Hugh McGuire on eBooks, mobile phones

[Christine Prefontaine]

Yesterday I commented on The Tactile Book, a post that Hugh McGuire wrote on The Book Oven Blog. You can read the full post and our discussion. He makes some great points that are very relevant to our community. Here are the juicy bits:

Christine: At the risk of sounding like a luddite, I just don’t see the appeal of ebooks. I am too much in love with the book as a whole.

Hugh: There should be no tension between loving the object of the book, and recognizing the usefulness of ebooks — whether or not you choose to use ebooks yourself. Portability, choice, access, convenience, etc are all advantages of the ebook, versus permanence, tactile feedback, and a host of other technological advantages of books. But “I prefer not to use ebooks” should not be confused with “ebooks will not be used by anyone.” After all, I *prefer* to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the *utility* of the telephone…and in a sense one has very little to do with the other. I’d suggest the same could be said of ebooks.

Christine: I never thought about ebooks that way. I was stuck comparing the two. I see now though it’s just different. Access, portability, utility. I get it.

Hugh: Especially when you imagine this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.