Medieval Monday

I still receive quite a few requests to read ebooks, which I often cursorily pass on for more reasons than my reluctance to read full-length stories on screen. Today I’m visiting book production, from past to present, to explain why I do not read ebooks EXCEPT first, to address a few debates on electronic books, let's be clear:

• I believe ebooks will be with us for a while, if not forever. 
• Ebooks are also overwhelmingly convenient for avid readers uninterested in building libraries or owning print book products. 
• I, as well, do not believe that the mere reading books on electronic devices will dumb us down. 

My basic reason for shunning ebooks, incidentally also a key reason for why print books continue to endure, can be traced through a cursory glimpse examining the timeline of book production.

I’m still young enough to remember those big General Electric typewriters; the big humming beauties where a many of secretaries lost fingernails…the ones with the wicked return levers... where you had to use whiteout tape if you made a mistake… the ones where I used to wonder how writers typed whole full-length novels on it!?! Goodness! That had to be dreadful. I could barely type one page without XXX’s covering the paper in so many places that it looked like I was typing a drawing as opposed to typing a story.

Which speaking of writing, back in this time writers were still turning in whole handwritten novels to publishers!

I was so grateful to technology for first coming out with that correction tape, and soon thereafter word-processors, though I longed to purchase ‘the’ computer; a computer where I could type and make corrections with a mere click of hitting the backspace key. And everybody, I’m talking about 1996. That’s how young electronic reading and writing apparatuses are, in comparison to the hundreds of years print books and its associated writing devices have been around.

Technology no doubt has made it very convenient for today’s writers, but there is a flip side to this convenience that is discounted.

Now, had I not visited Wikipedia, fact-checking as to whether or not there may have been earlier books than clay tablets and sticks, stones, and bones on which to create impressions (print) in ‘books’, I may have missed this opportunity to concisely cite the one phrase that amalgamates the primary reason for the arcane discrepancy between electronic books and print books.

Cited from Wikipedia: ‘The book is also linked to the desire of humans to create lasting records.”