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Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology.
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exclusively for pragmatic listeners. We'll talk about them more during the show. I'm your host
John Chidjie and I'm joined today as always by Vic Hudson. How you doing Vic? I'm good John,
- John, how are you?
- I am exemplary.
- That's cool.
- Yeah, I just wanted to pick a different adjective.
- I have a Kindle on the left and paper books on the right.
- And it will make sense in just a moment
to the listeners why that matters.
So hold that thought.
Bit of preamble, I had some feedback during the week
that my preambles are getting long.
So here's the short, short, short version.
Once again we're live streaming the show, go to techdistortion.com/live, you can access
the stream and the chat room there.
It's now possible to see the list of topics that I'm going to cover on the show in coming
weeks and months at techdistortion.com/topics.
If you're not a member, you will be able to see the list, but if you sign up, you'll be
able to vote on the existing list and also suggest whatever topic you'd like covered
on the show.
Beyond that, I'll be locking in episodes a week ahead of time, maybe two, and people
can see the topic and co-host or guest host details planned for the next coming few episodes.
an opportunity for listeners to guide where the show goes in terms of topics and whilst
I do get plenty of emails of suggestions and requests, there hasn't been an easy way up
until now to gauge if it's just one or two people interested in a topic or if they're
part of a vocal minority and lots of people want to cover a specific topic. So now you
can tell me what you want quickly and easily and everyone else that's interested can let
me know if they like those topics as well. So those new features are live on the site
right now. Don't wait, go and check them out.
There you go. How was that?
Good. Less than 60 seconds.
Not that I was timing it. Okay.
So, we're going to talk about
a listener voted topic. This was the most popular topic
as voted by the listeners. And of course, you kind of
gave away maybe, well, partly what it was. So, what is the topic tonight then Vic?
E-readers versus paper. Exactly.
Exactly. And specifically, when I say paper, I want to
be fair about this.
And the problem is that there are so many different kinds of paper.
So, how am I going to- We have to narrow this down.
We can't just talk about like newspaper, like
newspaper, you know, hardcover books, paperback books,
you know, textbooks, scrolls,
You know, parchment. Yeah, we got to narrow this down.
So, I'm going to stick with the most popular kind of book that's
made out of paper, and that's a paperback.
So, specifically, we'll focus on novels, I think, because paperback
novels are the most common.
And with e-books, obviously, novels are the most common thing you'll find as an e-book.
So, textbooks are getting more popular, of course.
But yeah, and of course, people love hard covers because they're hard wearing,
but, you know, they're also more expensive.
So paperbacks versus, paperback books versus e-readers.
Fight.
OK. I didn't know it was going to be a cage match, I'm unprepared.
Maybe it's not, maybe a cage match is a bit strong.
OK, so, of course, this is Pragmatic, so I've got to cover some
history. I mean, I don't got to, but I'm going to.
Okay, so when there were scrolls, then there were books, then newspapers, then paperbacks,
then computer screens, now tablets and e-readers, they all convey exactly the same content,
but the differences are the visual, the tactile, olfactory experience and the subtly different
for each of those different things. So as I said, we're going to focus on paperbacks
versus e-readers. But so far as paperback books go, it was actually in the mid 1800s in the UK
when steam-powered presses and pulp mills made book manufacturing a lot more economical and wider
distribution drove the costs down. So the removal of the hardcover obviously also reduced the cost
of manufacture at the sacrifice of some durability. But most people wanted, you know, the cheaper book.
So a German publisher called Albatross Books is usually given the credit for creating the so-called
mass-market paperback that was in the early 1930s but it was actually Penguin Books in the UK that
was in 1935 and they took essentially most of the ideas from Albatross Books and then of course
well it sort of dovetailed with World War Two and they ended up so as in Germany sort of got sidetracked
Anyway, and they ended up kick-starting the paperback revolution. So, Penguin Books is sort of
the main driving force behind that.
So, anyway, on the e-reader side of things, a lot of people
think it was Amazon that had the first e-reader, but it wasn't. Do you know who it was?
I do not. Okay. I was actually quite surprised because I
didn't realise it was Sony. I knew it wasn't Amazon, but it was
actually Sony. And the Sony Libre, L-I-B-R-E,
that was the first commercial e-ink screen reader.
Now, that wasn't the first e-reader and certainly wasn't the first e-ink
e-reader. However, it was the first commercial one that was widely distributed
and successful. So, the sad part is-
How long before the Kindle was set?
The Kindle was only a little bit a few years after that, but it was not-
Yeah, but the thing that's interesting is that the Kindle has just run over everything.
Yeah. And now the sad thing is that Sony announced in August that they're
discontinuing production of their e-readers, so their time is gone
from Sony anyway.
So, it's kind of a bit sad when that happens, but, you know, Amazon has just dominated.
Yeah, the Nook's doing okay, but not as good.
The Kindle's just, you know, flattening everything.
So anyway, all right.
So I guess it's sort of one of the things that I really wanted to do,
start with beyond that is this some of the statistics, you know, and I guess it's,
I don't know how to put this, but I know there are lies, damn lies, and
statistics and there are so many statistics out there I am not kidding
and you can you can well imagine how much there is out there about oh you
know ebooks are dead or you know ebooks aren't dead and or real books are real
books are dead or they're not dead and every single contingent of people who
with a vested interest have published statistics proving and disproving what's
going on in the market. So we have to start just quickly with Amazon and
there's a bunch of caveats I'll get to in a minute but let's just for the
moment look at the the figures from 2010. So in 2010 they reported that for paid
books, so first of all that does not include free ebooks, so one-third of all
all paperback book sales.
Sorry, hang on, let me rephrase that.
One third of all paper book sales.
So that's hardcover plus paperbacks.
So one third of all of their book sales were paper books.
Now, 15% of all of their sales were hardcover
40% were paperbacks, 45% were ebooks.
Now, since then, paper-based books have slipped even lower than that.
