ebooks | Showing off

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Showing off

One of the recent topics that gets brought up in ebooks-vs-print discussions is "you can't show off your library of ebooks." This is often said sarcastically, as if it were promoting elite snobbery to want to show off a book collection--Having a bookshelf full of big books lets you showoff to visitors exactly how educated and cultured you are. An unclutter site admonishes that Bookshelves are for storing reference books, books of great value to you, and books you plan to read. Bookshelves are not for trying to impress other people. Often, it's implied that this is an advantage of ebooks--once everyone switches to digital, we'll stomp out those arrogant people who fill their home and office shelves with "fancy" books they've never read.

As if "impress people" were the only reason you'd want a rack of books that other people could read. As if nobody keeps a lending library in their home (don't we pay taxes for those?) and nobody uses books as an honest method of home decorating: instead of posters, here's 1000 stories I care about. Here's the art that touches me; here's a list of people whose words have influenced my life.

Can't do that with ebooks--and it's a problem. Ebooks are solitary. Book *reading* is solitary, but literary culture is social; we share books, suggest what we think others would like, keep odd books we didn't care for because we know that someday, we'll find that person who needs to read that one, and it'll be long out of print. We keep books with beautiful covers even if we didn't care for the contents, and nothing is wrong with that. We put large books on our coffee tables so friends can ooh and aah at beautiful pictures and chat about which parts of those books relate to our daily lives.

Bookshelves aren't just a matter of pretension and competition; they're also art, personality, and communication. And ebooks fail at that. The few suggestions at partial fixes--screensavers with bookcovers, postcards you can tack up on your walls--feel like patchwork solutions because they are. Even ignoring that many ebooks don't have covers, or don't have good ones, they're an obvious extra, a pastede-on-yay fix-it because ebooks *don't* have a display method.

I'm not sure there can be a solution to this. Computers aren't designed to "display" their contents; they're designed to help you find & open what you want. Detail or thumbnail lists is as close as we get to display, and there's still no easy way to share those. (Elaborate arrangements involving a projector and a rotating slideshow of covers ganked from Amazon is not going to be the answer.)

I am certain that the device that figures out how to code in a "selective bookshelf" function will make substantial sales from referrals. Display cover thumbnails on a main page that can be clicked to see a larger cover & meta information (brief synopsis, title, author, publishing date, length of book); people who ask "is that one of those Kindle things?" will get told, "no, it's the ParmaGul Elite; lookit this..." and poof, shelf-of-books, just like if they visited the person's house and saw the bedside collection. The ability to show off "my favorite books" (say, a list of no more than 30 or 3 screensful) would (1) sell more of those books and (2) sell more of whatever device had that ability.

We need ways to make ebooks more social. We may never find a way to replace the wall-o-books arranged in efficient or artistic ways, but we *could* find ways to support people who want to encourage others to read ebooks.

5 Related articles:
In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover [if you notice the jackets on the books people are reading on a plane or in the park, you might decide to check out “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or “The Help,” too.]

A Physical Presence for Ebooks [1. You can't have a shelf full of books to impress people.]

The Art of Creating Emotional Attachments to Digital Objects [one of the reasons why people love physical books is that they announce to other people -- friends, guests, or the nosy onlooker -- that I am a Book Person.]

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet [5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.]

Why Wired Is Wrong About eBooks: Digital Reading is Ready for Primetime [I enjoy looking through the bookshelves of friends and new acquaintances to get a glimpse of their personalities.]

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You know, it's never occurred to me to think someone was being pretentious because they have lots of books--or that someone might think we are. I...have a lot of reference books and books I love and books I plan to read--every possible bookshelf-containing space in my apartment!

And I love looking at other people's bookshelves, because it does give me clues about them. I love browsing paper books.

I'm kind of viewing my ereader as a thing for travel, for books I don't deeply care about, and for Project Gutenberg (and fanfiction), because so many of the other functions of books for me are deeply tied to paper, and to the social aspects of paper books.

