E-books – love them or hate them?
Lately I’ve been tinkering with a thought of buying a much popular e-book reader Amazon Kindle. I’ve given many thoughts to why to buy it or why not.
In the Czech Republic, many people I’ve spoken to on this topic claim that nothing can ever beat the traditional book made of paper and “these e-books” are just a modern-day excess that can’t by any stretch of the imagination live up to the classic. I often hear that “the feel of touching sturdy spine cover on the book is an inseparable part of reading experience, as well as the antique scent of the outworn paper – this can never be replaced by some lousy electronic device“. I can’t help it, but I don’t see much of a sense in these “arguments”. I understand that reading of a good book has to be an experience of complexity, utilizing most of our senses. That it’s really nice to see a thick pile of paper stacked in a massive hardcover, in all its magnificence right on the table in front of us. To be able to touch it, feel it and admire the count of pages which we’ve already read. To smell that scent. Whatever. Yet I have to ask myself – what am I reading the book for? To feel its presence? Believe or not, I personally read the books mainly for their content. I consume the lines of text, not the outer appearance of the book (it may be sweet when the cover is well-made with many pictures and/or other decoration on it, but most times the look and feel of the cover and books’ constitution are far from being so mandatory that I would care about them that much). For me, that particular book is just a carrier of the “information” that is inscribed in its pages. I don’t have to weigh a couple pounds (in worst scenario 
) of a “paper brick” in my hands just to approve that it is actually there.
Now I’m speaking of books that are actually meant to be read (please exclude artistically polished books that are meant to amaze by their visage). When it comes down to picture books (e.g. for children, technical books…), we may find ourselves in a quite different situation. Today’s technology is not advanced enough (and I doubt it’ll ever be) to provide us a seamless “paper-like” experience of viewing image-rich content on a display of any device, let alone some e-ink screen. Here, there is no other alternative, so we have to take it or leave it as it is (i.e. in the form of big and heavy paper picture books), with all the pros and all the cons it comes along with. But as of a plain text (occasionally containing illustrative pictures), we have the possibility of choice.
Of course, nothing is everbright. The main disadvantage that sticks to the e-book readers is that all the social aspects of bookreading are gone. Indeed, you have all the books stuffed into a small “package” that you can carry on you all the time – but you cannot lend the books to friends, you cannot swap them. The visits to bookstore or library are suddenly no longer needed. I say that it’s always necessary to maintain the balance. Not to let the traditional books completely perish. But on the other hand (I hate it, speaking like a prophet 
), I’m afraid that once the time will come, when the paper books will become nothing short of a humble relic of the past. Though I hope that time is still far away from us. Now, we can still enjoy the endless freedom of choice.
As far as we let the actual figures speak (and they certainly do not lie ), we may learn that the sales of e-books somewhere start to level off or even exceed the sales of “old-fashioned” books made of paper. Slowly, but inevitably, the day is coming when e-books have a majority on the market. I’m certain that the traditional books will never perish (at least not in forthcoming decades), but they will be suppressed in favor of the electronic readers. Actually, the word is that the invention of the e-ink screen is as revolutionary as the bookprint was back in the day (and I think this is not exaggerated, not by any means).
For example this Amazon Kindle is a device which offers a real “e-book experience” for a very affordable price of under $200. And it packs, I dare say, everything what’s possible to get in a small and compact e-book reader these days. For its qualities (and again, did I mention the price?), this particular model has become a sort of phenomena in terms of an e-book reader on today’s market.
With an e-book reader you can read books. Luckily, that’s where the possibilities of this handy device only begin! Thanks to the big e-ink screen (it looks EXACTLY like a paper! – that’s not a myth) you can see a lot of information, aside from the book content itself. As you can spot from the official promo photo above, there is a bar on the bottom of the screen which shows the position you’re at in the book (countable in no. of pages, per cent…). That’s petty thing, you can say, in fact it’s the (lousy) substitution of mentioned “i-know-where-i-am-in-the-book-at-a-single-glance-by-looking-at-the-book’s-fore-edge” thing. Yep, that’s about true, but it shouldn’t take you long until you discover much more convenient features of this little “book machine” (given that you hold it in your very hands, of course ). Let’s review some of them:
- Searching – if you want to jump to a specific part of the book, you can use the keyword (provided that you think of one) to find it; or you can just check whether the word is contained somewhere in the text. Or – the big one for me – you can seek back for the name of the character that you can’t recall later in the book (this comes handy esp. in tangled storylines).