Now, those statistics sound pretty damning, right?
They sound like ebooks are well and truly the winner.
They are out ahead, right?
But the thing you have to keep in mind is that Amazon, they're an online
retailer that you access via an internet capable device.
And that raises a bar for a lot of people.
You know, I don't care how silly that sounds, but, you know, there are
still a lot of people that are not on the internet.
I'm sorry, but there is.
And even being on the, quote unquote, "on the net" is not actually
a guarantee that they're going to go and buy anything from Amazon, or that they even
know what Amazon is, or that they even care, you know.
So yeah, we're looking at a subset already.
And that and a subset of the whole population, internet
access is a subset and all that subset, you've got people that
actually care or know about Amazon and care about Amazon.
So of those subsets within that, those figures, that's where they
would come from.
So bottom line is the vast majority of population don't shop
Amazon.
And saying that these numbers are representative of anything
is kind of like saying, let's say two thirds of people that visited the chemist or the
drugstore, well, they came away with medicine.
Funny that. Yeah.
It's a very limited sample and it's a biased sample on top of it.
Exactly. So, take that with not just one, but many grains of salt.
One ain't enough. So, OK, what's far more interesting is a
study in 2013 of adults, which is 18 years and older, or that
that's debatable depending on who you speak to.
And honestly, some states in the US as well, like Nevada,
I think they don't consider you an adult until you're 21,
certainly can't gamble anyway.
That's a long story.
Anyway, that was in the US.
And they found in that study that of all the people
that had read at least one book in the previous year,
so this is now taking out all the people
that haven't actually read,
and so there was actually a percentage of the population
that didn't hadn't read a book, one book in the previous year.
But of the people that had, a quarter of them had read an e-book.
Interestingly, a tenth of them had listened to an audio book.
Interesting. The rest of them, which is the
overwhelming majority, had read a paper book.
Now, that paints a very different picture.
That said, you rewind that five to 10 years, you know, and there were no e-books.
So, clearly, e-book is rising up, but it is certainly not dominant.
Yeah. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
However, the thing I said is that, you know, of that percentage, what about the people that
hadn't read a book? Interesting statistic, nothing to do with the topic of this episode, but
you know what? One quarter of the adult US population had not read a book
at all in the previous year.
Sadly, I'm not surprised by that.
Well, I think it's pretty, yeah, it's
and I don't think that's a US thing at all. I think that
that's a, you know, I think that's a Western culture thing. I think that a lot of
people are spending a lot of time
doing other things. Yeah. Which is a shame, really. But anyway, all right.
You get the internet, Twitter, podcasts, TV, movies.
I don't want to dig too much into the statistics. There's a link in the show notes if you want to have a look at it.
It is really fascinating to read through and look at the different demographics and you look at the different people
and there appears to be some relation between people that spend time online and actually reading more books, which is, you know, interesting.
But, yeah, it doesn't prove anything. It's just interesting.
The last interesting statistic I just wanted to mention though is that more women read books than men do
Hmm
Anyway, lovely
So, the problem is with all those statistics and it's all like, okay, I'll quote whatever statistics you'd like
But the truth is that there's a lot of conflicting drivers that push ebooks popularity and sales and adoption and so on
on it's just you know so I don't want to go any more on I don't want to go on
anymore about statistics I just want to focus on the technology because you know
what we take away from this is ebooks have come a long way in 10 years they've
come from well essentially not existing to being a reasonably decent sized chunk
of book of novel content consumption in a decade in another decade I expect that
the numbers will be much, much stronger again.
But it's going to take a long time before e-books are actually the dominant
proportion, I think, statistically of how that content is consumed.
But there's no question it's heading that way.
Just don't listen to Amazon when they tell you, "yeah, it's just the best, it's so popular,
it's, you know, it's kicking butt" within reason.
Hang on, how does Amazon report stuff?
Yeah, it's doing really well.
Hmm, good. Anyway.
Numbers are great without any numbers.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
OK, so next, next, next, next, next, next.
Let's talk a little bit about the technology and you have to start
with the weight. And I want to look at,
and this is this part was a little bit difficult to research
because I can't say to you, go and buy a self-paperback novel now, tell me,
how much does it weigh? Because you'd think there's no standard
or rather there is, but there's not a...
There are so many different sized paperback novels.
And I don't just mean the X and Y dimensions, height, width, I'm also talking about the
thickness, the depth, the number of pages, the length is variable, not just that,
the weight of each individual page, exactly.
I mean, all of that adds up, makes it extremely hard to generalise.
But fortunately, there's a link in the show notes to someone who had
more spare time than I do that actually did this research.
Thank you very much.
So I plucked a couple that I thought were in the sort of size region
that I'm looking at. Size region I'm looking at is something that's comparable to
either a Kindle Paperwhite, let's say, or
an iPad Mini.
That sort of physical size, so slightly smaller to around about that
size, maybe slightly larger.
So I picked a couple for examples.
So the first one, dimensions in inches,
six and a half by nine and a half by half an inch,
160 pages, and in millimeters,
that's 165 by 240 by 13 millimeters.
And that weighed 15 ounces or 425 grams.
You get the same result with a different dimension book,
9.5 by six by one, that's inches,
and in millimeters 240 by 150 by 25 millimeters,
370 pages, also 15 ounces, 425 grams.
Two different average form factors
with the same weight in a paperback novel.
And that's pretty typical.
Now, now let's look at how much a Kindle Paperwhite.
Now I'm quoting the Kindle Paperwhite,
I've realized that there are many Kindles, okay?
And I'm not gonna list them all.
This is not the, I don't want to take the Kindle
and do a, like I did for the iPhone.
I'm not doing that for the Kindle.
How like in episode one, I did not,
I'm not doing that for the Kindle.
But I'm creating a Kindle Paperwhite because we own one.
My wife owns one and I've used it
and it's a nice bit of kit.
I like it.
