In the article "Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google, and the long tail", Terje Hillesund comments that he found over 500 articles written through 2007 that discussed e-books. At the Wisconsin Library Association's conference this fall, the keynote talk was about E-books. And when I opened up the December 2011 edition of American Libraries , one of the first articles I saw was entitled "A Guide to Buying E-books". They are on everyone's mind, and their market continues to grow. But what are they, really? Can they ever replace books or be used in a similar way? Do they even count as books or are they a completely different beast?
Many people have attempted to answer these questions, and in the next few paragraphs, I would like to make my own attempt to clarify what I think about the whole e-book thing. But I do not think there ever will be one answer to these questions for the simple reason that reading is a subjective personal activity, directed by individual needs, cultural background, and value systems. As such, my thoughts reflect my own background, that of a lover of reading, a person who has been in school for 19 years, a person raised by two professors, married to a PhD student and sister to another (basically surrounded by those of the intelligentsia), and also a person in love with technology and gadgets. With that caveat, lets talk e-books.
Both Hillesund's article and another article entitled "Disowning Commodities" by Ted Striphas take the view that e-books represent something fundamentally different from what we have seen before. Hillesund claims that they have, via separating the storage of the text from the reading of the text (storage in bits, reading in good old fashioned letters), broken the tradition of the book, in which the creation, storage, distribution and reading of knowledge are all contained within one unchangeable form. He quotes Roger Chartier, a prominent historian of reading, who says "Our current revolution is obviously more extensive than Gutenbergs". Another intellectual, Stephan Bickerts, discussed in Striphas, believes that e-books have destroyed "deep reading" of the past, a type of meditative engrossment in the words of another. Something,all agree, has changed.
There can be no argument that the medium has changed. Physically, the Kindle is very different from a paperback. However, through my own experience with my Kindle, I have found that the act of reading has fundamentally remained the same. For pleasure reading (a far too uncommon thing in my life at the moment) reading on the Kindle does not detract from my enjoyment of the story in anyway. Having Pride and Prejudice on Kindle does not change the fact that Austen writes with an incredible sense of character and societal analysis. The only problem is that it requires you to push a button to flip from page to page, which makes it hard to get back to a section, but, when reading for pleasure, this is not usually a huge issue. So when it comes to reading for fun, a Kindle or a paperback work just as well.
But what about for that "deep reading" or scholarly reading? Hillesund claims that the only reading people won't do electronically is for sustained, detailed reading of lengthy texts. In this I agree with Hillesund. I believe that this is truly where the book will continue to flourish, at least for the time being. Striphas believes that this is due to how the owning a physical book, in the 1930's became a status symbol of then new middle class. While this might have something to do with it, I actually do not think my dislike of using e-text for scholarship is a cultural phenomena. If anything, I believe that the middle class has embraced the e-reader like they did the displayed book in the 1930's, as symbols of their learning and ability to spend. The truth of the matter is that the functionality for serious scholarly reading is just not there. For myself, the lack of an easy way to write notes or highlight text in my Kindle, or quickly flip to a place I highlighted, seriously limits its use as a tool for research. Even if the e-reader improves on this, it still is much more expensive to lay out three e-readers to compare text than to spread out books on a table for cross comparison. Perhaps scholarship methods will change, but until that happens, a need for written text will remain for the scholar and the student
So, in my opinion, e-books are in fact just a new medium, not something brand new. In containing the same content one would find in a manuscript, in a codex, on a scroll, they fall into the category that these mediums do: the book. The fact that they are stored in a different way does not change their purpose, every books purpose, which is to share knowledge. However, they should and could not totally replace the older medium of the printed codex. Not only have they not reached a point in which they are truly useful for scholarly study, but they are simply not affordable for everyone. The digital divide still exists, people still come into their library because they have no computer at home. E-books are neat, and possibly might someday drive out the printed book. But today is not that day.
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