Digital Books Are "Locked In A Closed System"

Future Reading

Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next?

Craig Mod | October 1, 2015

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were changing and being affected by technology. Committing myself to the screen felt like the best way to do it.
By 2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. Released in 2007, its first version was a curiosity. It was unwieldy, with a split keyboard and an asymmetrical layout that favoured only the right hand. It was a strange and strangely compelling object. Its ad-hoc angles and bland beige colour conjured a 1960s sci-fi futurism. It looked exactly like its patent drawing. (Patent drawings are often abstractions of the final product.) It felt like it had arrived both by time machine and worm hole; not of our era but composed of our technology.

Bookstore for Millennials. Source: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/second-home-duo-tackle-bookselling-316037

<more at https://aeon.co/essays/stagnant-and-dull-can-digital-books-ever-replace-print; related links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/print-ebooks-studies_n_6762674.html (Sorry, Ebooks. These 9 Studies Show Why Print Is Better. February 27, 2015) and http://www.ibtimes.com.au/top-5-reasons-why-reading-real-book-better-perusing-e-book-1413191 (Top 5 Reasons Why Reading A Real Book Is Better Than Perusing An E-book. January 20, 2015)>