However, it's a first gen model.
It's dimensions, 169 millimeters by 117 millimeters.
117 by 9.1. It weighs 215 grams. That's the Wi-Fi plus 3G model. And in North American
speak, that's 7.6 ounces. So already, the Kindle Paperwhite is lighter than the two
paperbacks I mentioned. And significantly, literally half the weight.
Yeah. Next, we look at the Retina iPad Mini or what are they calling the iPad Mini 3 now?
The new one. I just I really hate it when Apple rename number things after the fact.
God, what are they calling it now?
Retconned? That's the expression now.
Whatever. OK, so the dimensions of the new one pulled straight from Apple's website
are 7.87 x 5.3 x 0.29 inches which is 200 x 134.7 x 7.5 mm and it weighs 12 ounces otherwise
known as 341 grams. So clearly it is bigger and heavier than a Kindle Paperwhite, not
by much in terms of the dimensions but certainly more in the weight, it's over 120 grams more
than a paperweight. That's not surprising considering first of all the materials it's
manufactured from and second of all, well, it's physically larger as in it's taller and
slightly wider. So, in any case,
it's still lighter than those paperbacks.
Now, people are going to say, well, you know, I have this great paperback novel
about, like, I don't know, a bunch of dinosaurs that they made and ate people
and stuff. Anyway, and it's slightly different dimensions.
And I'm like, yeah, OK, sure. But, you know, the generally- generally what I've found
is that the books that I've looked at, the novels that I've paperback novels that I've looked at,
yeah, they're all either equal or heavier and usually they're heavier than a paperwhite.
So, that leads us to the next interesting conclusion.
No matter how long the book is, no matter how thick it is,
no matter how big or small the font is, your e-reader is always going to weigh the same amount.
Yep. Always.
It's always going to have the same amount of arm fatigue.
Now, I got the Steve Jobs biography as a
Christmas present a few years back, you know, Walter Isaacson's.
It's a hard cover and this thing is heavy.
It is. I have a copy on my shelf.
Yeah. I got, what, nine chapters in.
And you know what? I stopped reading it.
I never finished it.
And it wasn't because it was necessarily a bad book, although I'm sure John Siracusa would have something to
say about that.
I think he had a whole episode about that.
He actually had two, but never mind that.
The Wrong Guy, hypercritical, look it up.
It's one of the best hypercritical episodes.
I've listened to that multiple times.
I just love that one.
Anyway, anyway, irrespective.
Point is that that thing was so damned heavy and the number of times I was reading it when I was
dozing off. And when that thing hits you in the face, when you're dozing off, it hurts.
So, I've been injured...
I would say so.
I have been injured less by my iPad falling on my damn face than a stupid book.
So, here we go.
Straight away, you know, I think e-readers are already ahead in terms of
arm fatigue. And frankly, it's only going to improve.
What are they going to do with books?
Books been around for hundreds of years.
What are they going to do? Make the paper lighter, thinner.
that'll just make it more flimsy.
Ultimately, the materials that we make,
like the batteries, like lithium ion,
is much lighter than nickel metal hydride.
Next generation of batteries is gonna be lighter again,
whatever it may turn out being.
And the glass will get thinner and stronger.
There'll be new kinds of plastic
that they use that are the lighter on Kindles.
And on iPads, they're currently using aluminum.
Well, they could try different alloys, they could go to thinner aluminium.
There's other options to reduce the weight.
But with a book, you're as far as you're going to get, other than reducing the size of
the type of the font and therefore the number of pages you need.
And you only push that so far before it becomes, you know, bring a magnifying
glass if you want to read your book.
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So next, next, next, next, next, next.
Okay. What you got? What you got? What I got? What I got next is cost and
convenience is my next broad topic section
thingy doodad.
Well, that's technical. Okay.
Borrowing and lending.
Now, this gets brought up time and time again.
I, you always hear this argument and the argument goes something like this.
If I have a paperback novel and I've finished reading it, I can now give it to
my spouse, my brother-in-law, my sister, the kid down the street on the skateboard,
whatever. I can give it to anyone I want.
There you go. Have a book.
Hopefully they read it.
Hopefully they don't burn it.
Whatever. Now, how many people are going to give away their e-reader?
Here, have my e-reader. It's got a book on it.
Well, you're not going to do that because it's your e-reader.
And as evidenced recently with Apple's family sharing,
the ownership and transfer of ownership is still a difficult problem.
So people don't want you, I'm sorry, people don't want you to, publishers don't want you
to give that paperback novel to the person down the street.
They want that person down the street to go and buy another copy.
That's what they want.
Yes, they do.
That's not what happens, but that's what they want.
With digital distribution, they have the ability to do that.
So, they're going to enforce it, aren't they?
So, you can say, "Hey, you know, power to the people.
We're not buying into this.
You know, we're going to keep giving our paperback novels away to our family members and friends and kids on skateboards.
We're going to do that."
Why? Because we can and we're going to stick it to the man or the woman or the person or the corporation, whatever.
The thing is, if you want to continue doing that, that's fine.
But what about what happens when e-readers become
a commodity item themselves?
So it got me thinking about how low do you go before it's
just as easy to say, I have more than one e-reader.
And I download on my e-reader and there's a part, there's
like a lock on it that stops people from accidentally downloading stuff
that's not theirs, but they can read whatever's on it, but they can't
surf the web or they can't download more books on my account, you know, without an access
code. Now, you do that and you make this e-reader cheap,
then at some point you're going to cross a line and it's going to be here, just have my
e-reader, there's four or five books on there you might like to read.
Yeah. And you may say, but then you're without an e-reader.
Yeah, but if they're that cheap and they're a commodity item, then you will have more than one.
See, I've seen a lot of popular, like bestseller novels,
you know, hardcover, paperback, between 20 and 30 dollars,
you know, for bestsellers, you know, really popular books.
And I did a search on the web looking for cheap e-readers.
