Thing 9: eBooks

Yeah, so, we bought a house in December... and I still don't really have room for all the books.  Not until I can afford to have custom shelving put in the dining room...

I'm one of those people who's not a fan of reading on screens.  I'm sure I'll get there eventually; as much as I love physical books, there's only so much space, and for most of what I read, the content is not format-dependent.  (In my head, I'm imagining what life would be like if I had my Betty Crocker cookbook in e-format, and an e-reader that could pull up, in parallel, the brownie recipe and the frosting recipe on the same screen...)  But, I have no e-reader, and my phone is a Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo that's two years old.

My husband, on the other hand, loves electronic books and has repurposed one of my older laptops (I'm a fan of 10" or smaller laptops for portability) as an ebook reader.  He reads a lot of pulp sci-fi, and he can get titles easily in a format that works on a variety of platforms.  He also reads on his phone, which would drive me nuts - the screen is so small!  He's getting a new Android phone in a couple months, which may or may not expand his options.

Now, all that said, I've used ebooks before.  We've had NetLibrary here at Cobleskill for quite a while, and I read Girl of the Limberlost through it... twice, actually.  I used it for research when I was doing a paper comparing the portrayal of women in Westerns with women's actual experiences in the West - Calamity Jane's short little autobiography was in there.  NetLibrary's format is cumbersome, however, especially when you compare it with our other ebook collection; the books  can't be exported from the web interface.  Our Springer ebooks are amazing - each chapter is a PDF that you can download or print.  We're allowed to do chapter "photocopies" through ILL in our license, which is great, since there are so many technical titles in that collection, and when you're buying/licensing "e" in place of print, lack of ILL license greatly curtails your service potential.  I've been using Project Gutenberg books for reference since... well, since I was an undergraduate.  (Shakespeare, King James Bible, etc.)


If the book series I'm reading were available as ebooks and I had an ebook reader - well, I don't know that I'd necessarily go for it.  My husband and I are reading the same book at the same time right now, and on, say, a Kindle, we couldn't do that without also sharing the physical Kindle.  There'd be no advantage to electronic over print.  It would be silly to pay for two copies of the same book in the same household - or to borrow two copies of the same book from the library in the same household.

And then I consider all the gaming books I have; I don't know how many people realize that when someone who plays Dungeons & Dragons or a similar role-playing game goes to play at a friend's, they're probably toting a small reference library of gaming books with them, depending on their role in the game and the amount of customization they've done.  I've run games where I needed to tote six or eight books weighing two pounds a piece.  Putting all those onto an e-reader, especially if they're in accessible PDF format (for text searching)...

Our students have had mixed reactions to our ebooks; some of them love them, and some of them want something they can access without a computer or the internet.  Libraries who borrow from us through ILL love our ebooks so much I had to add a loan deflection for them (since I can only send one chapter, and not the whole book for those titles).

In the end, though, the licensed nature of ebooks makes me uneasy.  Can the publisher pull the title on you?  Are you buying the title, or license to read the title?  If you buy a new reader, how easy is it to get your content from one reader to the other?  Can I easily hand the book off to a friend I think might like it?  Do they get to keep it if I don't want it back?

The limited circulations some publishers are trying to impose make me nervous; I'm sure many of us have been known to check out a book, not get around to reading it, and check it out again to read six months later when we have more time.  What if the library can't afford to re-up the title when it hit its limited circulations?  If I didn't buy it the first time around, I'm not going to go buy it just because the library doesn't have it any longer.  (In fact, I'm more likely to buy the book after the third time I've checked it out from the library.)

And of course, there's that article about women over 35 and the illegal downloading of ebooks.  I'm not in the age range yet, and I deal with copyright so much on a daily basis I don't think I could consciously infringe like that, but maybe publishers are doing something wrong if the trend is going up.  I buy a lot of mp3s - it's almost exclusively how I get new music now - but it's because the price is right for the product.  I wouldn't do it until I had a viable option that wasn't iTunes (no iPod, and Apple's DRM irked me), and the same reasoning is part of why I haven't gotten a e-reader.

Like I said, I'll get there eventually - maybe when ebook reader/tablet/phone development hits the level of confluence that would most interest me (I only want to have to carry one gadget, darn it), but I'm going to be slow about giving up paper.