Ebooks versus paper books

Image is retrieved from Freep.com

I'm not a fan of Ereader, or Ebooks, I prefer physical books in hand. But I'm very interested in the ebook/ereader trend and how it will impact the way of reading, thinking and publishing. Reading habit of adapting to ereader or not is more of a choice on a personal basis and I hope to discuss the issue from a general perspective.

Let us first take a look at pros and cons of paper books V.S Ebooks, five ways that ebooks and better then paper books and five ways that paper books are better than ebooks

Ebooks:

•   Social highlighting;  // the ability to share highlights with other people;
  
•   Notes; // can take notes and share notes with other people, and notes can be searched;
  
•   Look-up for words; // Most of ereaders allows users to select words and look them up in the embeded dictionary
  
•   Tweet and Facebook quotes; // Kindle 3 Wireless "allows users to share meaningful passages with friends and family with built-in Twitter and Facebook integration".
•   Search;
•   Multimedia; 

Paper books:

• Feel;
• Sharing, i.e., borrow and lend books;
• Second-hand books;
• Social interaction; 

I really like the social interaction brought by physical books. Ebook has no cover, and you won't know which book the man sitting in front of you in subway is reading if he's reading from his Kindle. We are always looking for people with same tastes and likes, and it is always a happy moment finding people on the street reading one of my favorite books.

As stated in a Newsweek article,

If you visited a friend, you took the first chance you had to surreptitiously scan that friend’s shelves to get a handle on the person. I suppose I could sneak a peek at a friend’s Kindle, but is that the same?

Or, such social interaction is shifting from physical bookshelves to websites like douban and Goodreads?

Lankes once said that, for your favorite book, you won't care about its format, it can be a paper book, a Kindle book, or a pdf, and you will read it anyway. To me, this is not always the case. I tend to purchase a physical version of the book if I really like it and it is affordable and I also keep a digital version of the book (if available) for search purpose. However, what he tries to put is that we should focus more on the context of the book, other than the format. Will talk more about his envision later.

As mentioned above, Kindle 3 allows user to share highlights and notes via Twitter and Facebook. A friend of mine recently bought a Kindle and synced his notes on Twitter. However, his notes do not make a lot of sense to me cause I can't read the original full text. What lacks here is the environment/community for users to share and view notes around the same article, book, chapter, etc and that is actually the "app" that Lankes is trying to build.

However, I am a little skeptical about the rich environment that the online community can offer. I do understand the value of conversation, and the background and derivatives in broadening the scope and helping users to gain comprehensive understanding of the original book. Reading is not an isolated behavior. But my concern is that such information is too rich to drag the reader away from the book and may end up nowhere. Imagine a reader is reading "Pride and Prejudice", knowing that BBC produced a TV mini-series based on the novel in 1995, in searching for information about the miniseries, he then spend hours surfing online to see posters, trailers, or other movies that Colin Firth participated......the distraction may end up nowhere and not related to the book at all.

My friend has subscribed to Kindle version of The New Yorker and it occurred to me that Ereader might be the perfect solution for magazines and newspapers. I have ten years subscription of Scientific American (Chinese edition) and more than ten years subscription of Science Fiction World (a sci-fi magazine with word's largest user group). I won't like the idea of throwing them away, even they occupy a large space of my bookshelf. But the saddest thing is, part of me do believe that I may never read them again because it is so inconvenient to search for any single articles. With ereader, multiple issues could be placed together in one single spot and they are portable and searchable. Isn't it amazing?