Token Anti-eBook Article

Linton Weeks wrote an article in the Washington Post last weekend that poses the now tired and too-often-asked question: why didn't ebooks work?

Frankly, I expected better of The Post. Weeks trots out some pretty tired arguments, including the following:

But maybe e-books never really caught fire because there was never a deep desire for them in the first place. The 500-year-old book -- with white paper pages and night-black ink -- is a perfectly good technology for providing word-based information.

Electronic devices, on the other hand, can deliver words and more -- voices and video and music and interactivity. You can play Scrabble on a handheld. Or chess. Or rock-and-roll. You can chat. Or e-mail. Or you can call home or surf the Internet. Why use them to read vast chunks of printed matter?

Why? I'll tell you why, Linton, since you asked.

1. Because ebooks are portable. I have over 300 books on my Pocket PC, and I carry them with me everywhere I go. Do I read all of them at the same time? No, not even close. But if I decide I want to start reading one of them now, I don't have to wait until I get home. I have my whole library with me, ready at a moment's notice.


2. Because ebooks are durable. No matter how many times I read my favorite ebooks, they never get dog-earred, the covers never fall off, the pages don't get brittle.


3. Because ebooks can do things paper books can't, like hyperlinked endnotes, fast keyword searches, even included audio and video if necessary.


4. Because ebooks are more comfortable. I can read ebooks comfortably one-handed while lying on the couch or while walking. Additionally, ClearType on my Jornada is as comfortable to my eyes as print on paper.

When will these "pot-shot" articles end? I'll agree freely that ebooks were oversold and haven't yet lived up to the early "print is dead" hype. But just because ebooks haven't taken flight, there's little real reason-- aside from journalistic bandwagoning-- to declare them DOA, either.