And the thing is that beyond the Kindle, which you can get for $79,
That's the one with ads. That's 79 US.
Yeah. There was a while ago, didn't last, was a company
called Beagle.
I think they're now Textr, T-X-T-R.
They briefly had an e-reader that was supposedly selling for
10 euros, couldn't find much for it, but the whole idea was it was the dirt cheapest
e-reader in the world that has ever known.
I actually found a few out there and it's not around anymore.
Not surprisingly, business model didn't work out, I guess.
Don't want to delve too much into the history of that one, but in any case, if I've got
any of those facts wrong, let me know, but I think that's what's happened.
That said, there are several e-readers out there available for starting around about
$60 that aren't Kindles.
So they're getting close.
I mean, they were using e-ink technology from six, seven years ago, probably, or even older,
but that's not the point.
The point is that now you are in a position where it's for the cost of two hardcover bestsellers,
you can get yourself an e-reader. Yeah. They're getting very,
very close to just being in impulse range for the mainstream population.
Exactly. Yes. And that makes them more of a commodity item, which then means,
well, you know, it's not so bad giving them to people,
lending them to people, you know? So again,
that's not what Amazon wants. That's not what the publishers want.
They want you to buy another one.
They want the other person to buy their own
and to download their own copy of the book.
But that's not what's going to happen
as they drive the costs down.
And people say, "Oh yeah, but what about ownership
of the device?"
Well, I mean, you can get around that by simply having,
you know, like I said, a lock on it
and say you can't buy anything.
Yeah, so anyway, honestly,
and because e-readers are not like an iPad,
like an iPad is a tablet.
I'm not talking about tablets necessarily.
I only threw the iPad in
because a lot of some people do read on iPads.
Personally, I've read on the paperwhite
and I've read on an iPad,
and I know which one I'd pick for reading,
and it's not the iPad.
We'll talk a bit more about that later.
But anyway, so, okay, cost.
The thing that's interesting though,
once you go beyond that, is you think to yourself,
okay, well, then if I'm going to switch
from paperback novels to eBooks and eReaders,
then I'm gonna save myself money in the long run
because, you know, it's going to work out cheaper, you know, to get all of
these e-books because, you know, than it is to buy the paperbacks because
they don't have to print anything, right?
Yeah. So, you think, yeah, it's going to cost less for digital distribution
than physical distribution.
OK. You know where I'm going with this.
You know where I'm going with this, don't you?
OK, so I have this problem with
Amazon. And I'm not the only one.
Amazon's business models defy analysis and
explanation to a point.
Now, a guy called Scott Marlow
in 2011 did a great blog post and it's linked
in the show notes if you want to read it, about some of the ins and
intricacies of Amazon's pricing structures for paperbacks, hardcovers
versus ebooks. Rationale, insanity, mostly insanity. So here's the thing I had a
look in there as doing a prep for this episode just to brush up on a couple of
details and they have the most insane pricing structures I've ever seen. It is
so counterintuitive, it's not funny.
And what they do is there's, I guess what you'd call, what I call a price
distortion. I just realised it sounds a bit like a website name.
It's a bit of a- It just- If you're a Prime member, you
get books for like, you get books for a massive
discount, but not e-books.
You know, like not really.
So, they'll have a- They had a paperback book that would sell to a non-prime member for about $16
US. But if you're a prime member, you got it for $7.50.
That's shipped to you, right?
Yeah. And the e-book started at $11.
Yeah. I'm like, what?
That doesn't make sense to me.
Oh, hang on. I get it.
They are encouraging you to become a prime member.
So, what they're doing is they're hiding that cost and they're dragging you in.
So by being a subscriber to be a Prime member,
then they're getting a regular income from you
rather than a sporadic income
from the occasional book you might buy.
Plus, of course, you've got the halo effect
once you become a member that you are more inclined
to use their other services that also cost money
but are quote unquote cheaper for Prime members.
You know, it's not a new strategy, I understand that.
But what it does mean is it's very difficult
to do a genuine price comparison
between paperbacks and eBooks
to come up with some kind of conclusion.
Yeah. There's some other variables in there, too, though.
Sure.
There was once a time when the absolute max price for a Kindle book would be
$9.99. And many of them were often found for cheaper than
that. There's a publisher variable in there that's
changed some of that.
Absolutely. I don't want to get too much more buried in that because,
Frankly, other people who have covered this previously, and honestly,
it's not a topic that greatly interests me at this point.
So, I'm going to leave Amazon there, except to conclude
Amazon is a very bad example of e-book economics because they
just seem to be insane, or rather they do things
in a way that is difficult to- For me to quickly dissect, just for
purposes of this comparison. Yeah. So leaving it there. Instead, let's talk about Barnes & Noble
that actually follow the laws of physics or more closely are aligned with the laws of physics
business. We find after we do a random sample of paperbacks versus ebooks that ebooks work out on
on average, about 37% cheaper.
Yay, that's more like I'd expect, right?
OK. There were cases where the paperback was cheaper, just like at Amazon, but the
next point is the economics of printing 100,000 paperbacks and selling only half of them,
and then you got to flog off what's left just to clear your shelves or your inventory.
Well, that's a different problem that doesn't exist with e-books.
So, you know, obviously, if there are paperback novels that are
cheaper than their e-book counterparts, it's probably because they
produce too many of them and trying to get rid of them.
So, you know, that's the most obvious explanation.
But anyway.
OK, so cost convenience, continuing, you can download
an e-book without leaving wherever you are.
Now, obviously, that depends on your e-reader.
some e-readers have 3G, some don't. Some with 3G as part of the,
when you buy it, you know, as in like, you don't have to pay for it. Other ones,
yeah. If you're within wifi range, you know,
so that's a limitation, sure.
But the truth is there's a lot more wifi hotspots than there are bookstores.
So you have access to books in a massive
number of situations.
