E-book Poll

I am as strongly opposed to reading e-books as I am to printing out journal articles to read.

This is probably about 90% of why I've gone all-in on e-books. My wife almost always falls asleep before I do, and it's much less of a hassle not to have to worry about keeping the light on.

I have trouble believing that physical books will ever go completely out of fashion, not only due to social reasons but also the pure robustness and ease-of-use of the codex relative to any electronic—often DRM’d—media (which also does degrade with time—when I met up with usernametoolong a couple of years ago I think I remember him mentioning little stuff piling up in old, electronically-stored pdfs from the nineties). There is still a degree of maintenance that goes along with electronic media, after all.

However I also find my attitudes towards technology are heading more and more “Edward James Olmos’s Adama” as I get over, so maybe I’m just a grump about such things.

Counterpoint:  Public domain e-books are frequently really shittily converted to an electronic format and hence are full of spelling errors and random sentence fragments that get cut and pasted out of context like five or six pages later though, to the point where they're almost unreadable.

I’ve had it happen fairly often when they scan an old copy of a book to text. I also did the public domain ebooks thing for a while in the Netherlands but running into that a few times in a row was too much and I started branching out after that—those were all Project Gutenberg ones, though, where they were both scanning very old copies and were probably among the first to try such scanning at such a large scale, or at least collect others’ scans, so some of that might be the cost of being an early adopter (they also tend to have the original book pages, but they’re big pdfs that don’t read well on e-ink devices because the pages themselves are too dark). It’s not that they’re all bad at Project Gutenberg, of course (and I’ve read a couple of their scanned-text ebooks since without problem), just wildly varying in quality.

Yeah, and in the US, where you can pretty easily find a lot of these books in English at one's local library system (and with a lot of public domain stuff, I kinda do like reading editions with some footnotes explaining obscure references or outdated terminology that a modern reader might not get, and libraries usually have those), it really just comes down to "is having to make two trips to the library and having to carry a physical codex around for a couple of weeks worth feeling confident that the text I'm reading isn't profoundly messed up"?

Oh God, yeah, this is such a bummer. Sometimes I download sample chapters of several versions, to see if I can find a decent one. Sometimes I'll pay for a Penguin version of a book that's in the public domain, just to be free of scanning errors.

My one hard and fast public domain ebook rule is that I don’t trust translations because they’re usually old and bowdlerized. I’ll also go for library/buying in that case too.

Nope. Because I might be going to that Used Bookstore primarily BECAUSE I am missing that one book.

This situation is particularly annoying for me right now because I have $85 in store credit for the big used bookstore here. They have two locations. I am equidistant from both. I have tried both and neither has it. I also noted that Trollope's other 6 novel series was well represented at both bookstores. But neither had all 6 books. I could have gotten all 6 of them, but I've have to go to both stores to get them all.

As for translations in the public domain - That's pretty much a NO for me. So many translations done in the early 20th century used that faux-Victorian English. I find translators now take much more care to try to capture the author's tone. Well, good translators do, anyway.

I try the big used bookstores to find good world literature in translation. But often I end up resorting to Amazon. Pretty sure the last 50 books I've bought from amazon consist of 20 textbooks, 25 foreign lit, and 5 new releases from authors I follow.

I'm late to this (as per usual) but the thing that drives me fucking bananas about eBooks is the pricing.

I realize that a significant portion of the market is willing to pay for convenience -- hell, I'm gonna shell out a bunch of money for an eBook tonight for some fairly specialized information / knowledge that I know the authour worked hard on as a single producer of the content with no other viable means of distribution, and that makes a lot of sense to me by reducing what would otherwise be a non-trivial cost -- but I really wish there wasn't so much goddamn gouging in the marketplace.

