Ruminations

This year I’ve read two ebooks. (Are they ebooks or e-books? The hyphen seems awkward so I am arbitrarily going to leave it out.) Both were read using the free ebook reader software Stanza, for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Billed as a “a wireless electronic library that stays open 24/7″, I can’t fault Stanza - it’s easy to use and customise and very easy to download books. The reading experience itself was fine. I didn’t find it particularly difficult or uncomfortable to read on my iPod Touch. And yet, and yet. Something was missing from the experience.

Part of the problem, I think, is the choice of books that are available to me via Stanza. It’s not as though the choice is really limited - there are a good number of sites where you can get books, free and for a fee. Despite this, I still felt somewhat constrained by the choices available to me. If I want to read classics, I can do this to my heart’s content using Stanza. Project Gutenberg, for instance, offers some 25,000+ titles in the public domain. I’ve downloaded quite a number of titles, ranging from Great expectations, through to Sherlock Holmes, and The wind in the willows. I thought that if nothing else I would be able to read favourites like The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which I have read numerous times on paper. Well, nope, I haven’t.

So am I being cheap, why haven’t I actually bought any books for my iPod to date, you ask? Well, I don’t actually like the prices  - Fictionwise, for instance, offers A long finish by Michael Dibdin for $13.95. I dunno, that seems rather a lot to pay for a 1998 title that I won’t be able to lend to anyone. (In any case, I have read it already, on paper.) I could get Twilight by Stephanie Meyer for $10.99, but again, I wouldn’t be able to lend it to anyone. And the latest Dan Brown? The lost symbol is $29.95! I would have thought that given the much reduced distribution costs it would have been cheaper? I can get it from a Perth bookshop for under $30 now. And not to forget, I can lend it to someone when I’m done with it.

The ebooks that I actually did read?  The first ebook I read was For love of mother-not by Alan Dean Foster. I didn’t read it because I was particularly interested in the book itself, I read it because I could get a free copy of it from Random House. Well it is a 1983 book, and I guess the demand isn’t that great for it. It wasn’t an amazing book but it was an easy read. It took me THREE MONTHS to read it using Stanza. (It would probably have taken me a weekend afternoon to read it if it had been in paper.) I just did not find myself wanting to read the book using the iPod. I had to push myself, and as a result I only found myself reading it in odd moments. On the bus. At 3am when I had insomnia. When I found myself on the couch with two chihuahuas perched comfortably asleep on me and the iPod was close enough to reach without dislodging anyone.

Not to give up completely on reading ebooks, when I finished For love of mother-not I thought I would try again, and this time maybe it would be better if the book was something I was relatively interested in. I chose The velveteen rabbit by Margery Williams. A short book, I thought, and I have wanted to read it for a while. Well, no. I still had to push myself to read it. And I didn’t enjoy the experience, either. (I’m going to have to get a paper copy!)

For me I think there’s just something missing from the experience of reading an ebook. I’m not completely sure what it is. The fact of holding a book? Its binding? The texture of its pages, its smell, its heft? The fact that you can flick from beginning to end, through to the middle, and go backwards and forwards easily? (Scrolling is not the same.) Am I just unaccustomed to ebooks? If I read ebooks enough will I get used to the experience and even grow to enjoy it? After all, keyboards and wordprocessing used to be awkward tools for me. Do I want to keep pushing myself to keep reading ebooks, when reading is normally an enjoyable experience and not something I have to push myself to do? Will I get over it?

What has your experience of reading ebooks been?