And if you've got a smartphone or a Wi-Fi hotspot, that's even, you know, it's wherever you
are, even if you've got a Wi-Fi reader.
So that drives spontaneity.
And spontaneity is one of those things that kind of is hard
to evaluate, you know.
I can't say to you, oh, spontaneity is worth
$5 a year.
You can't quantify it.
It's desirable for a subset of people.
I think spontaneity can be good, but I'm a planner.
You couldn't half tell, right.
I kind of- I'm not spontaneous.
I can be spontaneous, but I like to plan things.
And frankly, I would plan ahead.
If I'm taking a trip and I'm going to do some reading, I'd load up my e-reader with books before I
left. No different than if I were to go and buy a bunch of novels and chuck them in my suitcase to take with me on a trip,
you know, historically.
you know, but the spontaneity means that if you don't have to worry about that, you can be impulsive, you don't have to do the forward planning, you know, and if you finish the book you're reading, you can just go and download another one, away you go, you don't have to get up.
Now that sort of convenience, you cannot beat.
So, as a little aside though, do you remember back in the days before when people had no, when no one had mobile phones?
You know, and I have younger
people. God, man, that makes me sound old.
I have people, occasionally younger people, when we're talking about this stuff,
how did you survive without mobile phones?
How did you know where anyone was?
And it's called planning, you know.
Yeah. I'll call you at this time or I'll be at this location
at this time. It's actually not that hard.
Yeah. So anyway, but then again, having said that, people love
mobile phones because it means you can get in touch with anyone
anytime. And that has good and bad.
Same thing with e-books.
You know, maybe you shouldn't be downloading another book to read.
You should be spending time with your family.
No different to playing video games.
It's still a distraction.
So anyway. All right.
Okay. This one is a few more little ones that are sort of a
convenience. It's sort of borderline convenience, right?
So, the borderline convenience one is it's more of a durability, it's a bit of a durability.
So, if you drop a book, it's going to be fine.
If you drop an e-reader, you're going to be probably in trouble.
So, you know, from a durability point of view, books are always going to be in a better position.
You spill water on a book.
Well, it's probably going to be in trouble, or they could probably dry it out.
You spill water on an e-reader.
I hope you like the page you're reading because it's probably going to be stuck there forever.
Another one that I thought of was losing your place in a book.
How often does it happen to you when you're reading a book and
you either dog-tier, no, dog-ier, you know what I mean?
Flip over the corner of the page to mark where you are.
Oh, my goodness. And you know, I have some people say, "Oh, that's sacrilege.
You can't do that to the book. You're creasing the page." You know?
I'm pretty OCD about that.
Okay, so are you a dog-ear folder or are you against it?
I'm kind of against it.
Oh dear. Yeah, when you say you're kind of against something, that's like your really aggressive stance.
Yeah.
Oh my god.
I don't like most commercial bookmarks either. My preferred bookmark is usually a store receipt because it's like some of the
thinnest piece of paper you can possibly get.
Because I guess the issue is the thicker cardboard ones, or worse still,
the thick plastic ones.
More knitted or crocheted or macrame.
Yeah, okay.
You're damaging the book. You squeeze them into a book near the spine, then you close the cover and then that's going to create
pressure and ruin the adhesive, the glue
that's binding.
The pages together, that's the issue is it?
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
I think it just deforms the page, it's not perfectly flat anymore.
So when you flip the book over, it naturally is attracted to the pages that had the big thick bookmark in it for a long period of time?
Yeah, it tends to be, yeah.
Excellent. Well, here's the thing.
My biggest complaint about books is the fact that I lose my place because I'll put a bookmark in there with whatever description and kids come along and flip through the book.
Or it gets knocked off the table or the bedside table or wherever the hell the book is and the bookmark falls out and now I've forgotten where I'm up to.
Yeah.
- You know what I would suggest? - What's that?
- Taking a picture with your phone. - I can't believe you suggested that.
- Maybe I'll make an app for that. - Maybe you should hold off for...
- Analog bookmarks. - Just think that through a bit more.
I think that, yeah, but the whole point of that bookmark discussion, a little bit more about that than I thought we'd have to say, but there you go.
Honestly, it's not a problem with an e-reader.
E-reader remembers where you were, that's it.
You can drop it as much as you like.
You know, it doesn't,
there's no problem with losing your place.
So, you know, again, a win for the e-reader.
One of the other things I just wanna quickly talk about
before we start talking about display technology
is resale of paperbacks.
Now, I was not gonna mention this
'cause I find it to be ridiculous,
But have you ever sold books that you've owned for money, like
secondhand?
No.
No. See-
No, if I buy it, I usually tend to keep it.
Yeah. Now, I've given books away, but I've never
sold them for money.
And it got me thinking, there's- When I was a kid, it was
much more popular then to go to the secondhand bookstore.
And there were only a handful of secondhand bookstores.
But the thing that was wonderful about secondhand bookstores was that
that was where you would go, not just to find cheap books that people didn't want anymore,
that were 30, 40 years old in some cases, but you could strike gold
for stuff that was out of print, it had been out of print for years that you just couldn't get
anymore in these secondhand bookstores.
Yeah. And I have no objection to buying them secondhand.
A lot of my books were by use.
My grandmother taught me the joys of the use bookstore when I was young.
Yeah. And the smell, you know, it's got a very unique smell
compared to a brand new bookstore, you know, like
a like a Chapters or a...
Oh, God, who's left?
Is Chapters still all around?
Or are they gone?
I think they might be gone.
Okay, so Chapters are gone.
Jeez, I'm Mr.
Current Events, aren't I?
Anyway, whatever.
The point is that, yeah, it's a very different smell.
And the thing is, though, secondhand bookstores are dying.
And they're dying because there's no money in them.
And because people are just not- They're not selling the books, they're not giving the books
to the secondhand bookstores.
They're just- It's not happening anymore.
