[WEB4LIB] Re: eBooks can exist with...

[Charles P. Hobbs]

"Mark T. Bay" wrote:

> I usually avoid these threads too, since they just make me mad most of the
> time, but I'm going to jump in...

My feeling about the e-books?

What did we have before the book was "invented"? Stone tablets and
parchment/vellum scrolls. Don't see too many of those being produced nowadays,
right? It's because the modern book form is so convenient, compared to those
older formats.

So, any device purporting to replace the book will have to, at least in my
opinion,
represent as much of an increase in convience to the reader, as going from a
scroll to a book did way back when.

Is this true for the current crop of e-books? Perhaps in some circumstances.
For example, some doctors who used to carry handbooks around with them
are starting to upload all of that information into PDA's. The convenience
and increased functionality (e.g. access to dosing calculators and such) in this

particular context outweighs the inconvenience of reading off that small screen.

There are certainly other examples where having electronic text would be
an advantage (searching for quotes in some long piece of literature, etc). But
other than that, the e-book format doesn't really add anything to the access
to the literature, and is more difficult to read for many people. And, if it
costs
just about as much to download a novel into an e-book reader as it does to
just go out and buy the paperback (and that's not counting the cost of the
reader), what's the point?

Also the proprietary, dedicated e-book readers (not PDA's or PC's) are
probably in danger of becoming obsolete--not so much like the 8-track players
did (those died not because of limited functionality as much as cassettes just
became more popular due to their smaller size)--but more like the dedicated
word processors of the late 70's and early 80's. Remember the WANG word
processor? Gone, since PC's can do whatever it did and more.










--
Charles P. Hobbs
King Drew Health Science Library
http://www.cdrewu.edu/kdhsl