Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring"

i still have absolutely no idea what he thinks happens to the text in an ebook but i'll be fucked if i read the article either so

he saw fantasia and thinks the letters waltz around the screen

Stunningly, my boss - who was the one I was referring to upthread who gets frazzled when she can't make a PDF of text act like a Word document of text - is a huge Kindle fan. Just noticed this juxtaposition today, actually, b/c at lunch she mentioned that she bought a regular book b/c it had illustrations, and then a few minutes ago I was explaining why some PDFs are fillable and some aren't.

when she can't make a PDF of text act like a Word document of text

tbf i agree, fuck a pdf

i guess if someone wanted to support that point they could refer to amazon taking back e-books it had sold after finding out they didn't have the right to publish those e-books, like literally disappearing those books off of customers' kindles, but still fuck that guy

absolutely, but that's not a fault of the medium

i.e. it's not e-ink's fault that some dildo wants to slap drm on everything

well, it would be tricky to accomplish in the alternative medium tbf

"hey gimme that" *grab, run*

swings and roundabouts

If printed books do become obsolete in the next 50 years, Franzen is pleased that at least he won't have to see it. "One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], 'Well, that won't have to be my problem'," he said. "Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

who needs the ~scary change~ brought about by plumbing when you can fetch your water from the creek

Why doesn't he hire some scribes to write his books? No need for these newfangled printing presses.

i also believe that experiencing too many years of rapid human development + change would warp the mind. rip van what-the-fuck-my-eyes-are-now-8d?

I once read this Sci-Fi book that said one day we'd being reading books off of little electronic tablets and my mind melted.

maybe that's what franzen's afraid of

"Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

comments like that shit me to tears on THE most fundamental level

x2

Also, I like "shit me to tears"!

it's common here!

rip van what-the-fuck-my-eyes-are-now-8d?
lool

i'm not even going to read that, franzen is such a tool

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 30 January 2012 16:30 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol i was congratulating myself for managing not to read a franzenthing, now i just need to get to the higher level of not reading people talk about the franzenthing

eventually i will get to the level where i don't even hear about the franzenthing

I have not read the Franzen thing, but I still think e-books are stupid.

some of them are, certainly.

I dunno to me they're just books and books are pretty cool.

I guess to anyone who has downloaded books in the past (lol book piracy) or read stuff that's shifted to be more online, book reader devices are just kind of a necessary convenience we've been waiting to come along

Like, reading books on a Palm device circa 2000ish? That kind of sucked, but hey, mobile library. Reading while sitting at a computer kind of sucks, laptops are a fair sight better, and anything like an iPad or kindle/nook are pretty sweet

Book fetishism is a mystery to me, I have come to realise. I like books, they work well for what they do. I like e-readers, they work well too. Books do furnish a room, unlike e-readers, but lots of people here already own more books than they can deal with. I don't have any desire to own rare first editions or the like.

I feel like I'm predisposed to think words on a glowy screen are somehow more alluring now and I've had better luck finishing books on my iPad than in print, lately. It's making me sad.

http://www.digitopoly.org/2012/01/31/publishers-and-chickens/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+digitopoly+%28Digitopoly%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/01/31/146140663/no-more-e-books-vs-print-books-arguments-ok?sc=fb&cc=fp

Books represent ideas and freedom of expression. There's something unsettling knowing that someday this freedom will be completely dependent on having an electricity source

when we don't have electricity anymore we'll be worrying about more than the ability to read 'the corrections'

I love the idea that a serious argument against e-readers is that if electricity goes away, we'll still be able to read books. I'm sure our transition to an electricity-free culture will be gentle and with endless free time for hand-copying Moby Dick and, oh wait, I mean like the road warrior guys won't be tossing them all onto the fire to keep warm while your eviscerated nerd corpse rots on the cold ground.

xpost

I feel like I'm predisposed to think words on a glowy screen are somehow more alluring now and I've had better luck finishing books on my iPad than in print, lately.

See, I'm just the opposite, I'm sympathetic to e-stuff in general, and I've downloaded lots of books to my iPad, but I just can't manage to get around to looking at them. The books I actually read are the ones that travel in my backpack or sit by my bed.

my ipad is by my bed and I look at it for news first thing in the morning before I turn on the light!

I definitely read more on an ebook reader. Last week I read two books in two days (one sitting each), because it was easy as hell to just sit there with the ipad on my leg and flick through the pages. Holding open a book with my thumb for 3–4 hours gives me the shits. That's just a personal thing btw, I don't expect everyone to feel the same way.

Interesting thumb/bowel connection you have there.

It really sounds like you spend all day on the toilet with your ipad.

better than a pile of magazines amirite

not really, because when you run out of toilet paper the ipad is a horrible substitute

that's where apps come in

http://gizmodo.com/5880871/maurice-sendak-fck-ebooks <-- it's reactionary week in paper land

I couldn't watch the video at work, so what I noticed most was the commenters' saying they had no idea who Sendack was.

In a way I can see why he's saying that, who would want a stupid poky grey slab in place of one of his colourful shiny lovingly detailed books? But it's horses for courses and not all books are so dependent on their specific medium.

yeah but he doesn't really care about books he cares about colours and pictures, i don't think anyone is arguing that kindle is for add toddlers tbf

tbf the iPad has all kinds of child book/app content now and kids love that shit

well yeah if you bring tablets into it then rly these people are only arguing for ... paper?

yeah ok he's just a luddite :/

like i get that there are things you can do with books specifically, leather and dust and gild that shit up and curly print and smell the character and *lecter f-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh* but these are all arguments for these details only, not arguments against good writing being available in a convenient electronic format.

it's like the paper monopolists are paying off this franzen guy