So, it's all dying, which, you know, there will always be a niche, there will always
be places that have that. And there's a little bit of a trade going on in books on eBay.
But when the shipping of the book costs more than the book and you can get it cheaper,
brand new, if it's still in print from Amazon, why the hell would you? So, I don't buy the
whole secondhand book resale of paperbacks argument as to why paperback books are better,
because you're far more likely to give it to a family member, which gets back to the
the trading thing we've already talked about.
Okay.
So next we're gonna talk about display technology,
but before we do that,
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display technology now honestly the winning display technology for e-readers is e-ink
And it's actually
stands for Electrophoretic Ink, which is a
bit of a weird word. But anyway.
And it's also the name of the corporation that essentially, well,
owns it. Now, the way it works is think
of, well, they call them microcapsules.
small spheres and inside each sphere there's two kinds of particles. Positively charged particles
of one color usually white and negatively charged particles usually black. So each individual capsule
is a pixel. So as you know with magnetism like charges repel hence it's possible by creating a
small magnetic field directly under each of the capsules you can flip the color of the capsule
by flipping the field. And once it's flipped, it'll, it sort of
stay, it stays in position. And that particular technology is
referred to as a bistable reflective display. Meaning,
yeah, the bistable meaning it holds its state in, in either
state, even when power has been removed. And reflective means
that, you know, it works just like the paper on a book, which
is, you know, you read it, your eyes see it from light that
reflects off of the surface.
And that also obviously saves on power, and it's less less
annoying to look at because it's far more natural because it's
how our eyes were designed to work.
Now, a lot of e-readers still require a complete
sweep of every pixel when you change what's displayed, which
is why you'll see all of the old Kindles and
many other e-readers, where you'll see the whole page go white, black, white,
or black, white, black, or whatever, some alternation before the next page of text
is displayed. Newer technology is coming out now or has been for
gradually over the last few years, more expensive, of course, more complicated,
where it only selectively updates a much, much smaller area of the screen,
such that on most books, you probably go 100 pages or so before you need to do a
complete refresh of the screen.
So that's that's cool because I always found that annoying.
But, you know, I sort of understand the reason why.
So the downside of having a
essentially a reflective display means that when
low light, you can't read it.
Same problem with a book, though.
So from a comparative perspective, there's no advantage.
Except, of course, that newer models of some e-readers, including Kindles like the Paperwhite, for example,
they have their own side lighting light source.
Now, obviously, that's going to drain the battery.
It's going to drain it a little bit more than the ones that don't have the light.
And certainly when the light's not on, you know, because it doesn't have to be on all the time.
Yeah. Yeah.
But still, it's going to be nothing at all like the drain from an LCD or LED screen.
So just really quickly, LCD and LED, I'm not going to go into a long
protracted discussion of the different kinds because there are a lot of different kinds.
And so let's just keep it simple.
So LCD is short for liquid crystal display.
Where you've got multiple layers of slightly different colored liquid crystals,
and they basically turn on and off when electrical
currents pass through them, and they are essentially
semi-transparent such that if you shine light behind them,
the light will transmit through them and then you will see that.
LEDs, slightly different idea, different colored LEDs,
RGB, all sort of clustered really tightly together, blend together to make a pixel
through a lens usually. And they emit light, of course, light emitting diodes, LEDs.
Either way, these are referred to as emissive displays, as in emission,
as in emitting light, as opposed to a reflective display.
and they are generally considered to be harder on your eyes
that's certainly been my experience, what do you think?
They do, they are.
Ultimately they however have several advantages
and the biggest advantages are, at least with current technology, they have
head start on E Ink, though, let's be honest and let's be fair.
But at the moment, they have high resolution and they have much,
much, much higher refresh rates.
So you can refresh, you know, 30, 60, 120
times a second, depending upon the displays, you know.
Color. And you get much better color depth.
You can get color E Ink. It's not anything like color from an LED
LCD, no way. But still, the point is that you will get much superior quality of what
you are looking at from an LCD or an LED display over E-Ink. No question, no doubt, no discussion,
no debate. However, it kills your battery. Absolutely slaughters your battery. So the
The last thing you want when you're reading a book is to lose power and then either be on an
e-reader stuck on the page you're on or completely out of luck.
So, what do you do? Well, you go with e-ink, and that's why e-readers with e-ink are
generally the preferred option.
Doesn't mean you can't read books and stuff on your iPads
and on your, you know, Motorola Zoom or whatever tablet
you might have. You know,
touchpad yeah you can't you can't rule it out but seriously no people prefer
reading on e-readers for a reason on e-ink screens for a reason okay now the
last broad section that I've got to talk about is the touchy-feely stuff and like
I feel weird putting this stuff in but you know what I have to have it although
it's not usually a topic that I would cover the touchy-feely bit but you know
Here we go. So, I think that there is
an emotional momentum with paperback books,
with paper reading from paper.
And what I mean by that is that our brains get emotionally
sort of confused a bit based on not the
content that you're reading, but the delivery medium of that
content. You know, it's like the feel and the smell of
books, your brain associates that, usually
with a really good book that we read once, you know.
And then you'll pick up a book that's just average, you know, but you'll still prefer to
read it as a book because it triggers the memories of the good book you did once, you read
once long ago.
Well, maybe not that long ago, but you know what I mean.
And it's no different to hearing a song and it reminds you like you heard a song at
someone's wedding or, you know, worse sometimes at a funeral and it brings back bad
memories. The point is that, yeah, our brains associate, our senses trigger memory
and emotion. So, people say, "Oh, books are
always going to be better." I guarantee you that if you were to bring
up a child in a world with no books and only e-readers
And then introduced books, they would look at books and feel the same way.
And they'd say, well, I, you know, how can you hold that
thing? It's heavy. It smells funny.
You know, I don't get it.
So, the argument that, you know...
It won't hold itself open to the same spot.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, jeez, this stupid bookmark thing keeps- I know what I'll do, I'll just fold the
top down. Vic won't mind.
