Tag: e-books

Audio, Paper, Ebook, Shoot! (Or, My Book Format Preferences)

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For most of my life, if I wanted to read a book, I had to have the book in my hands. There had to be enough light to see by, and I couldn’t really do anything else while I was reading. Even a TV in the background was too distracting for me. Then, in 2009, I got my first Kindle device and my first ebook, which happened to be Jack McDevitt’s Polaris. It was so convenient to be able to get the book instantly and not have it take up any space on the shelves, especially considering the size of the apartment we were living in, with a baby due to arrive any day. In the months that followed, I accumulated and read more ebooks that paper books. Then in February 2013, I set aside my perceptions of audio books, and gave my first one a try. I loved it. From that point right down to today, audio books are my primary format for reading books1.

Given that today, I can get most books in any of three formats (audio, paper, and ebook), how do I go about choosing which to get? There are two ways to answer that question: my ideal book format preferences, and practical book format preferences. Below from left to right is a paper, ebook and audio book I’ve really enjoyed so far in 2021.

My ideal book format preferences

  1. Paper books. Anyone who loves reading and loves books knows that there is something about the tactile nature of holding a paper book in your hands that makes it a full sensory experience. There is the heft of the book. The feeling of the pages. The scent that the pages give off when you riffle them. Some books are beautiful to look at. Big books make a satisfying thud when you close them, and the sound of pages softly turning provides a pleasant heartbeat rhythm to read by. My ideal book format is paper for all of these reasons. And ideally, I am sitting in some quiet place, an enclosed porch looking out over a lake while rain patters on the roof; a beach, with the sound of my kids playing in the sand. The chair in my office while a snow storm brews outside. The book transports me and leaves me where I am all at once.
  2. Audio books. In the absence of a paper book, an audio book serves as a nice substitute. Audio books don’t have the same tactile qualities of paper books, but they have an added dimension that paper books lack: a narrator who gives a performance while reading the book. A good narrator can make a mediocre book tolerable. A great narrator can make a poor book enjoyable, and what they can do to a great book is really remarkable.
  3. Ebooks. Ebooks take no physical space, so I can accumulate a lot of them without worrying about filling my office and the rest of the house with books. Ebooks also allow me to get books instantly. Unlike paper books, there is no practical way to get an ebook signed. There is also no practical way to display ebooks on your bookshelves, so unlike paper books, they serve a strictly utilitarian purpose, and ideally, I would use them only as a last resort, when paper or audiobook editions were unavailable.

My practical book format preferences

1. Audio books

Years ago I had a realization that I would never be able to read all of the books I wanted to read. I decided that it was worth finding was to read as much as I could manage. Up to that point, I’d been reading between 30-50 books a year, but beginning in 2018, I stepped things up. I read 130 books that year, and 110 the next. The numbers have continued to stay high, and a large part of this is due to audio books.

Audio books allow me to read when I am doing other tasks that don’t take much brain power. Prior to audio books, I could not read while on long drives, or while doing chores around the house, or while exercising or out for my morning walks. Since I started listening to audio books, I have filled these moments in addition to the time I’d normally spend reading. I have also worked my way up from listening to audio books at 1x speed to listening to nonfiction at 1.8x – 2.0x (depending on the narrator), and fiction at 1.5x.

In every sense, audio books are the most practical format to allow me to read as much as I possible can in the available time. They are my first choice when it comes to reading a book these days.

2. Audio books in combination with ebooks or paper books

If audio books have a downside, it is that there is not yet a good method for taking notes in them. There is no practical way of highlighting passages or jotting comments in the margins. There are no margins! What I will often do with a book for which I think I will want to take notes, therefore, is listen to the audiobook in combination with either the ebook or the paper edition. What determines this secondary edition is typically (a) do I already own the paper edition, and (b) price. Often, you can get the ebook edition and then “add on” the audio book edition at a reduced price. If the reduced price is less than the cost of an audio book credit, I’ll usually just get the audio add-on with the ebook.

When I am listening to the audio book, I follow along in the ebook or paper book so that I can highlight relevant passages, or make notes. If I happen to be doing something else like walking, exercising, driving, or doing chores, I try to remember the places where I want to highlight or note, and then come back to them in the ebook or paper editions when I have the chance. This isn’t ideal, so I am interested in ways that audio books can be more interactive in terms of highlights and notes. Maybe a voice-activated system can control this better, e.g. “Highlight that last paragraph and add note to highlight: See also xyzzy,”

3. Ebooks

If an audio book edition is not available (increasingly rare these days for newer books, and getting rarer even for older books), then I’ll resort to an ebook edition. I’ll often resort to the ebook edition even if a paper edition is available out of practical concerns for cost and space. (Ebooks are usually, but not always, less expensive than their paper counterparts.)