Hmmm.

The only time I'd probably think really badly of someone with full bookshelves is if it's one of two particular types of shelves and they're trying to pass the books off as their personal, thoroughly read, library:

1) Shelves full of those abridged sets of classics with the pretty gold foil, leather spines, embossing and absolutely no sign that any of the books have ever been opened, never mind read.

2) Decorative books, when taken to the excesses mentioned in this New York Times article: Selling a Book by Its Cover
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06books.html?_r=1

Although, I suppose both cases are really An Excess of Decorative Books, with one simply being easier to spot than the other.

Luckily, my social circles have not put me in contact with anyone who meets all of those conditions. :P

Edited 2011-06-18 23:09 (UTC)

I might laugh a bit, but on the other hand, I periodically read book-collector magazines and droll over the decorative books, so I'm sympathetic to collecting books for the bindings (not that that applies to #1). Not quite the same thing as #2, though, I think. O_o

I don't think I hang out with rich enough people.

I love decorative books too, which is why my Thoughts only kick in if the second part of my conditions are met: "and they're trying to pass the books off as their personal, thoroughly read, library."

I totally have no bones to pick with people who love books for being pretty (Totally a sucker for pretty editions, myself. The money I could annihilate on Norton Critical Editions or Coralie Bickford Smith's Penguin covers is not to be spoken of.), just lots of dubiousness towards people who deny that the books were bought for looks rather than reading purposes. XD

*nods* And the guy who's all "Who has 4000 books?"

Well, if I had the money and space....

Ha, I have nearly twice that, and I don't even have near the biggest collection of books among the bibliophiles I know.

Actually, I have never counted my books. Hmmm.

I probably have about ~1000 paper books, at a very wild estimate (and a pretty negligible ebook collection, but I only got an ereader this year). The house I grew up in, though....

I only had the vaguest notion of how many books I had til I entered them all into LibraryThing. By. Hand. //is either stupid or very hardcore

Luckily, my social circles have not put me in contact with anyone who meets all of those conditions.

Me neither, but I know they exist. Of course, now we have vintage book wallpaper for those who like the look of books but don't want the pesky dust-magnets cluttering up their homes.

Then there's the baffling thought of covering books with plain paper because they don't match or look good, and you want books to be part of your household decorations but not if they look ugly. Twitch.

I have (and want more) bookshelves like this, crammed with different shape/size/color books, arranged in themes that make sense to me and hopefully others who check them out. And I'm frustrated that there's no digital equivalent, not for PCs or portable readers--there's sort by author/title/metadata tag, or sets, but there's no "keep these close to each other" option, and they're still text lists. :(

"Books are pretentious" is part of the anti-academic stance in a lot of households; it's a form of lashing out common in a lot of poorer/lower-class communities. The flip side--"successful people have impressive bookshelves"--is a common form of classism. (Of course, that means "expensive, important, valuable books," not third-hand copies of dog-eared out-of-print science fiction novels and micropress publications of activist propaganda and taped-and-retaped childhood favorites.)

My thoughts: I agree with Pratchett -- "If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."

I don't read paper anymore if I can avoid it. I don't *like* reading paper anymore. I'll use paper books for reference (cookbooks, gaming manuals), but for leisure reading, it's all pixel-based. Which means I'm deeply concerned about the future of "bookshelves," because as things stand, I can't share with my friends anything I've read in the last couple of years, except by hyperlinks. Which is bleh.

Yeah, most of my friends have bookcases full of dogeared used SFF paperbacks and computer manuals.

I think at this point that I'm not going to be one of the "ebooks >>>>> paperbooks I will never go back" people. Which is fine with me, but I can definitely see a need for new social models of books in the ebook world.

I'm aware that my reasons for switching aren't going to be universal; that ebooks hit about all my buttons for "fun reading" doesn't mean they work for everyone. And there's plenty that ebooks suck at, and some things they'll continue to suck at no matter how good the software gets.

