“Why Can’t We All Be Friends?”: An Alternative View on the Digital vs Print Debate
Joe Vaz, editor of the digital-only Sci-fi and Horror magazine, Something Wicked, has added his voice to the ongoing debate on the merits of eBooks versus print books. While remaining tentative about adding yet another opinion to a topic mired by repetitiveness and uninformed commentary, Vaz says that a view that has been neglected regards the simple factor of cost.
Every so often the eBook debate explodes on the internet – for example, with Jonathan Franzen’s recent declaration that eBooks are “corroding values”. His argument? “The combination of technology and capitalism has given us a world that really feels out of control” (two words Franzen: modern medicine).
A quick dip into the Franzen debate, for those wanting some background:
The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology.
“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.
On a recent holiday I read Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom. It might amuse him to learn that the reason I read it is because I knocked my Kindle, carefully stocked up with a holiday’s worth of books, off a bar and onto a stone floor, breaking the screen and forcing me to pick up a few emergency replacements in the airport.
In his timeous response to the debate, Vaz tries to gently side-step the “either/or” approach and simply bring into view some considerations which show that both have their value – that “both mediums are needed”. He points out that since buying a Kindle, he has read more classics than ever before thanks to the availability of out-of-print public domain books. They make access to reading “super-efficient”, “immediate”, and cheap.
On the other hand, Vaz reminds us that similar problems of cost and availability emerge when one considers that “an e-book is only cheap if you have a $100 e-reader”, making the medium exclusive mainly for “us children of the internet”. The medium also makes transference of books difficult. As Vaz points out, “how will you donate your old books to your library, or your gardener if they’re all tied up in licensing restrictions and, more importantly, sealed shut inside your Kindle or iPad”?
Diplomatically following the words of Franzen, Vaz says “there is a sense of permanence to books; they can be lost, or wet, or forgotten or donated or tossed in the bin, but they can also be re-discovered by someone else”. Or, as Stephen Colbert rightly points out, “You can’t burn a Kindle”.
Also responding to Franzen’s claims that eBooks lack a sense of permanence, Jeff Alexander in TIME Ideas writes that “Franzen was overlooking another factor that should be dear to any literary traditionalist’s heart: e-books are also keeping the classics alive.” Corresponding with the points raised by Vaz, Alexander says that eBooks have made out-of-print public domain classics like Anna Karenina available to a new audience:
“If you’ve just dropped a couple of bills on an iPad, Nook or Kindle, you may not be in the mood to pile on another $20 or $50 or $100 worth of the latest bestsellers to read on it, especially in the current economy. On the other hand, that pang of guilt you feel every time you pass Tolstoy or Austen sitting unopened on your shelf now has an electronic remedy and one that didn’t cost you more than a little download time.
Read the article at Something Wicked‘s blog:
As most of you know, I run an online/e-book fiction magazine called Something Wicked. My entire market is people who own e-readers and enjoy downloading our magazine, so it is fair to say that I depend on e-reader customers to finance my magazine. I myself own two Kindles, and have downloaded dozens and dozens of books and magazines. I have subscriptions to six short-fiction magazines, five of them e-mags, and only one in print.
I think it is fair to say that I am a fan of e-books and the e-reader technology.
Need a crash course on eBooks? Take a look at these infographics (click to view):
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