Ebooks vs. Books and Other Fallacies Part 2

In the first part we covered the history of books and publishing. In this second piece we will address the fallacies and preferences that people tout about ebooks versus books. The final piece will cover the good of ereaders and how books and ebooks will coexist.

Fallacies

The first argument I heard against books was that they are hurting bookstores and libraries. Libraries have been around for a long time and many are now offering ebooks to borrow as well as other streaming services. Libraries are keeping up with the changing book industry and thriving. Bookstores have been going out of business long before ebooks came in the picture. If anything, ebook readers are book buyers which is good news for bookstores. Bookstores are also producing their own ereaders and selling ebooks on their websites like the Nook from Barnes and Noble. Ebooks are cheaper to store and don’t take up expensive prime retail space in the stores.

“I prefer real books.” So do people prefer the paper and binding along with the ink, or what was written? Personally, I prefer what is written. I read a lot, I read ebooks on my Kindle and iPad and I read hardcover and paperback books that I buy all the time. Reading ebooks does not mean you don’t read “real” books, or the derogatory term dead tree books, it means you are ok with the latest change in the technology of the book. Ereaders are making millions of books available to billions of people who could not afford them before.

“I like writing in my books.” As a book lover, I have finally started to write in my books, I treasured them for many years and did not want to ruin the ones that I bought. I tend to do more underlining when I read which is very easy with an ereader like a Kindle. You can highlight texts quickly and look up words with the touch of a finger. When I first starting reading a lot, I had to carry a notebook and a fat dictionary with me because I didn’t understand a lot of the words in the difficult texts. Now, I rarely come across words that I don’t know, but when I do, ereaders make it easy and better to look them up. You can also write notes in ebooks that will display easily as well as being able to print them nicely organized. The Kindle Paperwhite has a built in vocabulary builder that compiles a list of the words you look up so that you can study them easily, similar to what I used to do with a notebook, when I was working on expanding my vocabulary.

“Free ebooks aren’t very good, you have to pay for the good ones.” I would say the opposite is actually true. The free ebooks are the classics that have been available for years, and before ereaders. Dead author books are some of my favorites. That being said, when I first bought my Kindle I would download any free books I could find. I quickly realized that many of them were not worth downloading. I started being picky about the free books I downloaded to read. The classics, epics, and anything published before 1923 are in the public domain, which means the authors are either dead or do not own the copyright anymore and can be sold by anyone who decides to print them, or made available for free online. You can also download free ebooks from your local library’s website. See my post on Overdrive for more.

Project Gutenberg is a nonprofit that works to digitized, proofread, and format books into ebooks and make them available for free. Many of their titles are available in the major ebook stores, and can also be had by direct download from their site. Some of the best literature that has ever been written is available for free to download, so you don’t have to pay for the good books, they are all free.

“Ebooks have bad formatting and are badly written.” True! You might have to put up with bad formatting with ebooks at times. Many of the major bestsellers in the last few years did not have the best writing. Have you tried reading The Hunger Games? Everything that is published as a real book does not necessarily have good writing. Many of the people that publish ebooks are indie authors but there are some major authors joining the ebook market like Stephen King. Authors are switching to ebook publishing because their books will be widely available to readers and they get better royalty contracts from publishers like Amazon. 70% royalties are unheard of in the present “real” book publishing industry. Most authors make pennies from each book sold while the publishers make the majority of the profits. I’m sure Amazon is not doing this out of the kindness of their own heart but to disrupt the present market, in the meantime authors are profiting and ebooks are here to stay.

The quality of ebooks depends on the quality of the writer and the production team, same as traditional books. Terrible books are published by publishers because they will make a profit. We have book reviewers that read and review books for the readers to find and read. We need the same for ebooks. Websites like mine review ebooks and make recommendations and we need more of that. Most books that are published by traditional publishers are now also published as ebooks. The quality of ebooks will rise much like the quality of the novel did in the 18^th century.

The bad formatting and bad writing is part of the stigma associated with self-publishing, and has been around for quite some time now. The stigma has transferred to ebook self-publishing, and comments about the quality of ebooks are addressing this fallacy.

