Electronification

I've been thinking about getting an e-reader.

Most of the people I know who own one are rabid converts...including people who swore up and down that they'd never buy one. Some of the things I've heard:

"The printed page is so yesterday. It even smells musty!"

"I can carry an entire library around with me anywhere I go!"

"I used to read a book a year, now I'm reading all the time!"

Retailers are hyping the things to the high heavens. "Our latest model provides you with extra-long battery life, the ability to read in direct sunlight...and it has a 700 book capacity!"

Humph. My inner curmudgeon has a response at the ready for each selling point.

What if I LIKE the smell of books?

I typically read one book at a time. You know, since I only have the two eyes, and they work together.

I read considerably more than one book a year, my wife outreads me by a wide margin, and everything we read is printed on dead tree.

Battery life, eh? Well, my Eye-Book beats your iBook there. I doan NEED no steenkin' batteries. And I can read in direct sunlight all...I...want.

The e-reader craze is simply the latest attempt to force consumers to BUY AGAIN.

"Buy Again", I am convinced, is the Philosophy of the Age. It's the only reason we still have something resembling an economy...people have to keep making stuff to sell to other people whose stuff is...gasp...OLD. Cue Ron James, one of Canada's best comedian-wordsmiths:

"A Model T Ford is...old. Benjamin Franklin's printing press: old. The sandals of Jesus...OLD. Purchased five years ago for forty-five hundred bucks...fairly new!"

We're in the process of being made to buy our movies for a third time, our music for a fourth or fifth...now they've stumbled on a way to make us buy all our books again. That's aside from the planned obsolescence that characterizes the devices we play all this media on.

And really, is Blu-Ray THAT much superior to DVD? You could certainly make the argument for DVD over VHS, but c'mon, to really appreciate Blu-Ray, you have to invest in a home theater system and a high-definition television. More money. For those of us who just want to sit back and watch a movie...why bother?

Music is a teensy bit more defensible in that each iteration of playback device has large and inherent technological advantages over its predecessor. A cassette tape is much sturdier than an LP; a CD has only one side and much better sound quality than either, and digital music is infinitely more portable than anything that came before.

(And yet you can still buy vinyl. That's like going into a telegraph office instead of a Bell Mobility kiosk, but whatever.)

But I will maintain to the end of my days that Blu-Ray is pretty much indistinguishable from DVD. And even if it isn't, what happened to music is BOUND to happen to movies, sooner or later and probably sooner. It already seems like most people don't watch TV on their televisions any more, and a sizeable number of people download whatever they watch. It won't be long before shelves of DVDs or Blu-Rays belong in a museum, not a private dwelling.

Back to e-readers.

Books are fundamentally different from music or video, in that they require no playback device to enjoy. If you have functioning eyes, you can read a book. There's no need to shell out a couple of hundred bucks first. No batteries required.

There are two arguments I can make for e-readers over books. One is the ease with which you can purchase new product. The other is the backlight that would, I admit, make it easier to read where I do most of my reading: in bed.

Are these two arguments enough to convert me? Not even close, because of my biggest complaint....

My biggest complaint about these things, aside from the "batteries to read a book? Really?" is simply this: they're unitaskers. Eva has taught me to mistrust unitasker kitchen devices, and I don't need her to tell me that unitasker electronics are just as crappy. Sure, each device does one thing and does it well, but...I only have so many pockets. This is why the iPhone is such a success: it's also an iPod. Of course, unless you have the eyes of Superman, your iPhone will never make a decent e-reader, and unless you figure out a way to stuff a tablet in your jeans pocket, your e-reader will never be quite as portable as you're led to believe. True convergence is a ways off...if it ever happens at all.

But I reserve the right to be wrong. Should a device emerge that functions well as a telephone, a music/book/video storage machine, and a minicomputer, I'll be all over that thing like white on rice. Call it a PMC: a Personal Media Companion. In the meantime, though, leave me alone with my chunks of dead tree.