We have laws against mining them in the U.S. which is why we get almost all of them from China. They don't give a crap about the environment there.

- Books are biodegradable. You could compost a book if you wanted to. If you were to burn a book, it would not give off toxic emissions. E-readers aren't like that. Because of their batteries, their microprocessors, and other chemicals and metals used to make them, they are toxic when returned to the earth.  Their metals corrode and eventually work their way into the ground water.

- Books have a much smaller carbon footprint than e-readers. The energy required to create one book (including ink-making, printing, binding, shipping, etc.) creates about 7.5 kg of carbon dioxide. The energy required to create an iPad produces roughly 130 kg of CO2, according to Apple. Kindles create roughly 170 kg of CO2. And while it's true that there are probably way more books printed right now than e-readers manufactured, at least with the book that 7.5 is a one-time expenditure. E-readers require energy for the rest of their lives. They also require other energy consuming things to function (the aforementioned computers, routers, modems, etc.)

- "E-readers ... require the mining of nonrenewable minerals, like columbite-tantalite, which sometimes come from politically unstable regions." Books don't fund Communist regimes.

- It's easy to write notes in books, highlight things, underline passages you want to remember, etc. I'm sure the stupid e-readers also have some stupid way of doing this, but I wanted to add it anyway.

- Books don't have the ability to connect to the internet or to anything else. This means you don't have to worry about streaming advertisements or flashy things to distract you from the page at hand. You won't ever be tempted to check your e-mail with or play a flash game or check the time and the weather or anything like that with a book.

- A book typically contains just one book at a time. This means that you are forced to focus on just it. If you want to read something else, you have to physically seek out another book to read. If you put a hundred books on one e-reader, though, I can imagine the temptation to quit and try a different book would be much stronger. This is sad because I've read many amazing books that started off slow and that I forced myself to get through because I had nothing else to read anyway.

- Libraries are cool, libraries are sexy. Is there any word in the English language more beautiful than "library"? Hundreds of books arranged neatly on tall shelves... It conjures up wonderful images in my mind.

- People that read in public are cool. I'm always curious about what people are reading in public, or even in movies and stuff. Even if it's something that I would never ever want to read, I want to know. People reading Kindles in public, on the other hand, are douche bags.


Neil Postman wrote that a good "test" for whether or not mankind needs a certain new technology is to ask several questions of it. The first question you should ask is: What problem do we, as a civilization, currently have that this new technology purports to solve? This is followed by the question: What new problems might theoretically arise because of this new technology? And finally: Do the benefits of using this technology outweigh these future problems?


Rock musician Patti Smith said, "Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." I echo her sentiment. Let's not abandon the keystone of religion, of civilization, of humanity itself, for a stupid electronic bauble.