The latest bash on ebooks came in the form of a study published in Sweden that says that people who read ebooks retain less information that those who read paper books. There are serious issues with this preliminary study that had non experienced ebook readers reading for retention. The authors themselves address that the findings might be different with experienced ebook readers. The blanket statement is a subjective fact since all readers are at different levels. I am an English literature graduate student and I never have problems recollecting majors themes or plot points from either ebooks or paper books, but I also have more experience than most with books and ebooks. While this may affect some readers, the blanket statement has been adopted by the “real book” lovers as another reason why they won’t read ebooks and why we shouldn’t either. The people that don’t read ebooks did not read ebooks before and they don’t read ebooks now; why they care if we read ebooks is beyond me.

The readers resisting change justify their reasons and it comes down to this, they prefer paper books. That is fine! I am not going to bash paper books every chance I get because I might feel threatened. Read what you choose and so will I and millions of others.

The last fallacy I will address for now is that “a real bookshelf filled with real books is more impressive than a Kindle Fire loaded with books.” If you buy books to impress others with your book collection, you are doing it wrong. I have been buying books since I was a little kid, I own thousands of books in all formats, I have read many of them, and I have a Kindle collection with hundreds of books that I am working my way through. I do not show off my books, or my Kindle. I buy, borrow, and download free books to my Kindle to read, not to show off.

Thanks for reading and check back soon for the final installment of ebooks versus books and other fallacies.

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Ebooks vs. Books and other Fallacies Part 1

The ebooks versus books “war” has been raging for sometime. This frivolous and baseless war has been conjured up by those that want to maintain their current control of the book market, mainly modern book publishers, and those that are resistant to change. Ebooks are not going to kill books, or libraries, or bookstores, the same way that television didn’t kill radio and the internet didn’t kill television.

Ebooks are the latest advancement in book technology. Publisher mass produced books were the last major technology that replaced the rotary press and the Gutenberg press before that, and hand written and bound books before that. What people really mean when they say that ebooks are killing books is that they prefer things not to change. They prefer “real” books, those that are mass-produced by publishers that have been around for only 100 years or so, to the newer style of books.  

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The History

To address this debate lets look at the history of books and printing. In 1440 Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that books, were hand written and so very expensive to produce and to own. Only the very wealthy owned books and they were also the only ones that could read.

In 1455 Gutenberg printed his first book, a reproduction of the Latin Bible. In 1475 the first book written in English was printed.

In 1534 the first publishing house was established at Cambridge in England, Cambridge University Press. The Press’s mission was “To further further the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.” Keep in mind this is still 200 years before the novel was invented in the early 17^th century. Being an Academic and educational publisher, they did not publish for general audiences.

It isn’t until 1639 that the first books were printed in the new American colonies. Followed by the first magazine being invented in 1663. In 1719 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was written, which was the first and beginning of the English novel. This and many others were being reproduced in the US without any form of payment to the authors. We have always been rascals when it comes to stealing from other countries.

Many advances in printing technology later produced the rotary press in 1846. This made it possible for newspapers to increase circulation and the New York Times debuted shortly after in 1851.

In 1845 paperbacks were introduced in the United States leading to the Copyright act of 1891, which banned the reprinting of English titles in paperback, due to all the pirating of books.

In 1917 the Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded, following in 1918 with awards for Fiction, drama, and poetry.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in 1922 leading to the first copies of a novel being destroyed because it was considered obscene. This is also the first book in the Modern Library’s 100 best novels list.

This brings us to modern day publishers that were developed as “a purely commercial affair” that established publishing as a business. In 1911 the formal business model of publishers and presses was developed leading to the domination of book publishing by presses with a profit bottom line. This was very different from the Cambridge University press that was disseminating knowledge and was not profit based.

For authors to get published they needed to go through literary agents and publishing houses to even be taken seriously (another fallacy). A book published by these publishers was considered good quality, but that alone does not guarantee a good book. A self-published book does not guarantee low quality writing either.

As technology has advanced in book printing from the Gutenberg press, to rotary press, and now modern day laser printers, so has the book. As different genres were developed so did the book business models. What I think this all points to is that book technology, mainly the book itself, has never been a constant. The ebooks versus books war is just the latest resistance to the evolution of books.

The current business model has been in place for about 100 years and it is finally beginning to change; giving more power to the authors who can choose to publish themselves and reach readers through the internet and online book sellers like Amazon. The business models have changed from mom and pop bookstores, to major chain retailers, to online wholesalers making more inexpensive books available to the reading public.

Books, bookstores, and libraries are not at war with ebooks; ebooks are the latest technological shift that has taken place. Like most change, it is being resisted by people who are accustomed to a certain way of reading, and the businesses who have perfected their marketing and sales models to produce their profits. The large global corporation book publishers are fighting against the acceptance of ebooks, specifically with Amazon.com who is taking their monopoly away from them by having the control of the market and demanding better pricing.

