Bibliomancer.Com

I don’t buy books any­more, at least not the way I used to.

I mean, I still buy books. In fact, look­ing at Ama­zon I’ve bought 14 books in the past 30 days, not count­ing ones I’ve got­ten for free. Of those, 3 of them were phys­i­cal books, and the rest were all e-books. I am well and truly con­verted over to the ebook man­ner of read­ing, and there’s no turn­ing back. The real proof of it? Jim Butcher’s Changes came out in this win­dow too. I’m not count­ing it because I’d pre-ordered, but it’s nicely illustrative.

See, it was one of the books that got caught up in Amazon’s squab­ble with the pub­lisher, and the kin­dle ver­sion got yanked off shelves (so to speak) shortly before release. Now, Ama­zon made it right — they sold me the hard­cover for the price I’d paid for the ebook, $9.99 — and I’m grate­ful for that, but here I am a month later, with this book form a series I love by an author I dig which I’ve heard is fan­tas­tic, and I haven’t touched it. Why?

Because it is just too much of a pain for me to bother with car­ry­ing it around. I always have my kin­dle. It’s part of my reg­u­lar kit. And I’ve got four dif­fer­ent books that I’m read­ing at once going on it. It lets me read in strange places at ran­dom time. In con­trast, for the hard­cover I need an unin­ter­rupted block of time at home, some­thing I just don’t have with a ram­bunc­tious 15 month-old in the house.

All of which is to say, I am very much the ebook audi­ence these days, and its with that in mind that I want to high­light the three books of the past month that AREN’T elec­tronic, because I think they illus­trate some­thing impor­tant. See, I still love books, but the kin­dle has changed how I think about them. There are books I buy because I want the actual book, but there needs to be some rea­son beyond read­ing it. If it’s just the con­tent I want, the Kin­dle does a bet­ter job.

Set­ting aside gifts and books with sen­ti­men­tal value, I think these three books do a good job of illus­trat­ing what attrib­utes call for a real book.

The first is San­jay Patel’s Ramayana: The Divine Loop­hole. Patel’s a graph­ics guy from Pixar and the book is, to put it frankly, absolutely beau­ti­ful. I saw it on the shelf in Bor­ders and every page was a won­der to behold. It’s pos­si­ble this book would do well on some­thing with a really nice screen (like an ipad) but for some­thing this lovely, the abil­ity to flip pages and be struck by the images is entirely worth it.

So I’ll buy a book if it’s beau­ti­ful.

The next is Head­first Rails. It’s an instruc­tional book about the Ruby on Rails pro­gram­ming lan­guage. The Head­first series are unique and well regarded because they present the infor­ma­tion the reader needs in really engag­ing and inno­v­a­tive ways. Com­par­ing their books to a ran­dom com­puter text­book is like night and day. They use lay­out and pre­sen­ta­tion as a tech­nol­ogy, using the book form to its fullest. It is prob­a­bly read­able in elec­tronic form, but it’s so well designed as a book, that would actu­ally seem less efficient.

So I’ll buy a book if it takes advan­tage of being a book.

The last book was the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Strikes Back. This is a great book and I *really* wanted it, but it wasn’t avail­able as an ebook, and given the cir­cum­stances of its pro­duc­tion (Sny­der died before it went to print) I didn’t feel con­fi­dent it would be avail­able in any kind of timely man­ner. So I bought the phys­i­cal book, and despite it being fan­tas­tic, I’ve barely dented it for the same rea­sons I haven’t read Changes.

So I’ll buy a book if I have no other choice.

I would sug­gest against publisher’s lean­ing too heav­ily on #3 — in most cases there’s a dif­fer­ent book I could buy, and I almost cer­tainly will. How­ever, #1 and #2 are hope­fully a lit­tle bit more infor­ma­tive, and they both have some­thing in com­mon. Both cel­e­brate the book as an object rather than a mere container.

Now, none of this addresses the very real frus­tra­tions I have with ebooks — the inabil­ity to gift or lend them is a par­a­lyz­ingly bad ele­ment that I tol­er­ate only because they’re still in their infancy — and I under­stand fully why any of those other prob­lems might keep some­one from embrac­ing the ebook. But once you do, it’s hard to go back, and it also makes you appre­ci­ate the books that really deserve appre­ci­a­tion all the more.