If you are concerned about these things (or many other things), you
shouldn't buy e-books. Indeed, you should probably stick with paper. There is no
digital medium that has lasted longer than high-quality paper and ink stored
under proper environmental conditions. These paper-and-ink copies can be read by
nothing more than one's eyeballs.
E-books are easy to back up -
you do not need Amazon to do it. For that matter, you do not need to buy your
e-books from Amazon in order to read them on a Kindle, or using Kindle software
on other devices.
Using an e-book reader has several advantages over
paper. For one, e-books take up a lot less room. Very handy if you are going on
a trip. And the environment I do most of my reading in is not what I would
consider proper environmental conditions to promote long book life. I
tend to read while waiting for a doctor's appointment, while my truck is being
worked on, as well, as in my recliner, or in bed.
A further advantage of
e-books is that you can read books by new authors that probably would not have
been published in dead tree version. I have found some great books from unknown
authors in Amazon's $0.99 sections. They may be lacking in polish, but they
are good books. In several cases, the author used the proceeds from the first
sales to have the book professionally proofread, resulting in a much more
polished book.
On the other hand, any digital medium will
eventually have to be both refreshed and migrated to remain current. (Can you
still read 8" floppy diskettes? Do you still have the hardware and software to
download data over a 110 baud telephone modem?)
Yes, I can
handle those media. I can also handle paper tape, but I can no longer handle
punch cards - the reader broke, and I have not repaired it. I do not have much
call for reading them any more.
And refreshing and/or migrating
data that wasn't created by you raises copyright issues in a way that storing
and preserving a book does not.
No really. You are allowed to
backup and restore digital media that you own. You are still buying a copy of a
book when you buy it in digital form. Unlike movies and music, where you are
just licensing it.
Not only that, it uses up energy (even just
reading digital media uses up energy) and wasting energy doesn't help the
environment.
It would be interesting to calculate how many time
you could read an e-book before you matched the energy that is used in making
the paper for a printed book. Then you have the energy used to make the ink. And
I could probably read e-books the rest of my life before I used up the energy
that goes into printing a paper book.
Oh yes - do you turn on the lights
to read your book? My Android tablet provides its own light. And I have a solar
charger for it as well.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
| 
