A major problem with e-books vs. real books is the light source.

Selecting a color scheme that is conducive to reading text is also of paramount importance. Black on white works best for me, and I enlarge the text so I can sit back and get some distance between me and the computer. I think that the eye discomfort in reading text can minimized by adding distance between the viewer and the screen, and by enlarging the text, thereby minimizing the amount of strain involved. The discomfort may also in some part be due to a learned behavior, those of us who actually did curl up with books and who did read hardcopies of newspapers and magazines (because there was no alternative), and the discomfit may be because of the comparative “newness” of the experience. I find myself slowly acclimating to the online reading, which probably can be better termed “electronic reading” since I generally am offline when I read the magazines that I downloaded.

A poor color scheme can blow a website right out of the water. This blog has an excellent one.

This is an admitted problem that can cause eye problems for many.

Additionally “curling up” means changing your position in space. It’s hard to use a laptop on it’s side.

A couple of years ago I saw an interesting presentation by the MIT Media Lab guys on this and they were working on “electronic paper”. Loosely based on NCR paper the idea was that you had one “book” and downloaded a story to that book from your computer. You could then unplug and walk around with the hard copy. When you wanted a different story, you could basically press clear and load something different.

Really cool tech but had a ways to go.

Curling up in bed with a book is good.

John Moore, I can sympathize with that sentiment, and I will agree that Ebooks will have a much harder time in supplanting the hard copies. In fact, I can envision organizations forming that will have the preservation of books as their mission. However, magazines and newspapers I believe will have no such support.

Curling up with and Ebook is not so farfetched. A couple of weeks ago, while waiting for my mother to get finished at a doctor’s visit, I saw two boys literally curled up on the waiting room chairs. In their hands was an IPOD sized electronic game. They were mesmerized.

Speaking of college, I have a friend who is an instructor at the local community college. Five years ago, all her classes were in house inside a classroom. Now all her classes (she’s handling 6 in this next quarter starting up) are online, and the geography limitations are non-existent, as the three campusses that she holds the classes are hundreds of miles apart.

Okay, rant aside, my problem with copyrights on electronic media is the inability to recover lost copies. I am unlikely to lose 100 physical books because a 65 nano-meter transistor fries, but I can put thousands of books, along with their copyrights, on a computer. So that is one commercial problem that has to be solved.

Curling up in bed with a book is good. Ditto with a magazine, which is why I don’t subscribe to the online versions of my favorite mags. I’d also like to curl up in bed with a bag of blogs – say, one PJM’s worth per day, although the temptation to then find a way to respond would disturb my rest.

But… they’ll come. And the NYT will no doubt find a way to put falsehoods into them.

Physical convenience: think paperback, smaller may be convenient to carry, but not to read. Weight also factors in here. Screen resolution is also an issue. If the reader can’t curl up with it in a chair, or in bed, then books may be reduced but never replaced.

Cost and Copyright issues: An early digital book version of Alice in Wonderland had a copyright limitation that prohibited reading it aloud. Which makes its value pretty low. Copyright license restrictions could keep the digital book idea strangled for a long time. I note that Barnes and Nobel have a modest stack of classical books that sell for under ten bucks. The salient issue here is, they are all out of copyright. B&N can still make money because they know there is a stable demand, they just can’t charge high prices for copies of these works. If an Ebook distributer thinks they can saddle me with silly license restrictions, I will happily keep on buying real books.

Retention: research has shown that (even for current collage folks) material is retained significantly better when read from book as compared to a screen.

And, of course, there are certain satisfying things about handling a real book. Besides being able to put in random bookmarks, margin notes (which I haven’t done since school), and random skimming.

Rove leaked Saddam hanging video to expose Osama’s anti troop surge stand as weak on terror.

Wait a minute. We have a blogger in my ear…. yes, I meant, to embarrass Obama, not Osama. That’s Obama with a b.

My apologies to Muslims everywhere. Wolf?

The future is online. By the second half of this century, I expect that even hardcopy books and paperbacks will start to fade away, each giving in to EBooks. It isn’t only the technies and nerds that are sourcing the internet for their information and entertainment. The youth of today is already using the internet for that. Online is in their DNA like it never was for us.

Using myself as my own guinea pig, I subscribe to magazines online now, and probably will never go back to the hardcopy versions. The advantages and convenience is considerable: space conservation being first and foremost, plus I can enlarge or diminish the size of the text to my taste, I can save specific articles while discarding the rest…it goes on, all the conveniences.

In the major population centers, like New York, where straphangers by the tens of thousands take the subway to work, the demise will be slowest, as the NYT, TDN, TNYP, and others give the riders something to do while they are commuting to and from work.

But out in the suburbs, where people drive to work, the transition will be faster and is already well underway, I’m sure, with people getting their information and more on line. The most notable effect should be a drop in subscriptions outside of the dense population areas, and I’m sure that print MSM is seeing this now.

In a way, if I was to analogize what I’m evisioning, I’d describe a wide open prairie, endless, and even in the foreground there is room to breathe and shout and stake your place, and still be leagues away, an infinity away, from your nearest neighbor.

To the aspiring blogger, the unlimited terrain is also the biggest drawback – how to get noticed. QUALITY, RATIONALITY, REASON, and good writing will rise to the top.

This blog and PJM are going for the gusto, and I think that Roger is underplaying the dominant role that news blogs will eventually play in providing news for the masses.

My timeframe is around 50 years, at the end of which the transfer of power should be just about complete.

You ‘da man.

And yet they seem at a loss to report any stat of the 10ths of thousands lost to Roe vs. Wade every year.