Ebooks Are an Abomination

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/

by laurex • 5 years ago

20 17 5 years ago

mad_ned• 5 years ago

I don't like them either, but I always want to. I wonder if e-paper or whatever will eventually get so cheap and so good, you could have a physical book full of e-pages, then after you read it, press a button, and it becomes a different book.

neuralRiot• 5 years ago

I used to hate them too but that changed when i switched to an e-paper reader and use epub files instead of PDFs. With the e-ink (or e-paper) display the pages look like framed book pages, the battery lasts forever and it weights no more than a paperback.

gremloni• 5 years ago

In my opinion, that’s pointless. Reading ebooks is a cleaner and easier experience. I only read physical books so I can keep the books afterwards.

aaroninsf2• 5 years ago

Counterpoint: the Atlantic is well on the way to being an abomination.

I have written them twice in recents weeks to say that as a long-time subscriber, I am considering cancelling and furthermore urging others to do likewise.

Maybe I missed some change in ownership; the new editorial policy appears to be to invite terrible opinions, typically with a clear and politically unpalatable agenda, cleverly dressed up in intellectual snark.

This is not what I subscribed to, nor what I want.

This is a fine example. Ludditism that is literally 10 years stale. WTH.

zzzbra• 5 years ago

Ian Bogost a luddite...? interesting.

aaroninsf2• 5 years ago

The article's fetishization of the experience of the print book and assertions about fundamental differences in reading based on it are luddite.

It's a funny argument to be picking at this moment. There are headlines everywhere about the publishing industry being in crisis for the indefinite future because of supply chain issues and shortages causing systemic break down in bookbinding and delivery, with the take-away warning being, "physical books are going to be hard to find this fall..."

I like books. I like physical books. I read ebooks every day on the Kindle, but I also buy 20x more physical books than the average American.

There are differences. Ebooks and readers could be better. But this sort of polemicism is oddly off key and ill-timed.

Hot-take: like everyone, Ian there is cranky and angry because of the compounded stress of the Trumpist/QAnon horror show, climate change, the pandemic, etc. I know I am.

The Atlantic thought doesn't get that excuse. It's an institution, not an individual...

aluminum96• 5 years ago

you have been able to scroll through Word (or WordPerfect or WordStar or plain text) documents for as long as computers have existed, even if few would call such an experience reading.

What snobbery. Reading is about the content, and many great insights have been written and read in Microsoft Word.

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

They ARE inferior. Abomination inferior depends.

They have far lower visual resolution than paper. They cause more eye strain and other side effects. You need to have have proper typography PLUS resolutions well over 2000 dpi to come close to paper.

caraffle• 5 years ago

Show me a printer than can print 2000dpi. Small font also causes eye strain, I say all books should be in large font.

Just because they are worse for you doesn't make it so for everyone.

slackfan• 5 years ago

ebook environments generally are awful mostly because of DRM.

I am endlessly happy to own an e-ink reader and reading books on that. However, I will also buy books in print because nothing replaces a hard copy.

beardyw• 5 years ago

I have one I rescued and fixed. It is only used for out of copyright classics (off Gutenberg). My wife started reading War and Peace on it. I wish her good luck with that! Everything else is books.

terracottage• 5 years ago

The software on ebook readers seems awful, and the responsiveness nihil. Years of upgraded models haven't changed this. Reading PDFs was borderline impossible because in addition to being slow, my device didn't even cache the previous/next page... Even though there is ample time to do so while you are reading.

The fact that it didn't occur to anyone involved to do so should be all you need to know to avoid the entire product category.

In a parallel universe, a company would've treated e-ink as a medium in its own right instead of as a webkit front end. They made the same mistake that html/css did: locking in the capabilities before they understood what people needed it to do.

robinsoh• 5 years ago

my device didn't even cache the previous/next page... Even though there is ample time to do so while you are reading.

It is sad isn't it? The state of software. You would think all these open source pdf readers would have developed various forms of caching the expensive operations by now. After all, emmc is inexpensive. Nobody seems to be working on it. It has been like this for years. Instead of getting better, it is getting worse. Eg: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/5766

rg111• 5 years ago

I don't buy this at all.

