Much as I love technology and gadgets, I'm an e-reader refusnik. This includes refusing to read books on my husband's new iPad, which is a glorious device. So glorious that it would obviously be great to get all my work-related papers loaded on to it, and put an end to the heavy, bulging briefcases. However, e-reading is clearly growing in popularity, and I found this Chronicle article in which several academics explain their relationship with e-readers very interesting.
All have some caveats – different ones. The three themes, I think are:
1. Academics want to be able to cut and paste selections into other documents, and the copyright protection mania (I guess) means none of the devices have that functionality;
2. The price point for e-books is set too high currently. My hypothesis is that price will need to be quite a lot lower for these intangible products than for their physical equivalents – with an e-book you're not paying for an asset that will decorate your living room or study as well as an experience of a few hours.
3. The iPad users are more enthusiastic than the Kindle users.
Finally, I think this comment by one of the contributors is spot on:
The truth is, e-books are simply not interesting.
The iPad and the Kindle before it are marvels of engineering and
commerce. They're endpoints on a publishing-and-distribution chain. They
make book-buying quick and easy, and by most accounts, they make
book-reading easy, too. Yet they also reinforce the most conservative of
publishing and reading practices. The iPad is the height of
21st-century consumer technology so far, but the e-books you might read
on it are much less experimental than any paper-and-glue book.
The creative potential of this new medium has yet to be fully explored. When it is, though, e-readers will become far more interesting.
Ebook readers actually do let you copy and paste materials. My favorite feature of my Kindle is the “My Clippings” feature. While reading a book, you can highlight sections of text or type notes on the keyboard and it will automatically save to the My Clippings text file. You can simply drag and drop the file from your Kindle to your desktop and viola, you have your notes (each clipping includes the book/location information). There are also small, easy-to-use programs online that let you export the contents of the text file into a CSV or DOC for more deft organization.
As an avid note taker, I now find it quite a chore to read physical books if only for the bother of writing (and then typing!) all my notes by hand.
(The only disclaimer is that some books will come with a Publisher-dictated clipping maximum, e.g., you can only clip 10% of the book. I have only run up against that problem once, and I have clipped quite a bit).
I also love being able to read and clip tons of PDFs. The only thing worse than printing out 50 page PDF files is reading 50 page PDF files on the computer.
Ebook readers may not be that “interesting”, but they certainly have improved my reading productivity and I have greatly enjoyed it. (I can only speak for the Kindle.)
I'll obviously have to try e-readers despite my love of books as physical products, but might wait a bit anyway for all the features to improve. But still, they seem to me to be complements to books at least as much as substitutes for them.