But I want the stuff that can get better, to get better, in ways that help voracious devoted readers, not ways to better entice non-readers to buy an ebook device because it plays sudoku and has email access and plays videos, and hey, maybe you'll finally get around to reading those Important Classics that you were told the smart people read. Bleh. Screw the bells & whistles; I want ebooks to work more like books, except for the parts that ebooks can do better. (Like the "carry 1000 with me at a time part." Still not done squeeing over that.)

Like the "carry 1000 with me at a time part."

Oh, yes. The prospect of maybe getting a job in Antarctica (I can dream) is way less daunting now. :-)

But I want the stuff that can get better, to get better, in ways that help voracious devoted readers.

Yesssss. I am at the point where I hate my books. Not because I hate-hate them, but because the thought of moving, taking care of them, and finding places to store them is just too onerous to allow me to continue to purchase books.

I want the device that allows me to read my sci-fi and fantasy books without worry about spine damage and missing pages, and I want it to be the same device that I can use for reading and bookmarking academic publications that come with footnotes and diagrams.

I want the stuff that can get better, to get better, in ways that help voracious devoted readers, not ways to better entice non-readers to buy an ebook device because it plays sudoku and has email access and plays videos, and hey, maybe you'll finally get around to reading those Important Classics that you were told the smart people read. Bleh

YES, this.

Like FOOTNOTES. Every single ereader I've seen has handled footnotes (not endnotes) really badly, squishing them into the text and making them absolute spaghetti. So anything halfway scholarly, or anything where I just want to be able to flip between two or three spaces while checking notes, doesn't work on an ereader. sigh.

Most ebook formats are based on HTML, which does footnotes not-particularly-well, and they're designed with linear reading in mind.

And yeah. They have ebook readers & formats that manage to put a header on every page (LRF was good at this) and dammit, they *could* put footnotes on pages with some careful coding, even if the basic version is "footnote is inserted between this paragraph & the next, in a smaller/different font & indented so it's obviously a footnote and doesn't distract too much," and advanced coding being "click to unfold footnote now."

But that's not where the emphasis is going; instead, we're getting a bunch of "MUST ADD TOUCH SCREEN!" and "MOAR WIFI" and (battery-sucking) color screens.

There's no obvious, easy way to deal with footnotes, which evolved for letter-sized pages and were squished into paperback-sized pages, which are still bigger than ereader screens. I can't think of a non-intrusive way to set up footnotes on an iPhone screen. But--the coding options means *I don't have to*; it *should* be possible to create a link that opens the footnote as its own page(s, if it's big enough), and another that links back to that place in the text.

The problem with coding footnotes includes the hassles of different readers having different options. The current commercial attitude is "if we can't control how it looks on every device it's going to be read on, fuck it; don't bother with that feature."

Yes yes to all of that....OTOH if there _were_ scholarly e-editions that cost, say, maybe half of the in-print editions with READABLE footnotes that I could annotate with a stylus maybe, oh God I would spend so much money. Instantly.

And the whole "now you can read PDFs on your Kindle!" - OMG, I have SO MANY PDFs, so that made me so happy, and imagine my dazzled chagrin when I loaded one onto the Kindle and it was TINY (WTF default view?) and to enlarge the pages I had to tediously 'nudge' the scroll buttons and that didn't stick while turning pages. And even Calibre, the best conversion program I've seen so far, really chokes on PDFs.

PDFs aren't going to get better, and that's not a fault of ebook readers or Calibre.

PDF isn't so much a format as a wrapper for several different formats, intended to allow printouts that look like the original. It was created to get around Postscript driver problems & compatibility issues. It's a terrific archive format; it's a lousy use format unless it was designed for the screen it's going to be read on. (Doctorow's For The Win PDF, for 6" ebook readers.)

How well it can be converted depends on how it was made; Calibre can't do anything useful with PDFs that are just scans. And the ones made with layout programs like InDesign and XPress convert badly if a lot of tweaking went into the layout--if the header-with-shading involves a large-font word, and the same word again in a light color behind it, and the word *again* with a picture wrapped around the letters, what you see in the conversion is three copies of the word. Maybe all together; maybe mixed in with the other text, depending on what order it was done in.

