While you are right that there are a lot of ways in which eBooks are vastly worse than their printed counterparts, I think it’s worth remembering that new technologies don’t overtake old ones by winning point-by-point comparisons. They overtake old ones by being vastly better in one or two key ways. Is portability and the ability to store and easily purchase thousands of books a key difference?

Well, it certainly was for music. MP3s, especially MP3s as delivered by Napster were worse than CDs and Vinyl in almost every way. Encoding as often terrible, songs were mislabeled, you didn’t get album art, you couldn’t show them on your shelf to sexy visitors. But they won on being free and on being portable. The iPod with its tinny headphones and grey screen continued the trend. It let you have a lot of music, and that was about it. But it was enough.

Newspaper and magazines are going through a similar bout of pain right now. Reading the news on my iPhone or laptop is worse in almost every way then reading it in a good magazine or well-designer newspaper. But it wins out on being easy to acquire, quotes, and share. So it wins.

I love good design. The state of web-design drives me bananas and I buy magazines often. But I also often end up reading the online version of articles that I have in a real magazine just because of convenience.

So yes, maybe the eBook has a long way to convince you. But I don’t think it has as long as you think to convince a lot of people to make the switch.

1. Technofuturist
2. Bookservative
3. Bookfuturist

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I’m pretty sure I invented the second; Joanne McNeil coined the third.

I’m always hoping that someone will step forward to defend the honor of “technofuturist,” explaining that in earlier usage it doesn’t mean at all what I make it mean. But so far, no takers.

I’m pretty sure my brain did a little inversion and read your “not universally” as “universally not,” which is one of the things that set me off. Not a willfull misreading, I assure you.

I think I would still contest your claim that Kindle readers “don’t care about the differences or are prepared to ignore them.” I think many do care, in some cases very much. One of the strongest voices that I know personally on this issue has been my coblogger Robin, who was an early adopter of the Kindle and writes and sells stories for it, but is still frustrated that he CAN’T design page breaks, fonts, and controlled illustrations. As an academic, I love reading e-books on my computer, but find the lack of consistent page numbers and poor foreign character support infuriating.

The people who’ve acted like it doesn’t make a difference aren’t the readers, but the device manufacturers and publishers. The reason, I suspect, isn’t ideology as much as it is the technical challenge of supporting these design elements. Text is easy; easy on screens, processors, and battery life. But the future lies with integrated-media books. And as Robin has said elsewhere, this probably won’t happen until a player like Apple starts eating everyone’s lunch.

A post about how e-books might win you over sounds outstanding — I look forward to reading it! And I hope you’ll stick around here, too!

To me, it seems as though the only advantage that you could imagine in an eReader is its portability. While this may mostly be true as of current, there is always room for innovation. While the content of an eReader is stored digitally, is it actually fair to argue that it has no physical merits? Nostalgia, in the long run, is not a good enough argument for one medium over another. While popular tastes might tend toward paper and ink, a few generations down the line might find paper’s lack of durability to be more trouble than it’s worth. Perhaps people who use eReaders are embracing the change in physicality, rather than ignoring it or waxing apathetic toward it. I agree that there will always be a market for traditional books, but this is not because they are the only outlet for readers who care about the physical form.

After all, the fact that a JPEG of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is fundamentally different from and not as good as the original is only an argument for preserv­ing paintings; it isn’t an argument for abolishing JPEGs of them, or caring about their quality.

At no point in my post do I ever suggest that the the eReader should be abolished, or that I don’t care about the quality of them as you seem to imply.

I never say that I think serious readers won’t welcome the eReader. I have a very good friend who hasn’t read anything on paper since September, and he’s a very serious reader, whose opinion I value highly. Note that I said “for the millions of people who do read compulsively, eReaders are not going to be universally wel­comed”. “Universally” is the key word there.

The fundamental point I’m trying to make is that a digital reading experience is, with available and foreseeable technology, a fundamentally different experience than reading a book. My suspicion is that eReader users either don’t care about the differences or are prepared to ignore them because of the portability. But that still leaves a large number of people who do care about the physical form, and for these people, independent bookshops are a boon, and will have a market for many years to come. Many if not most of the serious readers I know are at least partly addicted to the physical form of the book.

Of course there’s an imaginable point where the digital will overtake the analogue — but let’s not forget that books are themselves technology. I think it’s a fundamental mistake to think that digital = technology and analogue is something less.

I’m planning a post on what features an eReader would need to acquire in order to convert me away from physical books. I’m not sure what those will be yet, but I suspect that the technology is a long way off, and even then there’s a large doubt in my mind as to whether there will ever be a big enough market to entice someone to make one.

I think about the future of the book (and of my livelihood) all the time. I am a passionate, obsessive reader and I favor books on paper for recreational reading (I am not a digital native). Until recently I guess I was a bookservative, mainly for fear of the future. But the provocative discussions here along with conversations with a visionary friend have pulled me towards this new, creative way of thinking that comprises bookfuturism. Nonetheless, I’ll always love my store, my books, and putting “the perfect book” into a customer’s hands.

How will my bookstore evolve over the next several decades? How can I retain the essence of what I do — and how the store serves the community? It’s sounding like the current model will be obsolete pretty soon, at least in terms of financial viability. I can’t tell at this point how the American Booksellers Association is going to help us transition to the near future, but I doubt there will be any revolutionary changes — they are advocates for too many indies to try anything too radical too quickly. As for me, I’m planning to stick around and follow your conversations, perhaps try out an idea or two, and attempt to fashion a model that will fly in the real world. Maybe I’ll start a blog on the store website: Bookfuturism: A Case Study.

So glad I found you.

Also, once you start making predictions about the future, you’re in descriptive territory, whether you like it or not.

That said, I think this is really sharp: peo­ple who care about read­ing and books must care about many forms of read­ing, or their favored form will dis­ap­pear with the rest. Publishing, bookselling, etc. have long stood at the intersection of many niches. You might need to defend your niche as a matter of preserving your individual taste, but for preserving an eclectic institution like the neighborhood bookstore, it’s a disaster.

There’s no limb you can cut off of this body without triggering an effect everywhere else. For instance, it’s certainly the case that Ms Khan should care about what happens to bookshops if she wants to preserve libraries.