Post
by Jukka Juutinen » Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:11 am
John, perhaps my message was a bit ambiguous. So,
1) By $10,000 I meant the value of my current book collection. If that was stored only in a digital format, all that money would vanish by a simple EMP burst. No thanks.
2) Some of the most important books for me are large format ones with large sized graphics like cutaway and other technical drawings (e.g. ship plans don't work in small size) that need at least an A4 size to be useful. Now, this would mean an e-reader with at least 16" display. And how handy is that? What is more, an A4-sized books easily allow A3-sized illustrations either over double-page spread or a foldout. And A3-sized art requires 20" display. How nice that must be to handle.
Even if a 16" display would do, its power consumption would be far greater than that of a Kindle with their 6" or 7" displays. Which in turn would bring difficulties of their own.
3) If the user experiences of touch-screen phones are of any indication, these screens are very fragile and short-lived unless pampered. Added to this the fact that the life of such screens is less than 10 years. Thus in comparison to books, they are throwaway products and I will never, never support such excess consumption of natural resources that are unrenewable (whereas trees are).
4) I have not handled a dedicated e-reader, but a 7" tablet I have and that was an experience that killed any hope of such devices to be used for reading long texts by me.
5) E-reader display resolution is insufficient for me.
6) E-book production costs do not differ substantially from printed ones, at least ones that feature illustration laid out among the text as the biggest costs items are often editing, acquiring publishing rights, paying the mapmaker etc. That assumes a print run of several hundred copies, but if an English language book does not sell more than 100-200 copies, then it deserves to remain unpublished.
I do fear that these e-books will become nothing more than simple text files dumped on hapless readers in the name of "new technology".
All in all, I see absolutely no redeeming features in e-books for me while the handicaps are too many to describe in full.