Remember when ebooks were a strange Internet phenomenon that lacked the critical infrastructure to make them viable alternatives to paper books? I do. And I remember the great push to make them accepted in the halls of publishing, something which many publishers fought against. Today, ebooks are ubiquitous. Nearly every paper book is released alongside an ebook of some kind. While they haven’t taken over the industry as some predicted — and it is possible their invention helped increase the amount of piracy — many readers seem to love them. They have likewise become a staple of the independent (self) publishing market, supported by phone apps and dedicated eReaders. In short, ebooks have had a huge impact, and they’re not going anywhere.
Despite their ubiquity, I don’t read ebooks all that often. In fact, I only do so when recording a podcast interview or when I am roped into something in which ebooks are the only option. In fact, I personally can’t stand reading ebooks, and here I’d like to talk about why.
Ebooks are pretty easy to dislike. Reasons range from their price (too expensive = overvalued; too cheap = devaluing books) to their role in increasing piracy to the DRM that often comes with them and so on. While I, too, find the price of ebooks a bit ridiculous (even if I understand why), my reasons for disliking them have more to do with my reading history. These are personal opinions rather than some philosophical notion of the ideal reading medium. I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is a “right” way to read or a right type of reading. There is only reading and the reading practices that work for you.
The biggest issue I have with ebooks is the way they disrupt my reading practices. Generally, I approach reading as an activity that is both mentally stimulating, fun, and informative. All of these are essential, not just one. When I read, I do so to expand my mind, to think about character and setting and theme, and to understand how the parts of a literary text work. Blame all of this on my academic training, if you will, but part of what landed me in the weird position of having a PhD is the love I had for the written word and story. This means highlighting text, flipping back and forth between sections, mulling over words, and ensuring I really understand something. There’s a reason I’m an abysmally slow reader: I haven’t had a desire to power through a book in an evening since the final Harry Potter book.
All of these things are disrupted by the format of an ebook. Whether using my phone, tablet, or dedicated eReader, every ebook I’ve read has made it too time and labor intensive to take notes or flip between pages to refresh a memory. Worse are ebooks where flipping between pages is an essential function. I recently attempted to read several Star Wars choose your own adventure books, a format the requires going back to where you began or jumping back a single step to tread an alternative path. Yet, the ebook versions of these had no “back” buttons, the links sometimes sent me to sections not on the same path, and so on.
I admit that part of my trouble with these books is the device I used: a cell phone. In truth, this isn’t entirely the ebook’s fault; it relies as much on apps and technology as a paper book, and paper books just have the benefit of a well-developed print infrastructure that is still, I’d argue, in its infancy for ebooks. Yet, this highlights part of the problem with ebooks. They are device dependent. A print book requires only your eyes and hands (or a platform to hold the book for you). If there are defects in a print book, those are likely due to printing errors — and rarely so defective that the book doesn’t work. Yet ebooks require a cell phone, tablet, or eReader, and even then, those books might not interact well with your chosen device — as in my case. Most ebooks, of course, will work just fine, but in the case of those Star Wars books, the bugs were so intrusive that it made reading fairly simple books written for children as painful as reading my cell phone’s technical manual.
Really, it comes down to the fact that the technology for ebooks has not reached the point that my standard expectations of the reading process are met. I also don’t anticipate ebooks adapting to accommodate my personal process. After all, I’m a minority of readers. And that’s fine, but it means that I only read ebooks when I have no other option — and it means I rarely enjoy the experience.
Mind you, none of this is a judgment on the preferences of others. We all have our own strange reading preferences, strategies, and processes, and we should be free to pursue them as we wish. But for me, ebooks come up short to the print book.
3 Responses
Most of your issues with ebooks, other than the prices, could be issues with the device and its software. I can’t imagine trying to read a whole book on a smartphone, and even a tablet would give me pause because of the eyestrain of reading with a backlight.
I can’t comment on all ereaders, but there’s certainly the ability to highlight, annotate, and look up words in several dictionaries in the Kobo. You can also have anchors for footnotes – so when you click on a footnote it takes you to that description, and there’s a back button to take you back to where you were. This is really useful in reading academic texts. Now, whether the Star Wars choose-your-own book implemented that correctly in the epub version I couldn’t say, but the ability to do that is there if the publisher is savvy enough to use anchors properly.
Publishers don’t always understand ebook technology, even now, and it’s a shame because a badly formatted ebook can ruin the reading experience. I’ve come across ones that included a hefty index left in pointing to references in the print book, which is obsolete in an ebook. Mistakes like that do seem to be getting rarer, though.
Yup. I admit as much in the piece.
I’m aware that you can highlight and annotate in an ereader, but there is no system I’ve seen that can do it with the same speed as I get with the physical medium. For me, that’s a problem. Annotations and the like cannot take so much time that they disrupt the reading experience for me. But they all do. It’s either clumsy, time consuming, or too difficult to use. It takes me a matter of seconds to do it with the physical medium.
But even setting that aside, the fact that I can’t easily jump between pages on an ebook makes the annotations basically pointless. If I highlight something on page 59 and need to go back to it from page 147, I have to find the slider, try to drag it to the correct page, then do the same to go back. Some systems might have forward/back functions, but it’s just time consuming and disruptive by comparison to the physical media. For me. Again, for me.
As for those Star Wars books: I honestly don’t understand why they formatted it that way. It suggests to me that they didn’t think a lot about how it would function as an electronic book. They just did some simple porting over, put some basic links in, and called it done. Most ebooks aren’t like this, mind, so it’s a unique occurrence. I certainly won’t buy any books of this type in electronic format (the ones I read were temporarily free).