The Advantages of eBooks, by Michael Hart

The Advantages of eBooks
By, Michael Hart, founder of The Gutenberg Project

The Advantages of eBooks:

1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence

1. Readability

The more readable, the better.

For the general reader the greatest advantage of eBooks is most likely to be simply readability, the advantages of being able to have the words appear in the fonts and font size most suitable to the reader, not to mention a similar ability to adjust margination and pagination to also make the books' general appearance of what readers prefer as possible.

The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.

2. Searchability

The more searchable, the better.

Most readers regard the ability to find certain chapter or page indicators of great value, hence the whole idea of "bookmarks" that has been with us pretty much all of the history of books. One of the great advantages from the changeover to bound books rather than scrolls is an ability to jump directly from one place in the books to any other place, as long as it isn't on the other sides of the pages being read at the moment.

eBooks have extended the usual "ability to find certain chapter or page indicators" to the ability to find your specific word or phrase, not just an approximate place, but the exactly spot you are looking for.

The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.

3. Quotability

The entire idea of books is to communicate.

Most books become famous because people talk about them with their friends, which usually involves quotation as an element of the conversation.

With the original eBooks you could simply cut and paste the quotations you wanted in an effortless manner.

The harder it is to quote from a book, the less value a book has to anyone who wants to pass on information.

4. Error Correction

Perhaps the greatest utility of eBooks as compared to a similar paper source is the ability to correct errors.

Trying to correct an error in a paper book is usually a losing proposition, whether you are simply trying to do a correction in your own edition, or trying to get some publisher to correct an error in future editions.

eBook publishers can fix errors literally overnight, as people send them in.

Paper publishers often leave the same errors in edition after edition for decades, even centuries, instead of a new edition actually containing a newly proofed edition of the original text.

To the extent that any eBook is not correctable, it may be considered to have less "eBookness."

5. Ease of Storage

The standard DVD can contain nearly every word that you can find in the books of the average public library and the multi-level DVDs can obviously hold twice as much-- four times as much if double-sided and double-layered.
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The standard DVD holds ~4.3 usable gigabytes per layer.
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The Blu-Ray DVD starts with ~25 gigabytes, and had some added potential via a layer of 8.5 G, totaling 33.5G.

Thus 30 of these would hold 1 Terabyte. 15, if they release a 2-sided version.
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The next generation DVD has already been designed, with about 1 Terabyte of total storage, so just a few should be able to hold every word in the Library of Congress-- a few more for the British Library.
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Think of the savings in the cost of the shelving if not the simply the cost of the books. . . .
Not to mention the time and energy savings when using a book from such a collection.
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Many eBook producers use formats that are not so easily storable on your own media.
To the extent that these eBooks are not storable or not compressible, they lose their quality of eBookness.

6. Permanence

We have all heard the headlines published by olde media that information stored on computers is impermanent and is lost to future generations when the olde computer is no longer available.
This is only the case when the information was kept via out of general circulation via some secret encryption.

Plain text eBooks don't cause those kinds of problems.

The paper publishers tout their medium as permanent yet every year we hear that thousands of library books were disposed of because they were simply falling apart.

When new paper books are published, it takes only about five years for them to become so scarce that when local libraries have one lost, damaged, or stolen, that it is not replaceable.
Of all the things published in 1971, most are lost, and pretty much not retrievable except to the experts in an assortment of interconnected archives around the world, but not so with the first eBook as published by Project Gutenberg in the earliest days the Internet started its journey from laboratory experiments to reach out to the rest of the world.

Once an eBook is published in this manner in either the plain text or plain markup modes, the odds are it could survive indefinitely.

To the extent that an eBook does not have this quality, it is just that much less an eBook, as it has that much less a chance of survival.

Just as the more non-standard an email is the less will read it, the more non-standard eBooks will be less read by the general population.

Of course, that is the purpose of many of the formating decisions by various eBook publishers today, to keep an eBook out of the hands of the general population.

The entire idea of keeping people from being able to do all the things listed above is the general result of an astonishing philosophy that the most important aspect a successful eBook must have is that it can't be accessed in the usual manners, as that would allow copying.

Of course, this presupposes several things:

1. That enough people would only want to have illegal copy access that this would threaten the eBooks' success.

2. That it would be possible in the first place to make up some kind of protection that could not be cracked by an enterprising young hacker in its first few weeks.

3. These protection modes have not been intentionally made crackable by government enforcement agencies. [Such as the widely touted Lucifer, DES Data Encryption Standard that was intentionally weakened by some U.S. Government agencies so they could be sure to break into anything a person or corporation might ever store on a computer.]

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The Advantages of eBooks are:

1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence

The greater extent that an eBook eliminates the ability on the part of the potential reader to accomplish these the less the eBook has of the general qualities we have come to know as "eBookness."