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I, too, love books and I own several tons of them. But I also love ebooks. So I have to wonder if some of the argument against ebooks is merely nostalgia and a resistance to change.
My point of view, of course, is that of a reader but also as an author of published popular fiction. I have, therefore, some experience with the way publishing-in-paper works, and doesn't work.
Here are some of the points that came to mind while I was reading the essay.
1. The chain of profit-skimmers between author and reader is vast, and most of the people in that chain make more off a copy of a book than the author. There are printers and binders, typesetters and cover artists, distributors and truck drivers, loggers and pulp mill operators, mall owners and property managers, etc., etc., etc. Throw in libraries and used bookstores and even Amazon, ABE, and other online sellers of second-hand books, and there are a lot of people making money off the printed word. Romance novelist Rebecca Brandewyne campaigned vociferously for years to get library rental royalties and used-book royalties paid to authors, but as far as I know, she never got anywhere with it. (Never mind the dollars involved in subsidiary rights sales such as to movies and tv.) If a proliferation of epublishing eliminated all these profit-takers, maybe authors would make out a lot better EVEN AT VASTLY REDUCED PRICES.
2. The cost of printing paper copies of some books makes owning them out of the reach of many readers. I remember having to buy a large paperback book as a text for one of my classes in 2002 and hte price was $53. Of course, it had a lot of pictures, many in color, and it was an academic text with a small potential audience. When the publisher has to recoup set-up costs over, say, 5,000 copies rather than 50,000, the price is going to go up considerably. For another class we were supposed to buy a lavishly illustrated art book, until the instructor found out the price was something over $150 and the book was out of print anyway. An ebook that merely referenced public domain images on the web wouldn't cost nearly as much. In fact, I was able to transcribe the text of another art book required for that class, link to the works on the internet, and it didn't cost me anything, other than some time.
3. Physical ownership is often more of a class and status issue than a personal reading preference. In the days when hand-written manuscripts were the province only of the very wealthy, so today are book collections the sign of disposable income to buy them AND ownership of space to keep them. My books occupy a lot of space. I had to buy bookcases on which to store -- and display -- them. A Kindle or an external hard drive isn't quite so ostentatious.
4. A library of searchable ebooks would save me hours and hours and hours of looking for bits of esoteric information. Like the time I spent days looking for a quote by a specific author and actually read three complete books by him, only to realize the quote was from another author. . . . .
5. Books would never be out of print. (I love Project Gutenberg!!!!)
6. Think of all the trees we'd save.
TG, TT
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