Authors have always been able to self publish but there is a great amount of stigma associated with it. Arguments have been around for some time now like, if you can’t get your book published by a major book publisher then you must not be worthy of publishing. Publishers have a stranglehold on the book markets and control what is published and what is advertised. Authors without a foothold have a very hard time breaking into the market.

The publishing houses are businesses that are concerned with the bottom line. Whether the book is good or not is only a small part of the equation in deciding whether to publish. Whether the book will produce a profit for the publisher is the main consideration. Publishing houses do not equal quality or variety in books.

Major publishing houses have published Britney Spears's and Sarah Palin'sautobiographies, likely through ghost writers, because they would sell big, not because they were well written. Deals are made in the millions for the latest celebrities to publish books. If the publishers are supposed to maintain the quality of books published, then someone forgot to let them know.  

In the next part we will talk about the arguments commonly made against ebooks and why they are baseless. For the final portion, we will cover the pros of ereaders and how you can have both books and ebooks live in harmony together.

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature posts. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future posts, free Kindle books, and the best Kindle novels. Make sure you subscribe and check back for more. Happy Reading.

Amazon’s new ebook subscription service seems like a winner, until you realize there’s a better, free option, Overdrive. Includes an Easy 3 step setup.

Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited plan is a ebook borrowing service that makes it easy to download as many books as you can read for a monthly fee of $9.99. You can read on any Kindle device or app, as many books as you want, without any limits. It’s like Netflix for movies or Spotify for music, you can download as much or as little as you like to read or not read.

Sounds like a great deal for $9.99 a month or about $120 bucks a year. There’s just one problem, there’s already a competing service that allows you to read on any Kindle device or app, with a huge selection. You can also find the latest bestsellers for free.

Whether you read on your Kindle app for iPad or your amazingly simple paperwhite, you can download free Kindle books with Overdrive.

“OverDrive, Inc. is an American digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, music, and video titles. The company provides secure management, digital rights management and download fulfillment services for publishers, libraries, schools, and retailers.”

This great app that lets you download an amazing selection of books for free. You can read on your: Kindle, iPhone, smartphone, iPad, Nook, Mac, PC, and everything else. This free  service is available at your local public library.

Overdrive provides download services to thousands of libraries across the country. All you need is your library card! Set up is a breeze.

Step 1. Get your library card, if you don't already have it. Libraries are still a great place for communities and offer many services besides the ole “find a book check it out to read.” Libraries provide many community services including free classes, computers to use, and now free ebooks.

The selection of downloadable titles varies from library to library. The catalog of books available is impressive. You can also utilize multiple libraries to increase the number of books available. You can get a library card at most libraries in your state to access their ebook collections online.

Step 2. Setup Overdrive. Overdrive has been growing for a number of years and now has a link on most library websites. Set up your overdrive app by finding and adding your libraries and log in info. Then you can search the libraries for available ebooks. You can also head over to their main site and find libraries near you that support the service. Getting up in running doesn’t take too long and you will be all set up for future downloads. Overdrive even syncs across all your devices so you can read on whatever you have handy.

https://www.overdrive.com/

You can set up Overdrive to send the books to your Kindle devices and apps and read without having to purchase them from Amazon.

Step 3. Download books. Overdrive allows you to check out up to 12 books at once (depending on your library). I usually read 4 or 5 books at the same time so that if one book is a little slow, I can switch over to another. Best sellers and popular books may not be available immediately, but with countless free options you will be reading right away. You can get on their  waitlist and be notified when the book is available. The number of copies depends on the number of licenses that the library purchased. You might have to wait a few days to read a book, a small price to pay to read it for free.

You get to keep the books for 2 weeks before they are returned. In the Overdrive settings you can change the default checkout time to 3 weeks.

Everyones selection will be different and it will depend on the libraries you are registered with. Once you have set up the app, you can download books to your device to read in the Kindle app. You can catch up on all those books you have been meaning to buy!

Conclusion: Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited plan is very convenient. Amazon specializes in making purchases as easy as possible. Plus, you will never have to wait in line for a new book. The only thing that doesn’t make this plan a must have is there’s already a better free service that provides unlimited reading. If you are a voracious reader and want to save yourself $120 bucks a year, follow the three easy steps outlined above and begin reading free Kindle books. Happy reading.

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