It is easier to pull notes and highlights from ebooks, but even there, the system of highlighting and taking notes still feels clunky to me. I like scribbling in the margins, arguing with the author there, or noting something that made me laugh. I like making my own index of my notes in on the blank pages at the front of the paper editions–something I can’t do with an ebook because there are no blank front pages. My use of ebooks here is entirely practical.

4. Paper books

These days, paper books are a kind collector’s item for me. With limited shelf space in my office, and with a kind of collection of books established, I am picky about what I add to the collection. It needs to be worthy. Most often, I will buy new hard cover editions of books from authors I admire in order to add them to an existing collection of their books. Also, rare used books fall into this category. Or any used book that catches my eye in a book shop. Since I don’t get to book shops frequently, and I try only to buy books outside the chain book shops, adding these books doesn’t happen often. I will order paper books from Amazon. But I also order special editions of books I like. For instance, many of the beautiful editions of Stephen King books I own come from Cemetery Dance publications. They make works of art.

The problem with paper is more than one of space, it is one of time. There is no way I could read as much as I do with paper books alone, not while I still hold a full time job, am helping to raise three kids, writing here every day, and doing everything else I have to do. It just wouldn’t be possible. And so, as much as paper books are my ideal form for reading, from a practical standpoint, they don’t align as well with my goal of reading as much as I possibly can in the time I have available.

Do you have a favorite format you like for reading? If so, I’d love to hear about what it is and why in the comments.

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  1. Given that the underlying text is the same, I use the term “reading” interchangeably for paper, audio and ebooks. ↩

“Jump gestures” for e-books

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So in thinking about more use cases for traditional books and e-books, I came up with one that would be incredibly useful to have in e-book readers. I’ll use the Kindle App as an example, since that is where I do 97% of my e-book reading.

Let’s say you are reading, oh, I don’t know, George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows. You have the physical book in your hand. Your reading a passage referring to some geographical point of interest so you flip quickly to the map and then back to the passage you were reading. Very easy to do in a physical book. Not so easy in an e-book.

In my Kindle App, there are a couple of ways I can do this:

  1. I can go to the table of contents, click the map, take a look at it, and then click the Back button a few times to get back to where I was in the text.
  2. I can bookmark the map, jump to the bookmark, look at the map, and then return to where I was in the text.

The problem is that each of these methods take at least 3 click to get to the map.

I think a very useful feature would be to be able to assign a single bookmark to a “jump gesture.” It would work like this:

  1. I bookmark the map page and assign that bookmark to my jump gesture.
  2. As I’m reading, when I want to refer to the map, I use the “gesture” (whatever that gesture might be, maybe a 3 fingered backward swipe, it really doesn’t matter) and I am instantly on the map. All I have to do is that swipe. To get back to where I was in the text: repeat the gesture.

This gesture acts as a toggle and would let me get to the reference point as quickly as I could in the traditional book. And of course, it would apply to other things than just maps. Maybe there is a passage you want to keep referring back to. Assign that bookmark to the jump gesture and you can swipe to it instantly.

I can’t imagine this would be a difficult gesture to implement. Maybe it’s just me but I would make heavy use of this feature if it was available.

15 use cases comparing e-books to traditional books: an illustrated list

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I’ve now been reading e-books for more than 2-1/2 years. For the 37 years prior to that, I read paper books exclusively. For a while now, I’ve been meaning to compare the two forms of book in some reasonable and understandable way, but I was hard pressed to come up with a format for such a comparison. Then it dawned on me: use cases!

By day, I am a software developer and creating use cases is an important part of the construction and testing process. A use case is used to describe a real-world use of how the product in question might be used. So I came up with a number of use cases for e-books to see how they compare with traditional books. 10 of these use cases demonstrate (I think) how e-books are superior to traditional books. The remaining use cases demonstrate areas in which traditional books still have an edge over e-books.

My e-book reader, for the purposes of this exercise is my iPad 2, using the Kindle App for iPad. I’m sure I didn’t capture every possible use case, but these are the ones I seem to deal with most frequently.

