my name is mwd

It seems that you can’t open a browser or listen to the radio (perhaps even watch TV, but I’m not into that sort of technology ;) these days without hearing talk about electronic books. The debate seems quite polarised – either they’re here to take over the world and you can burn all that pulped wood you have littering the house, or they’re going to fail totally as you can’t get the same tactile relationship with a Kindle as you do a nice hardback novel.

But if we ignore the hyperbole, I suspect there’s room for both, and they don’t have to be in competition – it all comes down to what you want your book for. Despite still finding paper books much more comfortable to read, I’ve found two uses where I’d buy the ebook version either as-well-as, or instead-of the paper version.

The first use case is for technical books. Typically when I want at technical books it’s whilst I’m sat at my computer trying to work something out. Or I’m trying to learn something, which also involves trying things out, so again I’m at the computer. Frequently though, I’m not near the book the moment I need to reference it: it’s at home and I’m at work, or it’s at work and I’m at home, or very frequently I’m hacking away in a coffee shop. In any case, the book isn’t where I am, which is most frustrating. But the common element in all these cases is I have my laptop with me. So recently I’ve been buying technical books that are for DigitalFlapjack in PDF format. I’ve bought a couple of iPhone and Macintosh development books from Apress, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I’ve always got the book where I need it, and for tutorials I can cut and paste bits of sample code rather than have to type them all out by hand.

The second use case is for travelling. I’m currently reading through Neil Stephenson’s Anathem, which has been an excellent books thus far, except it’s a very large and heavy hardback. This is fine when I’m at home, and indeed it’s how I ideally like to read this sort of book, however at one point late last year I was required to travel up and down the country over a few days, and the thought of lugging the dead tree version around didn’t appeal. But I didn’t have to – I got the excellent Stanza ebook reader application for my iPhone and bought the ebook version of Anathem (or rather I had a friend with a US credit card help me, as you can’t get it outside the US yet, rather frustratingly). Thus I was able to keep reading my book as I travelled, and could switch back to the hardback when I got home.

An unexpected side effect is that I can now dip into the book at times I didn’t expect to – one the bus, in the Dentist’s waiting room, etc. I don’t carry a stack of books around with me usually, but now I do, as I have several ebooks on my phone that I can dip into should I have a spare moment.

I’ve been quite pleased with the appearance of ebooks. For me they’ll not threaten the paper version (at least not on current technology), but they provide a good complement to the paper version.