E-Books ain't evil

Brian wrote on 02/24/2011 at 21:45 from (47.525054, -122.048447)

I've heard a lot of whinging lately -- mostly from bookish friends -- about the apparent evils of e-books. At the same time, my parents both got e-readers and can't put the things down. It's an odd thing, I can tell you, hearing your Boomer parents trumpet the triumphs of modernity while your Generation Y friends cling to 500 year old technology and bemoan the march of progress.

I didn't really have much of a position one way or the other, mind you. In fact, I don't even own an e-reader. I hadn't thought seriously about the pros and cons until I read a post on Tumblr. I don't mean to pick on the author, but since they quite succinctly summed up one of the many arguments I've been hearing, I'll tear into the blog entry a little before moving on to broader topics.

Suffice it to say, I'm not convinced that all this e-book hate is justified.

Argument #1: They hurt your eyes

Long before the advent of electronics, eyes were being destroyed by books. Put simply, our eyes were not designed to focus on tiny little things for long periods of time, as many a sailor or tailor or bead impaler will no doubt attest.

So yes, in absolute terms, e-readers will hurt your eyes if you don't rest them every 20 minutes or so. But then again, so will books. Really, the argument here is that e-readers are worse for your eyes than books. There's a lot of nuance to this claim (Worse in bright sunlight? The dark? What kinds of books? What kinds of e-readers?), but I think this New York Times blog post does a better job of tackling it than I would (in less space, too).

At any rate, it's hardly a clear-cut victory for the printed page, especially as e-ink and backlighting improve.

Argument #2: Nothing beats the experience of holding a book in your hands

This would be a compelling argument if I was given a more tangible example of what that experience is supposed to be. Moreover, not everybody finds reading a printed book to be a pleasant experience. In fact, books aren't the most accessible parts of modern life, and whole industries have sprung up to rectify the many ways in which printed books mistreat the disabled.

Let's start literally. I can assure you that lots of things beat the experience of holding a book in your hands... if you don't have hands (or can't use them well). For people without hands or with limited finger dexterity, reading a typical printed book ranges from difficult to impossible. Sure, e-readers still need to be held, but require only the mashing of a button to turn a page, an action that requires two hands and quite a bit of fine motor skill with a book.

Leaving aside the issue of hands, there are plenty of other disabilities that aren't well accommodated by printed books. People with vision impairments require special large print or braille editions, which I'm quite certain are not issued for every book that goes to press. What this means is that traditional printed books have created a second class of readers, for whom only the most popular or topical books are worthy of printing.

E-books promise to make this problem obsolete. Depending on the device, the same e-book might be interpreted differently and displayed variously as standard type (for those with normal eyesight), enlarged/high-contrast type (for those with visual disabilities), braille, or even read aloud. The same technologies that have opened the Web to the disabled can be brought to bear on any device-independent format.

Praise technology.

Argument #3: Books are more earth-friendly, since they're made from renewable resources, not plastic and toxic metals

Now, on the face of it, this is a very, very compelling argument. After all, the dangers and inefficiencies of recycling electronics have been well-documented for at least 30 years now. How could e-readers possibly be more environmentally friendly than books?

To answer that, we'll have to note that one book contains... one book. And since books are experiential, they're really a form of disposable entertainment (except reference books, which tend to be frequently reused). An e-reader, by contrast, can hold thousands of books. An apt analogy, I guess, would be to compare whether reusing the same plastic grocery bag is more environmentally responsible than getting a new paper bag every time. To answer that, you'd need to know the average lifespan of the plastic bag, which is as much a product of consumer habits as it is manufactured durability.

Hm... that's a hard one.

Well, let's get concrete, then. Books are also a physical item, while e-books are virtual. Thus, it would be unfair of us to just consider the relative environmental costs of their manufacture. Printed books cost money and fuel to ship and store, something e-books simply do not incur.

Now, if there are about 275,000 titles published annually in the US, and each run averages 1,000 books (admittedly, I pulled this number out of my ass), and each book weighs about 12oz, and each book travels about 1,000 km from printer to reader (again, straight outta my bum, but probably a conservative number over the lifetime of a book), and the average efficiency for a semi truck is 2,426 kJ per tonne·km, then that means that just shipping the books takes 227,100,000 MJ. That translates to 1.650 - 1.892 million gallons of fuel (depending on whether you're using diesel or gas), which means emissions of around 40 million lbs of CO₂.