1. Finding a book on the bookshelf

Depending on how many books you have, and how organized you are, this can be a fairly daunting task for traditional books. Here is an picture of me illustrating the use case by searching for a book on my shelves:

IMAGE_86E3BC4E-A4AB-4B42-BBEC-7FF6CD2AACC5.JPG

I used to have my books organized alphabetically by author, and then chronologically within the author. That fell by the wayside the last time I moved. While they are arranged alphabetically by author, they are completely random within a given author. That may not sound like trouble, but for someone who has several hundred Isaac Asimov books, for instance, it can make any one book tricky to find.

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On e-book pricing (what Scalzi said)

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Not long ago I posted about how it surprised me that many 1-star reviews on Amazon were entirely because the reviewer didn’t like the price of the e-book–something that the author often has very little control over.

Today, John Scalzi offers up his opinion on e-book pricing, and I completely agree with him. As he sums up at the end of his post:

The shorter version of this: Complaining about eBook prices on Big Idea threads is a) usually off-topic, b) kind of mean to the author, c) something I’m bored with at this point.

John refers to his Big Idea posts, but you could replace “Big Idea” with “Amazon reviews” and it would work just as well. I agree with all three of John’s points. It’s perfectly within someone’s right to complain about e-book pricing, but doing so in a review that is supposed to be about a book, or a post that is supposed to be about an author makes said complainer come across as a dick. I’ve made it a habit of marking such reviews I’ve come across on Amazon as “unhelpful.” I want the reviews I read to be useful and insightful, not a place for someone to complain about book pricing economics. I, too, am tired of the e-book pricing debate.

12 reasons I love e-books (and a few areas for improvement)

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The long holiday weekend, during which I did plenty of reading, reminded me once again why I love e-book and why I am an e-book convert. Since obtaining my first e-reader (a Kindle) I’ve read 26 books in e-book format. I have since graduated to reading on an iPad (Kelly is now using the Kindle). Here are 12 reasons why I love e-books:

  1. Ubiquitous access. Sitting in the park yesterday, I was able to open the Kindle app on my iPhone and continue reading Stephen King’s Insomnia from where I had left off on my iPad earlier in the morning. And it took all of 5 seconds!
  2. Travel light. I can take my entire e-book library with me wherever I go and in doing so, add only 601 grams1 to my luggage, no matter how many e-books are in my library.
  3. Read in the dark. It’s nice not to require a book light to read in bed at night when the room is dark.
  4. Take notes to your heart’s content. I always hated the thought of marking up my physical books. I cringed when I saw people breaking the spines of paperbacks (mine are all unbroken) and I just couldn’t bear the thought of highlighting or writing in my books. But I have no qualms at all about marking up my e-books. I highlight passages, I jot down notes. It’s great and completely non-destructive.
  5. They lay flat. I no longer run into complications when eating and reading at the same time. You know: the book won’t lay flat. The pages flip when you set it down so that you have to find a stapler or rock or other heavy object conveniently accessible to hold the pages open. And then you have to adjust it every time you flip the page. Not so with my iPad. I just set it on the table to the left of my sandwich and it lays perfectly flat. I can eat with two hands.
  6. Sample chapters. When browsing Amazon for a book, if I am uncertain, I can download a sample for free. It appears on my iPad instantly and I can start reading and decide if I want to continue reading. No more buying the book and then deciding, nah, it wasn’t really what I was hoping for.
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  1. The weight of an iPad 2 according to Apple. ↩

In the battle between print and e-books, it is the “work” that comes out the winner

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For the longest time I denied the e-book revolution. A book was something you held in your hand; you could rifle through the pages and catch that lovely whiff of aged paper. There was some sort of psychological comfort that made me resist the switch to e-books. Then, two years ago, just before the Little Man was born, I bought a Kindle, and from the Kindle store, I purchased a Jack McDevitt novel and since then my entire outlook has changed. I still love my paper books; my office shelves are still filled with more than a thousand of them. But now, there are only very limited circumstances in which I buy a print edition:

  1. The e-book edition does not exist and I don’t want to wait for one
  2. I want to add the book to my physical collection
  3. I want to get the book signed

Having been one of those people who couldn’t imaging making the switch from paper to e-books, I now have a hard time imaging why everyone doesn’t switch. Yes, I get that you have to layout some cash to buy a reader (despite the fact that the reader usually pays for itself pretty quickly because the price of e-books are less than the price of even discounted hardcovers.) Yes, I get that there is that smell. And maybe there is something aesthetically pleasing about the way a book feels in your hand. But I have got to believe that our attachment toward paper books stems more from cultural habit than practicality of form. We have been using paper books for thousands of years, and it takes a lot to undo the need we feel to read things on paper.

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