How I stopped worrying and loved e-books

Against the background of the growing popularity of electronic readers and, as a result, the burning of holivars on topics such as “Digit or Paper?” And “Will electronic editions push out printed materials?”, I decided to sketch an article about my personal experience of using electronic reading. Two years ago, before using the reading room, I was an ardent addict of “real books” and contemptuously looked at all sorts of smart devices for reading books. And now it is difficult to find a bigger fan of e-reading than I (what the title of the topic transparently hints at). :)

About what the advantages of the readers contributed to my transition to the "enemy camp", told under the cut.

I must say that the topic is not analytical, but purely subjective, in the spirit of "How I spent the summer." Just the final collection of my impressions as a result of a two-year experience of using an electronic reader. Most of my conclusions and observations, of course, are commonplace and have been voiced once or twice before, but I hope I don’t do any harm to anyone by putting myself on the side.
')

A little bit about the hero of the occasion

Over the years, years of reading, I was so used to paper books that I didn’t think that I would ever switch to an unusual electronic format. However, the need for this was ripe two years ago when I started a blog with reviews of the books I read. To update it regularly enough, it was necessary to reduce the amount of funds and time spent searching for and buying new books. In the end, I decided to buy a miracle called iRiver Story . I won't dwell on the device itself, since the topic is not about it. I can only say that he has his own oddities and quite a lot of drawbacks and glitches (difficulties in understanding some popular formats, slow flipping, etc.), but he performs his main function - reading books - regularly, and so to me.

No trash (+1 love)

Do you know what advantage the e-reader turned out to be the most significant for me? Save space! Yes, purely physical space in the apartment. I read with delight from the age of five, and in early childhood books became a real scourge of our home comfort. In my room the books were on the shelves, on the table, they were stored in drawers and just lay in piles on the floor. The apogee was the fact that they were lovingly pushed to the top in both our washing machines and large basins that were under my bed. :)

Of course, I didn’t drag all the books with me from childhood to adulthood, but the fact remains: even if at the time of my settlement everything is clean and peaceful there, then after a maximum of two years, the absolute whole living space begins to fill with books. The situation was decided only by the donation of old books to the libraries from time to time. So it was before.

Well, now in my apartment is one small bookcase, and it is enough for all of my needs. The disorderly giant piles are a thing of the past, turning into small files in the memory of an electronic reader. Now you can not be afraid of looking under your bed, see Stephen King sadly looking at you from the cover, or God forbid, Fyodor Mikhailovich. :)

Less expenses (+1 love)

I still remember with nostalgia that summer of my childhood, when I traveled to the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, I came there to the company store of the publishing house AST and zatar it in the most I can not books for 30-40 rubles. Inflation, of course, does not stand still, but even in those times it was VERY cheap. I understand with my mind, of course, that those books most likely scattered on separate leaves at the first reading, and the publishers probably saved on the payment of royalties, but the heart warms every time when I remember that little paradise.

Now books with the same thickness and content already cost about 500 rubles. Considering that I read a lot of books (4-5 per month), this can result in quite a considerable amount per year. The peak of my spending on books came in my student years. Sometimes we had to save on food, but the craving for knowledge was invincible. :) Now, of course, I can afford such expenses, but the benefit from switching to e-books is obvious. Even without taking into account the free download (we will not point the finger at Librusek), legal electronic versions of books are much cheaper than paper counterparts. And with the money saved you can eat ice cream.

Quick purchase (+1 love)

History illustration: I sit in the evening at home. Those books that I have already read. There is a question, what else to read. I open the magazine “World of Fiction”, stumble upon it on the list of the 100 most significant fantastic works. Among the descriptions, I am interested in Mervyn Pick’s Gormengast trilogy, and I decide to read it. Previously, it would have been necessary to go to the bookstore tomorrow (and even to several stores, since it’s not a fact that the first one would have the right book), spending at least an hour on it, and start reading only the next evening.

Now I can shorten this procedure just by going online, and after 10 minutes I can start enjoying the book. It is, of course, in walking through the bookstores, too, has its own unique charm, but in the end, I can always pay a visit there. Even if right at this moment I don’t need to buy a book (by the way, I’m doing this quite often).