Conversion is always going to preserve line breaks at the end of a column or page, because PDF doesn't have a way of recognizing "this sentence continues." Sometimes it puts header/footer bits at the end of every page; if it doesn't, that depends on the program the PDF was created/converted with. And so on.

Lots of serious ebook people scream about PDF not being an ebook format. I convert PDFs to Word, reformat them, and then throw them back into useful formats. But I'm a hardcore PDF geek.

Lots of serious ebook people scream about PDF not being an ebook format. I convert PDFs to Word, reformat them, and then throw them back into useful formats. But I'm a hardcore PDF geek.

Is there a way to do that automatically? My husband tried reformatting a giant science PDF (he's a climate change geek) in Google Doc but it didn't work very well.

There are ways to make the conversion faster/smoother; there aren't any total-automatic methods, especially with different kinds of PDFs. (There's free online conversion methods, but they tend to scramble the formatting.)

For quick-and-dirty, I crop the margins out of the PDFs, including the headers & footers, and add bookmarks to anything more than ~10 pages long. For more careful, I convert to Word (Acrobat Pro will do this), and then reformat.

If there's a few docs you'd really like converted, I'm always happy to do that; if there's a regular stream of them, I don't mind as long as they don't eat up too much time. (I started

legaldocs because I wanted people to have access to text without having to copy-and-paste from doublespaced PDFs; I *really* love doc conversion work.)

For more careful, I convert to Word (Acrobat Pro will do this), and then reformat.

I use Calibre to reformat a PDF into RTF and then open in Word. Some of the formatting will be -- not what was originally intended, but I've gotten pretty fast at fixing things to my liking, then converting/saving it into whatever format and have at it in my ereader :)

For me it's that fine line between someone looking at my collection and admiring it, or assuming I'm an alcoholic ;)

I do miss being able to stare at them the way I did with my physical books. People would say hey' what do you recommend' and name their favourites and I could visually skim and pick out some things for them to try.

When I'm looking for a happy re-read it's harder to skim back through and have something jump out at me.

Edited 2011-06-18 23:00 (UTC)

Yeah, "favorites" is another function missing from ereaders. (Because why would you read a book twice? Just log into our store and download a new book! It'll be there in seconds!) Scrolling lists of titles is not the same as looking at spines on a shelf. And AFAIK, all the bookcover-based software on portable devices only works on books you bought from their store, not from sites like Smashwords, much less converted fanfic & personal documents.

I want favorites, and date added, and date read and and and :)

I'm working out my list of "Features I Want From Ebook Readers," based on what I think the hardware & software can do. There's no reason we can't mark favorites, except that nobody's considered it was worth making that available. (Hitting the "bookmark" button while on the scrolling lists should be do-able.)

Date read, finished-or-not, similar-to-[other title]... I want a lot of features that could exist, but none of the current software companies seem to be working on. Instead, we get conflicts over page-flipping animation, as if "make it look like Real Paper!!!" were an important part of the ebook experience.

Huh, I think with my Kindle 3 I can create non-exclusive favourites, finished/unfinished, &c categories, but it would be neat to see which books belonged in what category a la tags.

My ereader (Pocketbook 360) has a "favo(u)rites" function. (ETA: And a toggle for Unread/In progress/Finished.) There's various other functions it doesn't have (such as coping with DRM at all), but it suits my own needs well.

Edited (ETA parenthetical) 2011-06-20 06:28 (UTC)

That's so weird - do people really think other people have shelves of books to "impress" people? I always had them out so my friends could borrow! Public libraries always suck in the SF&F section, or the esoteric section, too.

The problem with ebooks, browsing and loaning could be solved simply: store them on removable flash media (like the original Kindle used to have) and store them on a "book cover" card case. Like a thin CD case, it could be displayed, lent, etc.

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