E-Book Readers and the Death of Print Media?
Posted in Econ, Environment, Lifestyle by George
Full Disclosure: This is not an advertisement, although the link to the Amazon Kindle is an affiliate link to Amazon. I am actually going somewhere with this article beyond the Amazon Kindle.
The Amazon Kindle
The Kindle is an E-Book reader. It’s about the size of a book, it has a small keyboard, a cellular internet connection, and most importantly an “E-Ink” screen that displays books. The battery can last for more than a week without recharging. The Kindle’s main purpose is to read books. If you want to buy a book, you can use the Kindle’s built-in online store to purchase books wirelessly, using its free cellular internet connection. Additionally, you can subscribe to NEWSPAPERS/blogs/other publications on the Kindle, so that every morning when you wake up, today’s paper is ready for you to read.
The Kindle itself is not necessarily a “good product,” or at least one that I would purchase. The Kindle is expensive, and the prices for books and newpapers subscriptions are not exactly generous. Moreover, it seems like it is difficult to send your own documents to the Kindle, and the battery life is not so good if you leave the cellular internet connection on. Additionally, the purchased books have DRM protection, making them difficult to manipulate if you want to save them to your computer for class/work/etcetera, or lend a book to a friend to borrow. Additionally, you must purchase the books from Amazon, and not every physical book has a Kindle book counterpart available for purchase. Additionally, and most importantly, you cannot mark up things you read on a Kindle. There is no highlighting or note taking feature. This is a must for students if they decide to put their textbooks on the Kindle. [I would buy a Kindle in a heartbeat if (1) my law casebooks were available in Kindle format; and (2) I could use a stylus to write on the screen and save my notes.]
However, the Kindle should usher in a new generation of E-Book readers that will have a huge impact on the world today. There is a serious amount of time and money that goes into printing presses for newspapers that must be delivered every morning at an ungodly hour. However, if newspapers become electronic, society will no longer need to waste the time, effort, ink, and paper running printing presses all night long and sending out people to deliver the papers at 4:00am. No longer will it matter if you’re on a business trip and you want to read the Wall Street Journal that you have a subscription for at your home address. All in all - just for newspapers alone - E-book readers could save serious time, money, and even a substantial amount of natural resources that can be put to better use.
Moreover, book publishers will no longer have to “guess” at how many books to print. If a book is a hit - as many electronic copies as needed can be delivered without any delays to print new books due to unanticipated demand.
Finally, and most importantly for me, those of us who lug tons of books around in our backpacks will now have much happier backs. An E-book reader should easily be able to store hundreds of law casebooks, meaning instead of lugging three ten pound books around, I can carry one one pound E-book reader.
Although the Kindle is far from a perfect product - I would personally not buy one today - the fact that it sheds light on E-book readers in general is huge. In the near future, I am certain new, higher-quality E-book readers will emerge on the market, whether they are the next version of the Kindle or a completely different product. When these E-book readers emerge, reading will quickly become more convenient for consumers, and more efficient for producers.
December 21st, 2007 at 6:00 pm
You can get another angle on eReaders at http://www.booksinmyphone.com they let you read books in your regular ‘dumb’ cell phone. This as a major advantage in that not only is there no paper involved, but you also do not need to manufacture another device. Electronic devices are not clean to make or recycle so reducing the purchase of them by reusing them for other purposes hits two of the three ‘R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).
The reading experience is pretty good, and (if your phone is internet enabled) it’s neat to be able to browse for a book and immediately install and red it (otherwise you need to get it from the web and install to your phone manually).
December 26th, 2007 at 10:29 am
This is a really interesting concept. All of your reasons for why an electronic book would be advantageous over hard copies seem to be good ones, but like you, I share some additional concerns. My first concern would be durability. If I’m in grad school and need to carry the E-book wherever I’m going I would need it to be very durable. If I was caught in the rain or fell off my bike I wouldn’t want to have to worry about losing all of my books or my only means of reading those books. Maybe one good safety feature would be storing your purchased books online so that you could access them if something happened to the E-book itself.
Another concern would be reliability. At 1340 G there were plenty of times when the internet went down and if this would prevent someone from reading it would be a bad thing. Though, I’m sure the internet would only be necessary for downloading the book initially anyway.
Would the E-book be something that is really expensive and only available to the upper middle class or above? Another concern is just how much energy we consume with our equipment. It would be interesting to see a study on whether buying newspapers and books would have a greater impact on the environment than producing E-books and then powering them. There seems to be a trend towards powering things with electricity that have traditionally been unplugged. One example, which I think is really stupid, is the E-picture frame. This is just something else to plug in and doesn’t really have any advantage that I can see over putting a photograph in a frame. There are plenty of new features in cars that use a lot more energy to facilitate. In the early 80’s your typical car had about the same gas mileage as the cars today, even though our engines have advanced and become more efficient. George’s 1990 Toyota Camry gets much better gas mileage than even the hybrid SUVs coming out this year. Something is wrong there.
I got kind of off topic, but I think this article is starting to point at a bigger issue.