eBooks (or A Ripple in the Space-Time Continuum)

I love my eBook! I've had it about 8 months now. Why do I love it? Let me count the ways!

1. It's lighter than carrying several books around. I realize it's ridiculous to need to have choices of books on a trip, but I'm neurotic that way. I am fine with going to the store to pick out a new book (love doing that!) but I don't ever want to be caught without a choice of what to read.
   
2. I can download books instantly. Granted my Kindle only works in North America, but before I went to New Zealand earlier this year I simply downloaded 4 or 5 new books. This also allows me to avoid a situation like on my trip to North Carolina a year or so ago. I took my 450-page book that I'd been working on for 3 weeks. I was on page 185. The trip was so awful that I spent so much time delayed at the airport and wasting time in the hotel room (work was a disaster too) that I actually finished the book after 3 days. I surfed the web for the nearest bookstore: there was one locally open from 9-4 (I was on-site from 7:30am-6pm, so that wouldn't work) or a Barnes and Noble down the highway about 25 miles. I went to the grocery store where I had choices of Harlequin Romance or Louis L'Amour. I should've taken the opportunity to broaden my horizons (having never read one of either) but instead I was grumpy about it and decided to "tough it out" by waiting to buy a book at the airport.
   
3. I can search the book easily. I love electronic searches!
   
4. I look up more words that I don't know - because the dictionary is *right there* and I barely have to move a finger to get the answer.
   
5. I can search things on Wikipedia - like when I was recently reading a historical novel and I kept looking up events and people. (I was highly impressed that the author got it right – I mean *I read it on the internet so it must be true*!)
   
6. I can make notes on the fly and highlight stuff I like - and retrieve it later.
   
7. I feel like part of Star Trek when I read it. Seriously - I'm participating in the future! Someday I'll have a flying car too!
   

I would like my eBook even better if it:

1. Had a touch screen.
   
2. Allowed me to share books I purchased with my friends.
   
3. Had a color screen.
   

And guess what? There's one on the market that has some limited capabilities like that!
So by the time I buy my next eBook it will be even cooler! I love competition that benefits the consumer (but that's another topic).

This week I've seen a couple of interesting news stories. In the first it seems that there's a market to *print* books that were only available electronically to-date.

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's top seller of personal computers and printers, is teaming up with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. to join Internet search leader Google Inc. as the latest entrants in the quirky new market of re-creating digital books as paperbacks.

The concept represents a different type of book recycling, as digital copies created from print get a second life as paperbacks.

MICHAEL LIEDTKE, HP, Amazon to Sell Paperback Versions of E-Books, AP Technology Writer, October 21, 2009

Does that seem odd to anyone else? (Ironic? I don't know anymore – after the controversy of Alanis Morissette's apparently misinformed definition of "ironic" I avoid that word.) I guess it's not really all that odd. I work with companies who "want to go paperless" but then print out every meeting agenda and who are miffed when I tell them the software system they bought from my company only has on-line help. (If you printed out our on-line help it would take 1000+ pages.)

The second article was equally pause-worthy, but for a completely different reason. It almost compared the advent of the eBook with the advent of the Guttenberg Press! Holy Smokes!

On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. […] In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.

Stephen Marche, The Book That Contains All Books, Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2009 (quoted from Amazon's Kindle Blog)

It's not that I disagree. But W-O-W! I totally like the idea of a book which contains all books. It's Escher-esque. It makes me feel like there's been a ripple in the space-time continuum like when Marty McFly started to disappear because his mom started falling in love with him.