Reading rare and unreleased works (+1 love)

There is a circle of good works that simply do not appear. That is, they cannot be bought in print form either now or in general. I first encountered this when I accidentally read the old edition of The Founding of Azimov, imbued with the novel of the great science fiction writer and began to look for its continuation - The Founding and the Empire. But no matter how I searched for a book in the shops of my city, I did not find it. The worst thing was that at that time this book wasn’t sold even in Ozon and Bolero (later, the publishers threw a large portion of classical fiction onto the market). So I had to wait almost three years before continuing to read this wonderful cycle. And then I would have a reader - there would be no problem.

Or take, for example, fan fiction. It is clear that no one will ever publish them, but among them there are very good works. One of the first books I read on my reader was a fan-fiction novel on my favorite Futurama, and it still includes, if not in the top 50, then certainly in the top 100 best books ever read. me. Or books in English, which in our city is almost impossible to get (in the shops only the classic like "Hound of the Baskervilles" or "The Old Man and the Sea"). I wanted to read books in “not our” language for a long time in order to improve my knowledge of the bourgeois, but only with the acquisition of an e-reader I was able to read foreign books that are interesting to me personally.

Preliminary acquaintance (+1 love)

Does it often happen that you start reading a book, but you still cannot “master” to the end? .. It happens to me. Just the book is not the plan that I was waiting for ... or simply very, very bad. One of the latest examples is the unforgettable Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (calmly! I read the book quite by accident, before the start of mass insanity on it, attracted by the intriguing title and the fact that it was supposedly a world bestseller). In such cases, it is very disappointing for wasted money, time and effort to go to the store.

As I was convinced, e-books offer a solution for such a case. Again, let's not talk about the virtues of free download (although this is the case that is most obvious), but online e-book stores often offer to read the first chapters of the book before buying (for example, I liked the favorite chapters of iCona about Steve Jobs, and I bought the whole book). As a rule, this is enough to draw conclusions. You can, of course, read the beginning of a book in a regular store, but this is somehow inconvenient, and sellers usually look at these visitors (although they don’t seem to have to).

Books will not be?

Against the background of my enthusiasm, I might get the impression that I don’t even look in the direction of traditional print media, and if everyone follows my path, then the traditional book market is doomed to extinction. Not at all! Even without taking into account magazines, almanacs and other periodicals, I still buy books. There are books that you will not find on the Internet: mostly they are either very old, or the newest books, as well as much of the specialized literature. There are gift books. There are also personal peeks (I think, not only for me) - for example, it happened so that I can’t read Terry Pratchett’s books in any way, except on paper.

In general, the flow of money that goes away from me to the publishers of books has significantly decreased, but there is no talk of a complete “turning off the tap”. Summarizing my observations on a general background, I can assume that in any case the complete replacement of paper books with electronic ones will not occur.

A spoon of tar

All my eulogy in favor of electronic readers, in principle, deserved by them. But still there are a couple of conspicuous for me cons, the nature of which comes from the very format of electronic books.

• The e-reader may ... break. Yes, yes, simple and trite. With my iRiver this has happened a couple of times already - fortunately, without a fatal outcome. And it can happen at the most inappropriate moment (once it happened during a long voyage on the ferry, and I spent half a day in unbearable boredom). And the paper book is so good that if I took it, I can always read it, without relying on the whims of the technique unknown to me. By the way, I think for the same reason attempts to replace school textbooks with electronic ones are doomed to failure — for everything that can be broken, any diligent schoolchild will break in two days.
• Still, even the most advanced full-text search cannot replace the good old quick flipping of a paper book, when you take it and in 5-10 seconds you reach it by using a certain fuzzy algorithm in your head exactly to the place that you needed. It seems to be a trifle, but often immensely annoying. If you also had similar feelings, let me know in the comments that I am not alone - it will be a little easier for me. :)
• The ease of acquiring and removing books in electronic format can play a cruel joke. In this case, it may seem that I am pulling the problem out of my finger, but for me it is. I will give an example: once upon a time I bought Sergei Luk'yanenko's “Labyrinth of Reflections,” but the book, as they say, “did not go.” After reading the first thirty pages, I put it on the shelf and forgot. Somewhere in a year I tried to approach the novel again. Again, failure. And only a year later, from the third time, I felt the atmosphere of the book and “swallowed” it with a volley (and at the same time all the sequels). About the same story was with one of my favorite writers Pratchett. If I took these books in electronic format, then most likely, after two unsuccessful attempts to start reading, I would delete them and forget. But it’s quite another thing if a book in a visible form is on your shelf and attracts with a bright cover - then you will sooner or later remember it, pick it up again and, perhaps, discover a new good author.