just wait and see

The other day my kindle broke. I’m thinking I dropped something onto it but it’s pretty sad. Needless to say I’m close to ordering another already.

Anyway I’ve always been a fan of digital books (digitizing is pretty awesome in general). As much as I love books they have many downfalls that drive me crazy.

Besides the obvious things like bulk and searching ability there are a couple things that I want to note.

Firstly is the globalisation of knowledge. A book is a very good way of communicating ideas that provoke expansion (a mentor is maybe the only think better) but the sheer number of books out there makes searching through the rubbish an immense task. Digital books are accessible everywhere and the metadata is almost as important as the contents. I don’t bother reading a book if Amazon rates it lower than 4 stars, this is simply because my time is too valuable to waste on the badly done stuff.

This is contrasted to back in the day when all you had access to was the local library, it didn’t matter that some other country was stocking the best book ever written on a certain topic. All you had access to was the local garbage, and that is what you had to learn from.

The second thing that I like about digital books is their ability to mess with the textbook publishers monopoly.

At university you get prescribed an essential text, and everyone in the class has to buy this book. But the book will cost you an unreasonable amount. Then they “update” the edition and your book becomes worthless.

Once piracy gets a foot then they wont be able to do this, there will be too big an incentive to download it illegally if it costs too much. This will drive prices down.

Once google wins the fight to have the digitized library online we will see another generation of awesome..

I miss my Kindle