The first start-up company I was part of was back in ‘98; the idea came few months before I was ‘honorably discharged’ from the IDF.  The endeavor was to develop a hand help device that will replace a book, allowing users to download content off a web-based storefront. Funny thing is that I was never much of a gadget person, and was very late to owning a cell phone. I made most of my calls from the Base public pay phone, and the concept of walking around with a ‘phone’ seemed quite strange at the time.  It was fun and very creating project encompassing software, hardware, and product design & engineering, web store, PC device connectivity and what have you.

CyBook miserably failed for various reasons, but the prototype we developed was not very far from Amazon Kindle that came good ten years later after CyBook returned it’s soul to the start-up heavens. I’ve been keeping an eye on the electronic book industry since than.

One of the things I realized somewhere in the middle of that venture is that Paper is a darn good piece of technology. A Chinese named Ts’ai Lun invented paper around 104 AD, but paper said to have existed in China since the 2^nd century BC. Paper is thin, flexible, tangible, crispy, smelly, and colorful. Paper has ‘presence’… You can write you own ‘user-generated-content’ on paper, print on it in color, double sided, formatted as newspaper, and articles. Not to mention that binding papers into a book used to be an art on its own.

You think electronic books are better for the environment? Think again: paper is recyclable, and several of treeless paper materials are in wide use today. Electronic Book require charging hence increase energy consumption, the devices radiate, and the materials they are made of are bad for you and bad for the environment. Tree-less paper fibers are a lot better for the environment, but not perceived as ‘sexy’ in the modern iPad age.

I love reading books, all kinds of books, but I’m far from being a technophobe. I strongly believe though, that we should be cautions about our electronic consumption habits and understand that an ‘overdose’ of technology is bad, and understand where to draw the limits. Technology should serve a good purpose and need, using a ‘trendy’ device that you don’t really have to use is just waste of energy.

For me, there is no real reason to buy a book on a Kindle (or similar source) vs. buying one in store. I know that maybe content is more ‘accessible’ this way, but I can wait few weeks (worse case) to get a book delivered to me, if it’s none existent in a near-by store. Not to mention that a visit to a bookstore is always an experience for me, and I’m willing to spend few extra $$ for that.

I do see reasons for electronic consumption of books, publishing a book requires a lot of money and makes economic sense on wide distribution only, content that fits a small audience makes sense to be consumed electronically (nobody will ever publish my blog for example…). Electronic consumption is great for academic usage, or when browsing for technical information. It has its uses and it has it’s place, but for entertainment or leisure? That’s over technology for me… I can easily see electronic content as an extension to printed materials, providing more background, references and discussions, but do we really need to replace a printed paperback novel with an electronic book? Why?

I think my major dislike is that electronic books try to imitate printed books, and I dont much see added value in them. I think this might be a wrong approach, even though it seems to be quite successful economically. Electronic books should be something else; they have the power to take the reading experience to the next level, but not in display technology but in knowledge structure terms. Think of an electronic book that adjusts the story telling to fit its reader’s preferences? Language? Age? Background? Think of the art of literature transcending beyond linguistics to the art of metaphysical descriptions and ideation? Thinking of writing as a form of creating ideas, building worlds, interactions, relationships and ‘print’ is only one ‘view’ of this imaginary world?

For me,  this concept was first create by Neal Stephenson is one of his earlier books ‘The Diamond Age“,  where Stephenson described an electronic book-like device that grows and protects the person it grows with.

Until such devices exist, I think I’ll stick with my old reading habits. Let me sign off for now and get back to the novel I left for writing these lines…

Amichay