It may be true that physical books don’t have to be recharged, ink-on-paper is high resolution, easy to markup etc. I also believe that all the cute little reasons that people give for why physical books are actually better technology does not really hold water. So, I personally do not believe that these two issues (commonly raised as objections against reading ebooks) serve as much of a roadblock at all. The resolution is incredible, and there is much you can do to mitigate the bright light (reading in dark mode etc.) getting more (diverse) books to more people more quickly. I really did see it as something that would accelerate the democratization of reading – i.e. I believed that the e-ink technology – the clarity of the black letters on the pearl-white background – would upend the publishing industry. This is good for me, not so good for bookstores.Įver since I first laid eyes on a Kindle (back in 2008), I was convinced that it would be a game-changer. I have to admit that I have stumbled upon an interesting book at a library and bought it there and there from Amazon with my phone (actually, it was from ). It seems to me that the enemy of bookstores today is as much the library as it is Amazon, or rather, a combination of library + Amazon. You do lose the pleasure of browsing when you buy online, but you can get much the same experience by going to a library. The buying experience, it seems to me, is no worse than buying physical books online and better (in many ways) than buying a book in the bookstore for all the usual reasons (time cost of getting to a bookstore, limited selection, haphazard organization, overpriced books, rude storeowners etc.). And there is nothing like having the book that you want in your hands within seconds.

The experience can be clumsy, but it seems that most of the issues have been ironed out. I have turned away from ebooks, but NOT because of: But the unpleasantness is not, I would argue, for the reasons you might think. In my experience, the ebook is failing as a “reading platform” because reading on an ebook device is simply not a pleasant experience. I have tried reading all kinds of books – fiction and nonfiction, classics to contemporary, long and short, and ebooks I bought for $15 and those I got for free. There was a time when I bought many an ebook, but – let me be very honest with you – I have not read a single one of them from digital cover to digital cover. This is probably music to publishers’ ears (but not to bookstore owners because in the same period, I have not bought a single book in a physical bookstore). My ebook purchases have fallen to zero, and this has been true for several years now. I still buy plenty of books, but only those made from trees. From a technological point of view, my reading habits have definitely regressed.

Typora or monkey writer