I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but when I was working at the library, we used Overdrive and another system that pooled the eBook resources of a bunch of small library systems throughout Ontario. it's great to have access to a zillion books, but the real kicker is that the publishing industry forces them to treat digital copies as if they were physical. so the library has to pretend that only one (or three or whatever) copies exist and can be circulated at any given time.

they're returned automatically if someone's license expires, and I get that a lot of technological rigmarole goes into this shit (don't get me started on how badly Adobe Digital Editions licensing / encryption keys can fail), but charging ~$2 less or something for a digital copy with all the overhead that goes into producing and distributing a physical copy of a book just irks me.

do any modern publishers do a "combined" offer with a one-time scratch key or similar, kinda like sealed textbooks sometimes do with the limited access codes? it would make sense to me if they did like some record companies do and when you buy a vinyl you get a download link to get high quality FLAC or MP3 so you don't have to use one of those converter USB turntables or whatever.

I realize that it's a non-zero cost and that a bunch of people have optimized the numbers for what the market will bear, but it just makes me want to opt out entirely and pirate everything, even though I want to give them my money! it's just that the break-even point for me is much different than for others, since I'm more inclined to use the library system (even with the shitty arbitrary restrictions they impose on it) and it just annoys me to see technology artificially restricted in such a fashion. unsurprising though.

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edit: also, PDFs suck horrendously on the eReader my ex got me. ePub is good, PDFs are unusable on anything with that crappy a processor (zooming is so laggy as to make it a massive chore and my eyes aren't great), and I won't even consider touching anything with images with a ten foot pole, as it seems like every non-tablet eReader on the market uses processor technology from 10 - 15 years ago with zero improvements in actual low power processor architecture or speed. and yet they always charge the same prices for the fucking things! it's ridiculous.

I wish large format e-Ink readers like the super fancy Sony one they marketed towards bankers and lawyers had caught on, but they're still like $1000+ for a sizable one. where's my digital newspaper future?

yeah, I remember that "rebuy" bullshit. I was utterly appalled by that and astonished that the library association didn't just tell them to get fucked six ways from Sunday and stop buying books from them en masse... but I guess you're at the mercy of the public's tastes and your duties. the publishing industry is pretty close in terribleness to the music industry in some ways... and the music publishing industry may be the worst of them all. (I will go into a palpable frothing rage if I start talking about the demise of the old Powertabs.net website, which was a godsend when I was first learning guitar and looking for decent transcriptions as a teenager, and they forced them to strip anything that fell into the Mickey Mouse window of copyright to be removed, essentially. urge to kill... rising...)

I always choke at the pricepoints on any non-sale item in an e-book shop, but that's just me? if I could buy my favourites for like $3 or $4 a pop, I'd stack a digital cart full and go nuts. I find it eminently sensible if you're repackaging a limited run or extremely niche work, and I think it can be a boon to smaller imprints and publishers, but as is often the case, I'm deeply unimpressed by how badly the big ones abuse their position in the marketplace.

only publisher I can remember being progressive with eBooks in general back in the day was Baen books (sci-fi imprint). I believe their policy was to give the entire first book away for free in eBook format, similar to the shareware business model that was massively popular in the 90's and made things like DOOM go supernova in popularity and cultural relevance. I suppose that wouldn't really work for any non-series / unserialized format though... unless you maybe give away the entire first third of a book as a sample...? which again would be viable for narrative works, I suppose, but might not fly for say a recipe book or what have you.

Kindle is basically a non-starter here in Canada since none of their devices work with our library systems due to their proprietary format. I mean... they sell them here, but even when my mom won one as a door prize, I don't think she even took it out of the box. I just found out today that Amazon takes 70% (!!!!!) of the list price of any book on their shop. 70 FUCKING PERCENT. for a proprietary format that won't play nice on any other device and would force me to use some fucking app on anything else. yeah, no. fuck that.

I have Prime and I really like it (drinking the kool-aid here) as I don't get out as much to shop and what not these days. I never particularly liked browsing shops for items that aren't directly related to my interests or hobbies, so it sands the edges off that nicely, and as evil as Amazon can be, it still provides me with a pretty solid service that I find useful. the eBook thing is pretty gross though.