Increasingly I find myself reading books on my iPad through the Kindle app. Generally these are pleasure books or books that I don’t plan to use in a scholarly way (such as Michael Pollan’s Botony of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma). But really that’s just it: I would like to use my iPad for scholarly purposes. Not only are electronic books cheaper, but I also believe they are more ecologically friendly. It requires energy to ship books. It requires energy to print books. It requires energy to cut down trees. It requires energy to make paper. It seems obvious to me that eBooks reduce our carbon footprint.
The problem is that in their current format eBooks are nearly useless for scholarly purposes. Because they don’t include paper pagination it’s impossible to cite them. Surely there is an easy way to solve this problem. If we can provide German pagination for Sein und Zeit in English translations, why can’t we make this standard practice for eBooks? I really wish publishers would get on this.
January 26, 2011 at 3:51 am
Entourage Edge dual book. With the ability to upgrade to a 64 gig SD card, it is possible to hold 10′s of thousands of PDFs, Word Docs or almost any standard Ebook format on one device.
http://www.entourageedge.com/
Take notes and highlight on the Epaper side and browse through the table of contents or look up a term on the tablet side. The developer team listens to research oriented folks as well and implements their suggestions, good folk. One thing I can say about it, is that living in Portland, OR mine has seen its share of moisture and vibration on my daily bike commute and one year later there are no dead pixels or weirdness like my stupid iPod touch.
January 26, 2011 at 4:22 am
Hi Levi, I agree with you about the environmental friendliness of ebooks (not to mention the price and the instant gratification of being able to secure new books so quickly), and it seems like an increasing number of university presses are publishing electronic versions of at least some of their books. I have a Kindle, and the highlighting function is amazing because any highlights and notes that I make are stored on the amazon website and can be copied and pasted into documents. I save hours in note-taking. And then, there’s the ease of searching for specific words or phrases in a text! (I have an ipad, too, with the kindle app, but the note-taking function isn’t as useful.) I believe that it won’t be long before MLA and other scholarly organizations devise documentation formats for ebooks. Until they don, though, I’m thinking that in future articles I might just start quoting from ebook versions and figure out some other way reference text locations. Exciting times!
January 26, 2011 at 4:50 am
It seems Amazon has been aware of this situation for at least a year. Still, no remedy in sight:
http://www.amazon.com/Page-numbers-on-Kindle-2/forum/Fx8K5S3V834TCX/Tx2L7JUBK9P0XCS/1/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B001P81618&cdSort=oldest
David Estlund, on page two, sums up the problem nicely:
“The idea that locations are more precise, that academia needs to “catch up” with the visionaries at Amazon, that the “best universities” would “accept” location references, etc., are all completely beside the point. None of those solves either of the following serious problems:
1. When I want to cite a passage, I want my reader to be able to find it. I don’t want them to have to search through 20-30 pages of a chapter in their version of the text even if some editor or supervisor would “accept” such a vague reference. If I cite the Kindle location number, then, even if editors, etc., will accept it, the reader will not be able to find the passage unless they have a Kindle. This is simply devastating to scholarship.
2. There are centuries of scholarship that cite passages by reference to page numbers. If I want to look up those passages, I simply cannot do it on a Kindle version of the text. This goes not only for old works, but also for contemporary works, of course. So if I download the Kindle version of a recent book in my field, I cannot use it to consult passages cited by reviewers, commentators, and other scholars unless they happen to have cited the Kindle locations. Which they will not and should not do, because they are useless to anyone but Kindle owners.”
In recent years a lap top has become a staple for academics and students; I imagine something like the Kindle could also quickly become ubiquitous – it’s certainly more preferable to lugging around a dozen or more books per course. Is the student/scholar market simply not as lucrative as I thought? Amazon’s (lack of) response is curious…
January 26, 2011 at 2:11 pm
ebooks are not quite impossible to cite. epub can talk to kindle by using a unique string. For instance I’m reading Matter and Memory by Bergson on the Sony ereader. I wish to draw your attention to and comment on a section about memory, perception and aphasia. If I select ‘in reality. T’ the search function will lead to that unique location in any searchable format. Putting in the full stop narrows the possible number of hits to the number of sentences.