The first reason being- a novel is a novel. A story is a story. A well-written non-fiction is a well-written non-fiction. The medium does not matter at all.

I have beeen reading voraciously since I was three and a half. It's not much, but I finished reading 200+ books that are not text books/tech books before I turned 20.

I tell you, dead-honest, once I am into a book, I absolutely, literally forget in which medium I am reading it. A book becomes the highest level I am interacting with where the medium is just abstracted away. This feeling is literal to me.

I have used laptops, tablets, 5, 6.5 inch smartphones, Kindles, and desktops as readers. Reading books on desktop is the least physically pleasing. But I must tell you that even while reading on desktop, I totally, absolutely forgot what I was reading on.

I read non-fictions spanning 300+ pages, novels spanning 600+ pages on desktop screens. I was so into them, I was so immersed, that I did not even remember it was a desktop screen.

Secondly, the author assumes the reader standard being Kindles. That's so shallow and out of touch with reality.

A lot of people read ebooks differently, not to mention ebook readers from other companies.

After trying all those, tablets are my best choice for reading ebooks, even better than Kindles.

Kindles are inadequate and have a lot of shortcomings.

I use an android tablet for all my reading- tech books, research papers, novels, comics- all of them.

I use paid apps for reading documents. I always use the lowest brightness available when indoors, with an always on blue light filter. This is a much better option and is very cost effective.

This is the best way I have to read books.

I only buy physical books when I absolutely feel that I should collect it, for my future generation to see, or I must have it.

knaik94• 5 years ago

This is a pretty confused article that tries to find flaws in ebooks without using a distinct definition of what ebooks are. The author is also pretty uninformed about the history of ebooks and misunderstands the target market. My first ebook format was the .LIT format books from microsoft, a format released back in 2000 and supported on windows 95. I also don't know what scholarly nonfiction the author reads but every single research paper I've read has been a pdf. Ebooks are much bigger than the kindle.

The author cares about mainly aesthetics aspects of physical books but then argues those aspects makes them superior. That's not what makes a book valuable. The actual words and meaning matter and only if you consider poems does formatting matter.

Art books aren't books in the traditional sense, but it seems that is what the author of the article seems to care about. With an iPad, you can keep all of the pages and formatting you would find in a typical book if you stick with a pdf. For really complex books, you could just make a pdf of scans. Even comics now come as a digital archive (CBR/CBZ) of high res pictures if not pdfs. I personally prefer digital copies because I can zoom into art that is impossible to do on physical copies.

Being able to change font type, font size, line formatting, line spacing and paragraph spacing without having to reprint a book is fantastic. Making different iterations and improvements of a book wastes nothing. These are positives, not negatives.

These arguments make it clear to me that in a few decades people will see physical paper books the same way people see records/cassettes today. Luddites seem to care more about what the experience is supposed to feel like rather than what it can be.

People's attachment to physical books is the reason why ebooks are so expensive. They aren't supposed to be equivalents, ebook distribution is free, lending ebooks doesn't make it unavailable to others, ebooks aren't tied to any specific device. But things like copyright or library lending laws treat ebooks like physical copies. If you're that attached to books, you can always take an ebook and print it out yourself.

You see people argue that music sounds better from actual records but digital music has become such an easy and mainstream thing, no one argues that we should be choosing records over digital files. School children today are using digital textbooks, the era of paper books is ending. No one argues that dictionaries need to be physical books only.

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

Ebooks have been genuinely life changing for me and I will continue to enjoy them as long as I can.

Just the ability to control font face and size alone is a huge benefit I find it increasingly difficult to live without, with my shitty eyes.

There's also the matter of access. Project Gutenberg, for a huge part of my childhood when I wasn't as well off, gave me access to TONS of books I would never have been able to afford, and many I wouldn't have access to anyway. I am not only forever grateful, but also willing to overlook any imperfections and enjoy the medium.

teitoklien• 5 years ago

ebooks with a good reader , were a game changer for me to read more books.

I enjoy reading a lot more now Just need a epub file and a the default books app on my iphone and I’m set for weeks.

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Related Stories