Tolkien on the Kindle

[Mister Underhill]

I will continue to buy paper books for as long as they continue to print them. I couldn't resist picking up a nice 40th anniversary copy of Dune yesterday. There's one I haven't read since junior high.

And as you know I'm not personally big on the social media, but supposedly facebook.com accounts for one out of every four page views in the U.S. these days. We're collectively quite fascinated with what we're all up to, apparently. Besides connecting with other readers, I also just saw this -- you can ask questions of some authors directly from your Kindle. Now, this rogues gallery of beta authors isn't exactly the Algonquin Round Table, but you can see where this is trending. Readers connecting with other readers and with authors while they're in the act of reading.

I don't know. I have a bit of split personality on these things -- the Tolkien in me longs for simpler times. The Star Trek fan in me is jazzed to have tricorder tech available (still waiting impatiently for a breakthrough on the transporter, though). Part of me is glad just to see that enough people are still interested in reading at all to make e-readers a viable product.

[Alfirin]

One other advantage of the e-book is that it should allow for far more rapid updating and correction of material. Any errors of text that slip by before release can be quickly corrected, and those correction can automatically be sent to anyone who bought the book, rather than having to buy another copy. Or if the author decides the book for some reason needs another chapter or a addional essay in the appendix, it can go to everyone, rather than those who have the money to buy the book a second time (it will also end having to continually buy addional editions of the same book (unless you want to) just becuse it has one more three page foreward added. This, I feel, will be particularly important in the case of reference material and scientific literature. As it stands now, a lot of, scientific material (in particualr I'm thinking of things like identification and field guides) tend to suffer from a triple whammy. They tend (if comprehensive) to be far too large and unwieldy to actually be taken into the field, the very limited market tends to result in them being absurdly expensive, and the continual accumulation of new knowledge means that they tend to go obsolete very. very quickly (often, from a funtional point of view, almost before they can be published).
That being said, these very advantages could in my opinion, create their own sort of problems. The ease with which errors can be corrected may result in less care being taken not to make errors in the first place. The ability to update all of the copies of a book simutaneously may result in the loss of a trail of a books evolution (imagine, for example, if the changes JRRT made to the hobbit automatically erased all previos versions of those sections, so the "corrected" text was the only one we ever saw.) As someone who also has a fondness for the Illustrated book, I also worry that the proliferation of the e-book, which can be transmitted easily, may result in a "lock" between a books text and illustrations that is far tighter than we are used to. Part of the reason we have so many different wonderfult artistic concepts of many books (especially when considered in a world wide aspect) is the variable skills of printing all over the world and the fact that, as it stands now the text of a book and the illustrations of a book are often under seperate copyright. If sending a book to another country becomes simply a matter of running it through a good translator program, I can easily see a situation where it becomes the norm for a book and it's pictures to "become one", and legal deviation to become far, far rarer.

[Bêthberry]

I've thought of something that is tangential to Mister U's and Alfirin's points, but I'll post it anyway.

Books can be shared, physically. Can e-texts/e-books be shared digitally? Once you have a book on your Kindle, is there any way you can pass it on to a friend's Kindle? If there's this extensive social media capability, is there this sharing capability? I wouldn't think so, unless the Kindle itself was shared, as that would cut into profits I would think.

[Mister Underhill]

You know, I wasn't sure myself so I had to look:

Lending Kindle Books

The short answer is -- if the rights holder has enabled it, a Kindle book can be "loaned once for a period of 14 days". Definitely a downside of ebooks, though of course with all the public domain stuff out there it's not an issue. In fact, the opposite -- you can turn someone on to a book without losing your copy.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop. Right now, most publishers are still pricing ebooks on a par with or even more than physical books, but there's a lot of downward pressure on that from various directions, and a lot of controversy in the publishing community about the appropriate price for an ebook. Ultimately I think something like what happened with music is going to happen here -- they're going to have to price books low enough (plus add whatever other sort of value, like social networking) so that it's more convenient to just buy it than to pirate it.

[Mister Underhill]

P.S. -- The Kindle edition of LotR is not lendable.

[Mithalwen]

I'd never loan my hard copy anyway!! My library has started doing E books I see... Somewhat illogically here while paper books are VAT free E-books get clobbered with an extra 20%.

[Mister Underhill]

Heh -- I guess the upside of loaning books Kindle style is that, like faithful hounds, they come back to you, rather than disappearing into your friends' libraries a la Hugo Bracegirdle.