Okay, so I'm going to bring that up again, you know, now that I know this.
Oh, I mean, okay.
The experience of walking into a bookstore, we sort of talked about this, but a little
bit about the smell, the feeling of it.
But going through into a bookstore, it's similar in a library, flipping through the titles and the books that
they've got, enjoying the "usually", quote unquote, "usually quiet atmosphere",
that's kind of completely non-existent with an e-book.
You just go, "tap-pity-doo-dah, zippity-day" and you've got yourself your book.
Well, you hope anyway, if you've got money and credit card.
So, yeah, that's a very different experience you can never replicate.
Question is, is that an experience that is really going to be
saved for the masses?
Is it worth saving?
Do enough people value it?
And I don't think they do.
It's sort of a reality that we've become accustomed to.
It certainly isn't more convenient.
And it's something that we've become used to, not because-
Because we had no choice, we had no option, rather than we demand
a bookstore because bookstores are just the best.
No, we went to the bookstore because we wanted a book.
Anyway. All right.
The piece of paper is always going to
feel- Oh, I've got to watch saying that.
With current materials and current technologies, the
feeling of a book is nicer and more pleasant to
the touch, I think, than something made out of metal,
plastic, rubber, any of the common materials that are currently used
to make e-readers and tablets.
Would you agree? Yeah.
So, I honestly think that that is one of the
areas where, again, it's touchy-feely, right?
feeling, literally, because, you know, how do you quantify that?
And maybe someday in future, which is why I corrected myself, maybe they'll invent something that feels just like paper and it'll be here, pick up this iPad in the back, feels like paper and you close your eyes, you do the field test, do that, do the blind field test.
And that gets actually really creepy very quickly.
But anyway, right.
I think I'll move on.
Remotely reading to your child.
I'm going out West again for a few days next week, for four
days next week. And I'm faced with the problem
of reading books to my kids, my youngest kids anyway.
And you can't do that with a paper book.
Not without adding another technology to sit over their shoulder, which is probably
going to be an iPad or something or a phone, whatever, Android phone, whatever.
But here's the thing, if you're always going to, if you're going to introduce another technology to read to your child, then why aren't you just doing it on an iPad?
Because they, I thought it was brilliant actually at the latest event, Apple event just recently, been the iPads, they showed Caribou.
It's C-A-R-I-B-U app, link in the show notes.
They demoed that in the Apple event.
Now that is a cool app.
They're not a sponsor, but it's a cool app.
and it allows you to do remotely read with your child.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
That's brilliant. So if I'm 400 miles away and I will be next week for four days...
You can read them a good whole story.
You got it. That's magic.
You know, that's brilliant.
Try doing that with a paperback.
Good luck. Although admittedly, if it was a kid, I wouldn't be giving them Game of Thrones to read.
But still. No.
No, definitely not.
I skipped to the red wedding.
Okay. Now then.
Last one. Oh, no, two more things, and I think then I'm
done my notes. And that is moving my books around.
Oh, my God. So, I've got myself a hundred books, two hundred books, whatever.
I used to have 100 plus books.
What do I do?
I need to put them somewhere in a bookcase, in a bookshelf.
Now, that could be an entire room for some people.
And honestly, that's a lot of space.
You got to move it around when you move.
You know, are you really going to read those books again?
I might want to read them one day, so I've got to keep it.
Well, that's what happens.
That's how it happens.
You are a book hoarder.
That's what you are.
And, you know, maybe that's OK.
Some people are proud of that.
And that's fine.
You want to collect books, that's fantastic.
Some people have their own library in their own house, like it's a study, but it's better be
more accurately referred to as a library, you
know. Walls lined with bookcases.
And the best part is I can fit every single one of them into a single e-reader.
So, honestly, do you really need to deal with that?
Ultimately, finally, I think that there will always be bookstores
I think that you will always have paperback books
I cannot foresee a time where they will completely disappear
I do think that it will be for hard to find books, niche books,
limited run books, rare edition books, things like that
You know, that's what it will be
But they will be a token
You know how they do golden records
You know, platinum records.
They don't make records much anymore.
They don't make vinyl much anymore.
They really don't. You know, it'll become a token thing.
Here, I've got this book, it's sold a million copies.
Here's a paperback or a hardcover, probably more likely a hardcover book.
You know, maybe an author signs it.
Here you go. Author signed the inside of the cover.
There you go. That's a prize or something.
and people will get it and they'll put it on the bookshelf and they'll never read it
because they've got a copy in their e-reader
but they've got it because it's a special collector's thing
there will always be specialty bookstores, I think
for people that are truly enthusiasts
but honestly, realistically
e-readers are ultimately going to win
and books are going to die
not completely
But they're going to fade significantly and I just think that's inevitable
I think so
What do you think?
Did you have anything that you think I missed?
No
You always say that
I think that I would add that one thing that comes up a lot when I have this discussion with people about ebooks versus real books
A lot of people are really worried about the future of the library as an institution and
a place to go.
I don't think people need to panic that that's going to go away as the paper book declines
in favor of e-readers.
I think the library will change, but I think it fulfills a community service that's always
going to be valid and it's always going to exist.
I think the librarian's job will change, but I think that that's still going to need to
to that place and that institution and that service is always going to need to exist.
Yeah, I tend to agree up to a point.
I think that once everything becomes
so cheap, I mean, if you- If it costs
10 bucks for you to go and buy a Kindle.
Yeah. But these are library
Kindles, shall we say? Local government Kindles, whatever.
So, just like you pay your rates every year for them to pick up your garbage and, you
know, deal with, treat your sewage and give you fresh running water and all that stuff.
Do they call them rates over there?
It was just a service fee.
Service fee. Okay.
All that was- When I used to rent over there, so it was all hidden in the rental costs, so I
don't actually know what it was called anyway.
