Let me start by saying that books are awesome. I went without reading for several years after I graduated from high school, and I realize now that that was a big mistake. I’ll talk about that in a minute, but first let’s talk about why books need to disappear.
Like most people, I have a huge bookshelf of books that I only read once and will probably never read again. We hold onto them like trophies, unwilling to destroy them or give them away, which is understandable considering how much we paid for them. Pocket books for $10, soft covers for $20, hard covers for $60… what’s going on here? Why is a soft cover book $20 when you buy it at a bookstore, and 50 cents when you sell it at a garage sale the next summer? People are only willing to pay 25 to 50 cents for books at a garage sale, so that’s what a used book is worth. From $25 to 25 cents, that means that books depreciate by 99% as soon as you take them out of the store. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
Of course, the bookstore sometimes gets rid of their unsold or damaged overstock for up to 90% off, so obviously the profit margin on books is pretty high. How much do you suppose it actually costs to make a book, from the cost of materials and production to the expense of transporting it to the store. Probably no more than a dollar, right? The markup on books is huge. What’s especially galling is that huge row of “Classics” for $9.99, where publishers reprint books that have fallen into the public domain and charge almost as much for them as new books! The profit margin on a book whose author didn’t have to be paid is nearly 100%!
That’s why it boggles my mind that people still buy books. For well over a century we’ve had a useful service call the library! Why would anyone pay for books when they could borrow them for free? And that realization is what got me back into reading a few months ago. I hadn’t been to a library in almost a decade!
My local library is large, but they often don’t have the books I want, but they’re available at other libraries in the city. I simply ask for a copy and it gets sent to my local library for free. I live in a metropolis of over a million people with well over a dozen libraries, and yet some of the books I wanted to read weren’t available anywhere in my local library system. For those books, I’ve requested an interlibrary loan, and amazingly those books have been sent from other parts of the province to my library, once again for free. It takes longer to get a book that way, and you can’t borrow it for as long. I really enjoyed one of the books that I read and I would like to read it again, but I don’t want to wait for it to arrive from some distant corner of the country. A surprising thought came to my head: I should buy this book!
So, here’s my philosophy on book buying. You should only buy a book if you absolutely, positively will read it again and again. That means that your personal library should have only a small selection of your all-time favourite books. Every other book should be borrowed from the library. You shouldn’t have a wall full of books!
Actually, I propose something even more radical than that: you shouldn’t have any books at all. Let’s face it, books are expensive, they take up a lot of space, and they have no resale value. Why on earth are we still buying them? I had high hopes that books would disappear when the eBook appeared more than a decade ago, but reading books on my computer screen was no fun at all. I have to sit at my computer to read an eBook, which prevents me from reading in the only two situations where I ever have the desire to read a book: lying in my warm, comfy bed; and when I’m at work, either because I arrived at work early and have some time before my shift, or if I’m waiting for a ride after work. My computer can’t do those things.
Oh, but there are notebook computers now, right? Notebooks don’t help because they have to sit on your lap, but I want to recline in my bed and hold the book in the air. They’re also too large to conveniently pull out of my bag while I’m sitting at my desk or in the lobby. Besides which, they still have the second major problem with reading books on your computer: the computer screen.
I hate reading book on a computer screen. Despite wonderful innovations like ClearType, which makes fonts look smoother, computer screens just don’t look as nice as printed pages. Whether I have to sit at my computer to read a book, which I don’t like to do, or whether I have to carry a (relatively) big, heavy notebook computer, they can’t compete with the print quality, ease and convenience of a real book. Books are small, weigh practically nothing, and they have printed pages. As the librarian asked me when I talked to her about eBooks, “Why would anyone want to read a book on a computer?”
So, a few years ago I started hearing about eInk. The concept is that science can now produce an LCD screen that can produce text that is as crisp and clear as a printed page, and put it in a device that’s about the size and weight of a real book. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it! Then, along came Amazon (who else?) with the Kindle, an eInk reader that could hold 200 books. Now the Kindle 2 is out, and it’s faster, lighter, displays 16 shades of grey (up from 4), and has enough memory to hold about 1500 books (2 GB). Is it time for books to disappear? I say yes!
Bear in mind that I haven’t actually used this thing. I’m reviewing the concept rather than the actual product. Practically speaking, how awesome would it be to be able to buy as many books as I want, but never have to store them on a bookshelf (or even own a bookshelf), and I can take my entire library with me wherever I go? Not only that, but we could save millions of trees. Pretty sweet, huh? Plus, Amazon sells Kindle books for less than regular books, which is only fair since an electronic book has no material or shipping costs. Assuming that the Kindle and its competitors actually do take over the world, eBooks had better remain cheaper than physical books for exactly those reasons. I understand the concept of paying for convenience, but there’s no way that I’m paying more for a bunch of 0s and 1s as I do for an actual book made from an actual tree.
So those are the pros, but what about the cons? My first question is whether or not the Kindle is going to be an open standard, or if it will support open standards. This is essential so that you can download books from sources other than Amazon. I’m not talking about piracy or copyright infringement, here. Remember what I said about books that are in the public domain?
Google is reportedly trying to archive every major literary work to ever fall into the public domain. Publishers are furious, because it will destroy an entire market for them. But really, why should anyone have to pay for the works of Shakespeare or Homer any more? As a supporter of the shareware concept, I understand paying a nominal fee for the disk that someone else’s software came on, so I can understand paying for the material cost of producing a book with someone else’s words on them. That means, I’ll pay for the paper and the ink. Publishers who reprint classic literary works have not had to pay an author, so the words are free. The author is long dead, so they don’t need to be paid royalties any more. Google has every right to make the classic works of literature available for free online, and when they do, I want to be able to download them into my Kindle so that I can read them like a book instead of staring at my computer screen. Will Amazon allow that? Seeing as how they sell copies of books that are in the public domain, I’m understandably skeptical.
If Amazon would allow me to put literary works that are in the public domain into my Kindle for free, in addition to letting my new books at a discount, there is no question that I would buy this thing. Like most people, I’ve promised myself that I would read the classics, but at $10 per book, that’s just not going to happen. Maybe I’ll get around to borrowing them at the library some day, but I’m certainly not going to spend hundreds of dollars to read the classics. Being able to read them for free could lead to an unprecedented revival of those books. It could be a literary revolution! So the question is, does Amazon want to be a part of that or not? Because I guarantee that if they won’t, some competitor will!
So, I close by saying that I believe the time has come for Kindle, or its future competitors, to replace the printed word. I hope that they will replace physical books in schools, and in society as a whole, sooner rather than later. I recommend buying the new Kindle, to the maximum extent that I can having never actually used the product. And so that no one can accuse me of writing this article to conceal an advertisement, I’ll come right out and say that I’ll get a 10% commission if you click this link to buy a Kindle. I honestly intend to buy one myself as soon as I’ve earned enough credits in my Amazon affiliate account.