e-books, coming and going

Electronic versions of books have been promised and launched at periodic points during the last decade. Some academic publishers (e.g., the Idea Group) have been offering narrow market titles for some time now, which can be purchased online and read as a pdf file that cannot be printed and only transferred to one other computer. An advantage of this variant is immediate access to the text rather than wait several days / weeks for a conventional order to be processed. I needed a copy of Christine Hine's New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science (Idea Group, 2006) immediately and the electronic version was very welcome. Still, reading a full book behind the screen is much less easy and convenient (for a variety of reasons) than the printed version. It seems, by the way, that the publisher of this volume has subcontracted the e-book version to eBooks.com and the price there is now more than the printed version (usually the electronic version is cheaper).

During the past Christmas shopping season a series of e-book readers came on the market, one of them released by Amazon and called Kindle. I haven't tried it (or the other readers, for that matter) out, but have a built-in reservation that is summed up well in the following LA Times article on the innovation. The first paragraphs are pasted below; to read the full article it will be necessary to register at the newspaper site (free), which is worth doing. For other reviews of this reading technology, see the 6 September 2007 NY Times review. One of the many blog reviews of Kindle can be found at TechCrunch; another contribution to this blog, prepared during a press conference of the technology on 19 November, is here.

 

Reading between the lines with Kindle

The e-book reader raises questions about the fundamentals of literature and its future.

By David Sarno
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 9, 2007

Something there is that doesn't love an e-book.

Take Amazon's new Kindle, this season's much-hyped new electronic reading device that allows you to instantly, wirelessly download any of 90,000 titles from the online retailer's database. Despite its $400 price tag, first-generation clunkiness and mid-80s design aesthetic, the Kindle actually provides a pretty darn good reading experience.

But try telling that to anyone who first read "Treasure Island" at age 11 and could still tell you whether the cover illustration on that copy had Long John Silver in a red pantaloon or a black one. Or to anyone who's ever discovered a first edition among the musky tomes of a used-book store. Or to anyone who, upon conquering Proust, has immediately promoted the whole set to the top of their bookshelf, alphabetization be damned.

Jason Epstein, a longtime editorial director of Random House, founder of its Anchor Books imprint, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, and first-ever recipient of the National Book Award's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is himself a bibliophile of sorts.

Reached at home not long after he'd finished reading a new translation of "War and Peace" (the third time he'd read the novel), he had just begun the latest volume of John Richardson's multipart biography of Picasso. "There's no way you could read that book on a screen," he said, jazz humming in the background. "Even if you leave out the color illustrations, it's a very complicated book. You've got to be able to concentrate on it," he said. "To go back, and go ahead, and look at the footnotes.

"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."