To print or not to print

While I admit that I am excited about e-books and their possibilities both as an educator and individual reader, I find myself a print addict.  Anything more than a couple pages long that I need to read with care goes to the printer. I shudder at the thought of trying to read anything of substance on a PDA or, worse, a cell phone screen. I've not purchased a Kindle. My dresser is stacked with - gasp - a dozen or more hardbacks and paperbacks. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and printer cartridge manufacturers all love me.

Am I a latent Luddite?

Probably, but Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal (2007) 74 pages by William Powers, Media Critic for the National Journal, helped me understand a little better why many of us still cling to hardcopy books, magazines, newspapers, and printouts of digital content. It's a fascinating, uh, "paper."

One of the more interesting sections describes the early  impact the printing press had on hand-written manuscripts. Handwriting, according to historians became even more widespread and important after Gutenberg. He uses this as an lesson, writing: "We have seen that new technologies do not necessarily eliminate old ones, at least not as quickly or predictably as is often assumed. However, when new modes of communication arrive, they do often change the role played by existing media." (p.26) and argues that "paper's work has been shifting away from storage and toward communication." Communication being the end user experience of actually reading.

Power's describes a Sellen and Harper study that ascribes to paper four "affordances" - inherent characteristics that make it particularly useful, especially for concentrated study:

• Tangibility (Our hands can do some of the work our brain does in navigation.)
• Spatial flexibility (We can spread out paper limitlessly, not confined by the size of a monitor)
• Tailorability (We can easily mark up printed documents.)
• Manipulability (We can put one page beside another for easy comparison.)

He concludes, "within a multi-tasking context, printed documents make it easier to focus on each specific task."

There are two other characteristics of paper that Power describes that resonated with me.

The first is that is is immutable. "Unlike a Web page that can be changed in the blink of an eye, a paper document implies a certain commitment to the content it carries." (p. 49) This summarizes my concerns over Wikipedia - not that the information it contains may be inaccurate. But that it may be accurate today and inaccurate 10 seconds later. (And frightens me to think how easy it would be today for Orwell's Big Brother to finish his task of revising all of history.) This may also explain why I take a good deal more time and care writing an 800 word magazine column than a longer blog entry - no going back to "re-write" the column.

The second characteristic is that paper is a selective medium. "A hard-copy document can only hold only as much information as will fit on its pages, and it cannot link to other sources except by verbal reference. ... the immensity of the digital trove also makes it inscrutable, unwieldy, and, at times, overwhelming." Power quotes Brown and Dugid in The Social Life of Information: ...it has become increasingly clear that libraries are less 'collections.' than useful selections that gain usefulness from what they exclude as much as what they hold." If that is not the best argument for excellent collection development strategies in school libraries, I don't know what is.

Anyway, Hamlet's Blackberry is well worth taking the time to read. I suggest you print it out and do so.

Can the Kindle pay for itself?

Here are the last three books I've purchased and their relative costs in paper and as Kindle-readable e-books:

• Stephen Hunter's The 47th Samurai. Hardcover $17.16; Kindle edition: $9.99 Cost savings: $7.17
• Laurence Bergreen's Marco Polo. Hardcover $19.11; Kindle edition: $9.99  Cost savings: $9.12
• Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Paperback $9.60; Kindle edition: $6.39 Cost savings $3.21.

So, let's add this up...  Carry the two, add the five... $19.50 less for the Kindle book versions. Let's tack on another conservative $4.50 for postage for these three purchases. I'll have saved $24 on my three purchases or an average of $8 per book. That means my Kindle should pay for itself after purchasing about 50 books.

A few observations:

• I could not find 2 of the last five books I bought in Kindle format (Don Norman's The Design of Future Things and The Rough Guide to First-Time Around the World.) This limits the economic viability of the device. Will availability increase?
  
• If I am willing to wait for the book to appear in paperback, the costs of the two products are more similar.
  
• I can't re-gift, donate, or display my erudition and fine taste via my physical bookcases.
• (On the other hand, I could read trash on the Kindle, free from worry that others may think less of me because of my reading tastes.)
  

It would probably take me at least two years before I broke even economically on the Kindle. A pretty long pay-back time even for a regular book buyer like me. There are "value-added" benefits that should be factored in: lower carbon footprint for the e-book format than the paper book format; convenience of ready access to both my collection and new materials; the search/annotation feature of the e-book.

What if one did the math, however, with textbooks? Say we could buy (or lease for five years) a textbook for a fourth of its $80 cost? The typical five $80 textbooks at a $60 savings would be $300. Hand that 7th grader an e-book reader with all texts, novels, supplementary materials that have been updated, leveled for reading ability, customized for the curriculum, supported by a built-in dictionary/encylopedia/atlas. Cut out the printing costs of worksheets, lessen clerical costs of tracking, inventory physical texts, eliminate school lockers, etc. Do I smell a sea-change?

Maybe a blend of the OLPC or ASUS eee and the Kindle - readability, interactivity, portability, productivity and affordability. Can't we have it all? Tomorrow wouldn't be too soon. 

Emotional reactions to the Kindle

I was somewhat surprised by the rather negative and emotional reactions many in the blogger community had to Amazon's e-book reader. You'da thunk somebody was suggesting that lovable old grandmothers were being replaced by Satan, or something.

The Valleywag blog does this little comparison

I suspect that had the the author of the chart above been writing in 1907 instead of 2007, it may have looked something like this:

Other folks have been fussing that the device is a single-function machine; that it uses a proprietary format (and one would have to actually pay for creative content); and that it can't re-gifted at Christmas to the brother-in-law, etc.

I suspect many people will be unable (or unwilling) to make the switch from cellulose to silicon readers. I suspect both better technology and better content distribution/remuneration schemes are just around the corner.

But what many of us fogies are forgetting is that IT IS NOT ABOUT US. I find it ironic that the Kindle release and the knee-jerk reactions to it were made the same week as the latest report by the National Endowment for the Arts that decries the decline in reading by teens:

1. Young adults are reading fewer books in general.

• Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.
•The percentage of 18- to 44-year-olds who read a book fell 7 points from 1992 to 2002.

Could it be that kids read, they just don't like reading on paper? Be a shame if our own preferences, predjudices and quibbles related to book format discourage reading by the next generation.