It's All About Value

Listening to professor Chyi's troubles with book pricing, printing, and transportation really made me value books even more than I already did. I think there is something special about holding a tangible work in one's hands that conveys the effort that the author put into it. All the time that was spent formatting it and editing it just right so that the reader could properly explore the story within. 

I think this is something that is missing from ebooks. In the text "E-Books and the Digital Future" they note that "despite all this think-big entrepreneurial optimism, many continue to doubt the worth of e-book technologies." To me, this makes total sense, because as professor Chyi pointed out, e-books seem to have the Ramen Noodle effect; they're cheap, easily accessible and get the job done. Personally, the only reason I ever opt for an e-book instead of a physical copy is if the physical copy is much too expensive for me. Besides that I see no additional value or benefit to reading an e-book. 

In class we spoke about accessibility and convenience, but we never talked about the effects that e-books may be having on the learning process. This article explores this topic and claims that “(The students with ebooks) were much more motivated to read, but they were also able to re-tell less. Their ability to answer questions wasn’t quite as strong when they were reading interactive ebooks". I have personally experienced this myself, and in my case I feel like when I have a physical copy I am immersed in the text, but when I am reading on a device I feel disconnected from the content. 

Additionally, the article makes an interesting comparison between Powerpoint and e-books when stating "“It’s like PowerPoint. At first, everyone wanted their slides to fly in and dissolve and have all of those effects. And all of that became very distracting from the message.” All of the flashy functions of e-books may take away from what the consumer was initially interested in: the content. There are also other distractions that can be accessed with a click of a button, and what started as Chapter 3 of the Great Gatsby may turn into us mindlessly watching videos of cats online. This accessibility to distractions coupled with our ever-shrinking attention span may also detract from the value an e-book can offer, which has now decreased to 8 seconds. That is less than the attention span of a gold fish people! 

There is something special about getting lost in a book, and I think many of us can see the value in that. For e-books on the other hand, we must consider what the true value actually is. Is it adding any educational value? Monetary value? Artistic value? Historical Value?