Jason Merkoski

A FirstReads GoodReads.com Giveaway Review

Overall impression: Fair/Good
General impression: Where to start? ...The best part of the book is the insider look at the development/production of eReaders; this is perhaps due to the fact that I know very little about this technology. The remainder of the text felt a little trite, especially to an avid reader and one who used to work at Zimmerman library on the University of New Mexico campus. And I would have to agree with Paul Bartusiak's review, Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading needs more research and editing to be a main course meal for a biblioholic. (I cannot tell you how often I wished for the author to have used a thesaurus or to change the word order on some of the text.)

I feel like this book might get better reviews if it was handed to high school, or even junior high school, students. At least they might still care to have a Facebook or Twitter account in order to access the discussion pages listed at the end of the "Bookmark" sections. (Though how many of those students would understand the phone booth/call box reference?)

Ultimately I wanted there to be better reference material and more concrete metaphors. Sometimes it felt like the same ideas were getting rehashed every other chapter. Take the chapter "Digitizing Culture", the part on print page 206 where he talks about books starting to be left out with the trash because they cannot be sold and community events to swap books. This already happens! There are tons of people who are too lazy to take their recyclable stuff to a donation center and instead leave it out on the curb. And for those who are not aware, http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php is a free site where you can exchange your unwanted books with others across the nation and get credit for books you do want. Just pay to ship the books; the books you get are free and do not even come from the same person who you gave your books to. (Did not mean for that to sound like an ad.)

And yet not a sliver of words was brought forth to examine the preservation of third world and developing cultures or how used books will impact them as shipments of "unsell-able" used clothing and treadle sewing machines have in Eastern Africa. (This is the anthropologist coming out.)

One side of me wants to rant about all the other sections that really bugged me, the other side does not want to fill up review space merely to vent. Guess that means I need to get blog!… (mehr)

This author of this eBook used to work at Amazon and was apparently responsible for a number of features of the Kindle e-reader over the years before and after its initial launch in the US in late 2007. He talks a bit about that, but not very revealingly on details; it's more that he gives a sense of what it felt like to be working on something that felt like the cutting edge of a whole new technology and whole new era of reading digitally, comparing the revolutionary nature of this change to that begun in Europe by Johann Gutenberg when he printed his first Bible in the mid 15th century (putting monkish scribes out of a job and inspiring the same sort of reaction as eBooks do today from those who say that the new innovations are not "real books"). A digital medium for reading is the fifth main medium after clay tablets (Sumeria, 6000 years ago), papyrus (Egypt, almost as old), parchment (about 2500 years ago), paper (nearly 2000 years ago). Each medium is less physically durable than its predecessor, but more convenient and easier to mass produce. The author sees this as one long evolutionary process, punctuated by these revolutionary breakthroughs. He sees books, in whatever form they may be, as the primary means to transmit information, and the key feature that distinguishes humans from animals (I might add that other forms of culture such as music and art also form part of that distinction).

The author loves all kinds of books - as well as being an evangelist for eBooks, he has thousands of printed books. The beauty of his view is that he moves beyond the sterile argument that either medium is intrinsically better than the other; they are all books, both have their advantages and disadvantages. He sees printed books as becoming a niche product and eventually disappearing as part of a natural evolutionary process, as did handwritten books (and parchment scrolls, etc. before them). He sees digital books as becoming much more interactive in future, with readers interacting with each other and with the authors, like computer games where you choose an alternative path and a different set of consequences ensues; while this is plausible, this gives a whole new definition of reading and makes it more akin to consuming other forms of mass entertainment. Personally, I'm not too taken with this vision, but it depends on the individual's tastes and reading needs, of course.

I could go on, but in sum I would say this is an always fascinating, often very thought-provoking and occasionally slightly annoying, account from someone who has been on the inside track of the digital revolution in reading over the past eight years or so. 4/5… (mehr)