So, the point is, what-
Would it not be the direction for the government to hand out government
issued ones and you would be entitled to one
every few years as part of your service fees and
you could then download things from a catalogue in the library over the e-reader?
I'm not sure that analogy holds up 100%, but I think that the
point that you're making could be valid.
Like, um, a lot of places like the city, the government's not responsible for the
garbage and stuff here.
So I don't know that they'd all be lumped together, but okay.
And I, I, the, the point that you're making, I think would be valid and, and
that, that it could shift over to an area of that kind of responsibility.
But I tend to think of the library, it's a, it's a social place.
It's a source of information place.
It's already evolved in a lot of ways over the years.
I mean, you go now and you can check out CDs and you can check out DVDs and all kinds of
things and I think it's just always going to evolve, but I think that the social need
and the community need and the source for information, I think that those reasons will
always keep libraries open.
While I will admit that they probably won't need as much staff as they need, and they
may not need as big a physical location.
I think what you're going to- I think what will happen is the small libraries will
shut down. And everything will become concentrated into the city
centres, like the really big city centres.
And what our local government currently
does is there's a large public library in
Caboolture and there's a mobile library, which is essentially a
semi-trailer, or semi-trailer, that drives around and it's full of
books, oddly, and it will spend one
day a week at a smaller township.
So, up the road at Beor Burrum, for example.
And then, you know, the next day at Glasshouse Mountains and then the next day at Beor
and so on and so forth.
And then that way, locals who can't drive, won't
drive are still have access to library
to library functions, you know, like borrowing books and so on,
different other services that go around with the truck.
But at the same time, they don't aren't big enough to warrant their own library.
And I think that that sort of contraction and that methodology will continue to the point
at which the Caboolture Public Library eventually will close and it'll just become one library
in Brisbane, and eventually it'll become one library in the state capital, which, you know, in the case
of Queensland happens to be Brisbane. But, you know, I think a lot of regional libraries as a
fixed location will shut down and they'll simply become mobile libraries to go from area to area.
Inevitably, it's going to be cheaper to blanket a city with not Wi-Fi, but perhaps a successor to
WiFi, low bandwidth, low cost that
any e-reader can access to provide basic
internet service. I think that's- It's already starting to happen
with WiFi, you know.
Yeah. But the problem with WiFi is range and the range is difficult.
You need to look at a different- Slightly different technology, but anyway, I think that
that's where it's going to go, because, you know, you look in 20, 30, 40 years
time, it's going to be unheard of, I think, that you don't have access to the
Internet. It's just it's going to be available.
If you want access, you simply go to, you know, the main library or whatever, or
you or you write to them or whatever, maybe not call them, whatever.
I don't know. But and they'll send you a very basic tablet e-reader
device that you can, you know, that you can use as part of your your rates,
as part of your taxes.
Because I tell you what, think about how much money that would save the government.
You could- You would streamline the number of people you'd need to have as front facing
individuals, you could shut down all these different offices.
I'm not saying that I like that idea necessarily.
Yeah. But look at the trends, look at where it's going and think how
governments think. Yeah.
Unless you're Sir Humphrey Appleby, in which case, don't think like that.
But, you know, you know who I mean when I say Sir Humphrey Appleby?
I do not. Oh, really? Sorry.
There's a very, I was going to say popular, but perhaps not popular in your neck of the woods.
But a show by the BBC in the 70s called Yes Minister was followed up by
another series called Yes Prime Minister.
And they were shows about British politics, particularly following James
Hacker as he worked his way up from the lower bench or whatever
it was, and eventually became, was made prime minister, mainly because he was considered to be
a bit dimwitted and they were able to get things past him.
It was meant to be satirical, but the thing is that it hit
home on so many counts about politics, it wasn't funny.
Yeah. So, it was a really, really good show.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
And so, Humphrey Appleby was the head of the civil service.
Well, he wasn't, anyway.
So, the consummate public servant,
absolutely unbelievably amazing.
It was played by Sir Nigel Hawthorne, who-
You know who he is? I do.
Cool, well, that's something.
You should check it out, it's a good show.
It hasn't dated, it hasn't dated, it really hasn't.
I mean, okay, the vehicles and, you know, some of the clothes, the, you know,
the suits the men wear, you know, suits of suits of suits, but, you know,
generally speaking.
I would imagine that the drama and the story holds up, though.
Oh, yeah, it's not drama, it's comedy, but it's it's he's so good anyway.
All righty. Well, if do you have anything else that you want to add or wrap it up?
I think we're good. If you want to talk more about this, you can reach me on Twitter at John Chidjy and check out my writing at techdistortion.com.
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From Mac Birdie and he asks, "Color e-ink, is it difficult to do or is the demand non-existent?"
I think that at the moment it's a quality cost trade-off that's not panning out for
for most people.
So, it costs a lot more to implement it.
And that cost for the quality of the colour depth that
you get, if you put that up against an LED or an LCD,
you're just going to shake your head and say that's a joke.
Yeah. You know, and until the technology improves and becomes cheaper, I just don't think you're going to
see it. They'll go to higher DPI in black and white, as
they are actually come to think of it before they go to, you know, before colour
becomes more widely adopted.
Yeah. I think there will be plenty of demand.
Once it is economical and efficient, though, I think there will be plenty of demand for it.
Sure, absolutely. But, you know, you also have to consider the fact that most
e-books have been written with that in mind, that black and white is all
you've got to deal with. So, going to colour is going to give you
precious few titles where that's going to be of any advantage whatsoever.
So I think that it's a, the technology will improve, it'll become more desirable,
more e-books will support colour.
And at that point in time, it'll become more the thing.
But I'm still not, I'm still not sold on e-ink as a long-term viable technology.
I honestly think that there has to be something else.
And Mirasol would look promising, but, you know, honestly, it's just not being widely adopted.
And honestly, I'm not sure why that's an interesting question.
I wish I had a better idea, but I don't about that particular kind of display.
But hopefully that answers the question.
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