Why Ebooks Won’t Kill Print

I consume more ebooks than most people do. The reason is mainly convenience - why drive to the store to get a book when I can pull out my iPod, buy a book, and read it without getting off my butt and spending an hour in town?

So why do I say they suck? They’re the wrong answer for the content.

This is particularly true of textbooks. Indeed, print textbooks are bad to begin with. When you use a textbook, you’re usually looking for something in particular, and you jump around the book looking for something. There’s tables of contents and indexes to help out, but those are time-consuming and annoying.

Instead of using the power of computers to improve the situation, ebooks exacerbate the problem. In the case of Kindle books, which on the iPod & PC have no search ability, you are completely at the mercy of the table of contents & index. Furthermore, Kindle books are entirely linear. They treat all books as novels, and as a result you have asides buried in the middle of paragraphs because they can’t show something to the side of the main body text. They also can’t be easily cited, because there are no pages. PDF textbooks are a bit better, because you can search them and maybe even copy text or print out of them. But you don’t see them, because they’re difficult to secure.

Ideally, they would take the content of text-ebooks and put them in the form of a website. Those are comparatively very easy to navigate, and if that doesn’t work, very searchable. They can also have real interactivity - really cool charts, quizzes/homework/etc., and other media resources such as videos and the occasional piece of music. Security wouldn’t be an issue as long as students were required to log into their paid accounts to access the site. The only downside is that they can’t really be used in class, but I’d be willing to accept that tradeoff.

Ebooks do, on the other hand, work well for novels. With a novel, you’re reading a long, constant stream of text that never really ends, and you never jump around the book. An ebook reader is great for this. They also give you have a library in your pocket that can’t be ruined (you can destroy the device, but the books are still “in the cloud,” ready when you get a new one). For reading novels, they’re wonderful.

But will they replace printed books? Probably not. They’ll cause the publishing industry to suffer greatly, but history has shown that most obsolete technologies tend to stick around in one form or another. People still buy CD’s and even vinyl records instead of MP3’s. People go to the theater instead of the movies. People still ride passenger trains instead of flying in jets.

Vinyl records are a great comparison with printed books. Those records are selling better because, despite all the inconveniences that go along with them, they have higher quality than even CD’s. Ebook readers require power and sometimes an Internet connection, aren’t as easy to read, and aren’t nearly as dummy-proof. A book will never crash on you, and the only bugs you’ll find are actual bugs. There’s way more freedom to design a book as opposed to a Kindle book or even a PDF. They have all sorts of advantages over ebook readers. That won’t change very soon.

If I was a textbook publisher, I’d migrate all the content to the Internet as soon as possible. Not just sticking downloadable PDF’s to an e-commerce store, either. Make actual sites with the content of these textbooks, charge for access instead of charging for the book, and hand the technophobic professors printed but otherwise identical textbooks. The students will love it.

If I was a novel publisher, I’d rather be a smaller quality-focused publisher than a bigger mass-publisher. Eventually, like the vinyl record, the customers left over will be the ones demanding the highest quality.