First, I read different things differently. That sounds obvious but I actually think it’s really profound. Many of my students, for instance, don’t get that reading a textbook is different than reading a novel. They just think there’s reading. I’m all for what you dub a “dynamical approach,” but skimming an entire book or chapter before diving in can be a good way of figuring out what your general orientation to the text should be. Think about when you’re trying to decide whether to buy a book. Do you skim it? Or let’s say you’re trying to decide between two books to read before bed or on an airplane and you don’t want something too taxing. You may quickly skim them to determine which would make for lighter reading. When I flip through a magazine or newspaper, I don’t read every article as it’s presented to me, but rather I read headlines, scan opening paragraphs, plow through shorter articles, note longer, more serious pieces I want to return to later, and so on. Skimming can help you determine if and then how you want to read something.

Second, my “Ebook readers are bourgeois devices” line was meant to be somewhat polemical, but I think it’s still more or less true, even though e-readers have gotten cheaper. I have a Kindle, yes, so I’m familiar with its e-ink display, but eventually it will break and/or be rendered obsolete (in a consumer technology sense) by some newer device. To read an ebook, you first have to buy a $100+ device, then you have to buy a digital copy of the book. With traditional books, you just have to buy the book, which won’t be obsolesced as quickly, if ever.

I concede that you have a point about portability. Just as it’s amazing to be able to bring my entire music library (or at least most of it) with me whenever I leave the house, there’s something thrilling about traveling with a Kindle stuffed with ebooks. I guess the point I was trying to make here is that books – particularly individual books, particularly small paperbacks – are more portable than people sometimes give them credit for, and don’t require special protective cases (unless you count dust jackets, which are usually included with the price of the book) and power chords. I can slip a paperback in my back pocket. I can’t yet fit my Kindle, in its case, with its power chord in my back pocket.

Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting. Your points have forced me to think harder about this.

I don’t quite get that point. What is your reading style? Do you first skim through the upcoming chapter and then decide whether you are going to read it fast or slow? I adjust in a dynamical approach: When I don’t get things, I slow down. If topics are known to me I skim through them.

“E-book readers are bourgeois devices.”
139 or what $ for a Kindle isn’t really “bourgeois” to me. The iPad you’ve been referring sucks as an eBook-reader, it doesn’t feature an eInk display (have you seen one yet? I’m still amazed at this technique).

Concerning portability: I think that this is a major plus for eBooks. I usually read more than one book at once, and I don’t always know what I’m going to read when on the road. Also, the battery life is amazing! You can read like 750 pages with one charge. That should be enough to get back to civilization.

Other than that IMO eBook readers are ill-suited for most academic concerns atm, since you can’t skim, annotations are rather silly and you can’t have two books open at the same time (unless you own 2 reader devices, but that’s costly).

In the meantime, I’m happy to snatch up old paper books in order to build my own impressive library. As Borges wrote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” To that I say, Amen.

To me, though, this is really asking the wrong question — the whole “books vs ebooks” thing is really skirting around a more important (to me) development.

On the whole, very few (relatively speaking) people read books. The people who do read books aren’t going to stop reading books, for all the reasons listed in your post. People may supplement book reading with e-reading, and if the Kindle, et al, gets more people reading in general, than it’s a net benefit to society.

But, having had a Kindle now for a few weeks, the real value here is the e-ink and the screen — the Kindle is a way better thing to read from than a computer screen.

So the real question in my mind is ebook technology versus a computer for *reading web content*.

And that’s where the Kindle really shines, and that’s one area not listed in the reasons above that a book can never replace — web content. And there’s a ton of really good web content out there.

Your post, in fact, linked to a whole bunch of good stuff, and I can get all of it on my Kindle and read it there.

That’s where I’ve found real value — using instapaper and calibre with my Kindle to make web content much more readable and portable.