Per year.

That's not exactly sustainable. Hell, that's not even taking into account the massive energy cost of making paper from pulp. Even if an e-reader is more costly (in energy terms) to manufacture, the pool of potential customers expands at a fraction of the rate of book production.

Argument #4: Anything electronic is inevitably pirated, and the industry will suffer

True, piracy will almost certainly increase as redistribution costs go down. E-book retailers know this, as they've already expended tremendous effort engineering anti-piracy technologies designed to prevent sharing of titles. That this piracy will doom publishing, however, is hardly clear.

About a decade ago, the RIAA was making similar noises to those eminating out of the publishing cartels. They were claiming that the advent of peer-to-peer technologies and a rapid expansion of internet access was going to kill the music industry. Potential buyers would simply download a song instead of buying the CD, they said, with labels and artists losing out.

A decade later, the recording industry is more profitable than ever, seemingly in spite of itself. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that, the more convenient it is for people to purchase an artistic work, the more likely they are to purchase it (obviously). Indeed, most major label artists now give their music away for free on sites like YouTube, which has had the obvious (to non-RIAA executives, anyway) effect of driving music sales up, not down, relying on peer-to-peer marketing effects (previously termed "word of mouth") and the ubiquity of the internet to further pump up demand for popular songs.

Meanwhile, lower distribution costs have meant that the barrier to indie musicians and film makers is now dramatically lower. A glut of services offering better deals than artists could ever get from record labels in exchange for distributing their works online emerged, resulting in lower music prices, more diversity, and better pay for the artists. As if that wasn't enough, some bands (notably Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) began distributing their music themselves, on their own websites, pocketing all the money for their efforts and giving nothing to the industry they succeeded in spite of.

Freedom.

There's no reason to suggest that publishing is any different than music (or movies, for that matter), where the digital revolution has liberated many artists from the lack of leverage imposed by distribution cartels. Sure, it might come at the cost of some piracy, but assuming that every pirate was a potential sale is flawed reasoning. If an easy route exists to pay for a work and the consumer still won't pay, they probably weren't going to buy that album/movie/book anyway. Meanwhile, unlike material theft, the artist has suffered no loss from piracy.

Argument #5: One or two books are easy enough to carry; Nobody needs a library in their pocket

I have a one-word rebuttal: Travel.

When Marijana and I started our six month trip, fully 1/3 of our packed weight was consumed by books. And this was after we opted to leave most of our pleasure reading at home. Reference books, guides, maps, dictionaries, and histories dominated the bulk of our books, and we used every one. If we could have carried those volumes on an e-reader, we would have had far more mobility, fewer concerns, fewer backaches, and more fun. Hell, if we had brought an e-reader, we would have been able to bring all that pleasure reading we weren't able to do.

Bonus round

I think that addresses most of the complaints I've heard lately. But there are other upsides to e-books than the stuff outlined in my counter-arguments.

From the point of view of publishers, as I said, e-books represent a massive cost savings. Printing, shipping, and storing physical books doesn't just use up energy and fuel, it takes up space, time, and money. E-books negate entire facets of the existing publishing process. Publishers will no longer, for example, have to estimate how well a given book will sell, since the cost of copying and distribution rapidly approaches zero for digital content. Nor will they have to worry about returns, remainders, and delayed (and convoluted) royalty payments, since these are all the by-products of maintaining and tracking physical inventory.

With e-books, authors and editors can structure their texts differently to take advantage of e-reader features. The software publishing industry, in particular, has been exploiting the benefits of electronic texts for years, now, incorporating features such as hyperlinks to skip around within a text or reference external websites.

But e-books are probably most beneficial to readers. For me, at least, the most compelling feature is that they allow you to cram a whole library into your pocket. I'm a voracious reader, and can easily go through a book a day. Ironically, my love of reading has made me all but give up reading books, since I consume them too quickly and travel too much for it to be practical to carry them around with me. Add in the benefits of built-in search, multiple bookmarks, text resizing, and instant gratification and you have the perfect literary delivery vehicle.

For me, that is.

P.S. All that said, I still think that mp3s, digitally-distributed movies, and e-books are too expensive, considering their costs of production. And, as long as Amazon, B&N, and the rest continue to distribute DRM-restricted e-books, I'll be procuring mine from Project Gutenberg and reading them on my netbook. I enjoy Orwell a lot, but not so much that I want to pay ironic tribute to his cynical dystopia.