Every now and again, missives like this one entitled “How the rise of e-readers takes the fun out of giving books” from the Canadian Globe and Mail by Leah McLaren pop up and bounce around the web.
They make me chuckle. Their common theme is that, essentially, you can’t wrap ebooks and stick them under your Christmas tree. They are only one step away from those “but what about the smell of books” rants bemoaning the changing of technology.
Don’t get me know – if people don’t like ebooks, and enjoy dead trees with words on them, that’s their right. But call a spade a spade. Why don’t you ever see a post titled, “I don’t like ebooks because I just don’t like change generally.” That would be honest.
These people are entitled to their opinions, but so am I. So allow me to offer some counter-arguments…
Publishing-industry experts are calling the holiday season a “tipping point” – with good reason. Curling up with a new novel on Christmas morning will never be the same.
Thank whomever your Lord is for that one. A decade or more ago, I went through a period when the unwrapping of any book-shaped gift revealed the latest in the 101 Uses for a Dead Cat comedy cartoon book series. After 90 seconds of flicking, I needed its companion edition: 101 Uses For an Unwanted Book. No. 17 – frisbee. If ebooks and vouchers were around, I could have been reading the book I was actually craving within two minutes tops.
Stay with me! I swear this is not going to be one of those hackneyed columns about how much we’ll all miss the old-fashioned book. I travel too much to be sentimental about the beauty of marginalia or the satisfying crack of a hardcover spine. Hauling books around the globe has cost me thousands in excess baggage fees, and left me with a hyper-extended left shoulder and a nagging sense of having misplaced something important. Hardly a week has gone by since university when I haven’t stood up from my desk thinking, “Where is that book?” then spent half an hour scouring my shelves before concluding it must be boxed away in my parent’s basement. The idea that, having attained an e-reader of my own, I will now be able to have all my books contained in a single device, like a pocket-sized library complete with personalized Dewey Decimal System, is so liberating it’s almost magic.
Magic. And yet, it is one of those columns, isn’t it, Leah. “I don’t like ebook because they’re not exactly the same as paper books in a certain way…”
My issue is with other people’s books. Specifically that the act of giving books as gifts – once the simplest of holiday rituals – has been perverted beyond recognition as a result of technology.
Interesting word, “perverted”. Yes, books are different, eh fellow perverts. Also, surely there are one or two non-book gifts one could give in the Christmas/holiday/Hannukah season?
In the olden days (a.k.a. last Christmas), if you really wanted to read a hardcover book but couldn’t justify the expense, all you needed to do was buy it for your partner for Christmas, then steal it back as soon as it had languished for the requisite six weeks on his night table.
Yay! It’s the gift that keeps on taking. Your partner gets a gift he/she obviously didn’t want, and you selfishly get one you weren’t really entitled to. So you’ve effectively robbed them of heartfelt and/or wanted gift. Nice. Also, try living in Australia and paying $30-40 per hardcover vs $7-10 per ebook and see how long that sentimentalism lasts.
But it’s more than that. In the era of Kindle, Kobo and iPads, we have become literary pod people. While movies and music can still be a shared experience, book consumption is necessarily a solitary pursuit. Old-fashioned books can be passed around in a way that personal e-readers cannot. You might lend your friend a paperback, but would you lend them your entire library (especially one they might destroy by dropping it in the bathtub)? Sharing (or better yet stealing) the reading experience is no longer an option.
Huh? A solitary pursuit, that you can include all your friends in, by lending books. Struggling with that concept. Never mind that the latest gen of ereader technology can include book discussion, tweeting, group highlighting, book groups etc. But it doesn’t have to. And yes, you could drop your ereader in the bath and kill it. But your ebooks would likely be safely stored in the cloud, and easily retrieved. So you will have lost a $130 piece of metal and plastic. If your house catches fire your paper books will be in the cloud too – that black one above the smoking shell of your house.
Book buying, by extension, has become an impersonal exchange. Soulless gift cards and instant e-certificates are, of course, the only option when there is no specific book object to wrap. But giving gift cards in a long-term relationship is depressing. It’s like saying, “Here’s 150 Amazon dollars. That’s how much I love you. Please adjust to reflect my portion of the mortgage payment.”
As opposed to the steal-it-back method above, where you give your nearest and dearest something that isn’t for them anyway. Apple iTunes cards seem to hardly ever be sneezed at, by the way. People who give, and receive them clearly get it – that the consumption of media is slowly changing, and even intangible media – downloads/ebooks – have value and are wanted and can make you smile. tell your teen/husband/wife/mother that you’d like to give them an ereader or Apple device, but are worried that they’ll be disappointed because their gifts will be mainly intangible thereafter. See what they say.
OK – enough. I know this is just tit-for-tat sniping. But at least we’re calling a spade a spade.
Via Jason Davis’ Bookbee
In the spirit of calling a spade a spade, I regret to that this is the most silly and nonsensical rant I have read on Teleread since I joined it’s reading ranks 6 or 8 moths ago. What a load of absolute tripe 🙂
I see absolutely no connection between the ‘concern’ expressed by many people about the eBook ‘gift giving process’ and the migration from paper books to eBooks issue, smell and feel and all. This is a lazy and indulgent red herring that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I also resent the regurgitation of the nonsense that lending books among family and friends is ‘stealing’. That is not just irritating, it is offensive.
And let’s just ignore the unbridled naivete about cloud storage for eBooks shall we ….
After all that irrelevance the only content of this long, long article that relates to the actual subject is at the very end, saying only “People who give, and receive them clearly get it – that the consumption of media is slowly changing, and even intangible media – downloads/ebooks – have value and are wanted and can make you smile.” A wholly simplistic statement of opinion that could have reduced the length of this article by, I would estimate 99% ? however it is that and only that, an opinion. No argument, no reasoning, no evidence.
I disagree. As a long time technophile who has been reading on my iphone, iPad, Laptop and desktop for years I find the prospect of giving and receiving vouchers in general (much like giving or receiving cash) far less rewarding that giving or receiving the actual object of the voucher. I don’t like vouchers for anything. Clothes, gadgets, toys, music, trips, furniture … whatever.
Sorry, but I wound up not reading your article. Whose idea was it to place the quotes against an eye-searing background of commas?
Gift cards strike me as
1) Dickish
2) Impersonal
3) Paternalistic
It says “I have no knowledge of you, your likes and dislikes, your taste or any other feature of your personality”, along with “I did not deign to give you a considered gift based on what I know about your likes and dislikes”, all wrapped up in “Here is a sum of money which shall be spent IN THE MANNER OF MY CHOOSING!”
Merry Christmas, dick. Next time just give me the cash.