- Built-in dictionary – if you bump into a word or term that you don’t know the meaning of, there’s nothing easier than to fire up the built-in dictionary and search for the desired phrase or expression. The meaning is immediately displayed on the screen. Very convenient!
- Font size changing – though you may forgot that you are staring onto a display of an electronic device, the advantages of the dynamic image is still there. Therefore, it’s very easy to change the size of the displayed text – useful esp. for older people or whoever has an inferior vision.
- Book store – Kindle is equipped with a Wi-Fi (higher models even with 3G). There’s nothing more convenient than shopping for books right from the device (not mentioning the lower price).
- Compact dimensions – not neccessarily a feature (though it is, in a matter of fact), but certainly a convenient fact. The e-book reader is small, light and thin. It can save up some space in your apartment. It can accompany you wherever you go.
- Newspapers – you can have your favorite newspapers delivered every day into your device. OTA via the built-in Wi-Fi or the 3G, so you don’t even have to get up from your bed in the morning. Pure laziness
Amazon Kindle (and likes of it) has plenty to offer for a very neat price. I think it’s truly worth obtaining. I surely aim to buy one very soon .
Google is to square off against Facebook!
Another day, another surprise. I just read a couple articles about the new social platform Google+ and I must say – it completely blew my socks off. The all-new approach to making communities and online social interactions looks not only very interesting, but maybe even revolutionary. I’m not a big fan of online social networks, but I am definitely going to watch the rise of Google+ closely.
The whole idea seems to me like a very fresh social concept that is going to make the online interactions between people a little bit “better” from what we know today (it may be considered as a next step in “online social experience”). Well, it also confirms that computers have become an unseparable part of our lives, today’s people can hardly escape the grasp of the artifical, abstract world that is the internet (almost everyone is signed up to at least one of them social networks – it’s like a plague). And Google+ takes this conformity even higher, with introducing the “more advanced” social features.
This sharing, it’s now the fundamental part of our “life on the internet”. We look for heads-ups from others and in return, we always let them know about anything interesting we come across. This ecosystem is well established by the Facebook. Everyone has their own profile, where they can post random thoughts, links to interesting stuff, pictures from vacation etc. that they want to share with the world. And they also can view what the others share with them. In the case of Facebook, this whole “sharing” thing was sophisticated, but still far from perfect. See, the Google+ steps it up a whole damn level with its “Circles“. You know, we don’t always want to share everything with everyone – so here come the “Circles”, which represent certain groups of people that play some role in our life. Here we have the acquaintances, our schoolmates, there our workmates, friends from sport club, etc., etc. We can break down the whole lot of people that we know into couple of well-distinguished groups – “Circles”. And now we can share whatever we want with whomever we want (and respectively, we can read whatever might interest us from the “Circles” we follow)! This also means that we can share much more things than before, even the stuff we would not have wanted to share with just everyone. Behold, how our online life is being improved – with sharing ability level two!
There’s a mighty more to that than some “Circles”, of course. You can take a peek at Google+ on the official website.
It’s now more complex, more comprehensive, more “social”. Will Google+ beat the pants off Facebook? Or will it go down as soon as it starts off?
Personally, it gives me goose bumps, thinking of where such things will be in five, ten years. Just consider what we were thinking about “social” internet a mere five years ago, it’s completely unpredictable. As of me, I personally don’t want to know where these things are going – because I’m pretty damn sure they’re going nowhere but (more) south. Will we once live our lives in their entirety on the internet? Best not to think about that. Still, I do much admire how giant leap of progress the technology has made over past decades to make all this possible. It’s truly fascinating.
Watch the official promo video (in case you still haven’t, which would honestly surprise me ):
Starting over!
It’s almost two years (yeah, quite a hell of a long time) since I wrote last article on this blog. Finally, I decided to resurrect the whole blogging thing and rise this blog right from (where it’s obviously been up to now) the ashes.
So here I am, picking up this blog right where I left it year and a half ago. Only with a few, yet substantial changes. First of all, I’m switching the main language of my blog to English. The reason is – with my English not being that good at all (I’m not a native speaker), I tend to use it wherever and whenever I can to keep improving it (and that’s what I love about learning languages – there’s always plenty to learn!). There are going to be mistakes in my articles, but I’ll do my best to avoid them.
The articles in Czech language are only to be found under the ‘Česky’ category, I displaced them from the main feed.
Another changes are rather technical, like adding Facebook Connect support for comments (although it’s already been here for a while) and some other tiny modifications.