User-values: Bible software is not a replacement for books.

I have never personally witnessed a book-burning, but as I read about it, I can imagine it being a very tense time. I remember we had to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school and that really opened my eyes to seeing a literary generation turn into an illiterate generation. Before there were books, there were stories. People told the stories. People embodied the stories. In the Classical world we have the example of the mysterious bard, Homer. In the Biblical world there is the witness of a flawed, yet profound public speaker named Moses through Deuteronomy. Books have not always been around, so I assume it would be arrogant to presume that they always will be.

One of the best parts of being in the Seminary is living on the same campus as a multi-million dollar library. People who are thirsty for knowledge can come and check out the latest volume in a series or dig deep into the shelves to pull out a 17th century classic. The point is, libraries are wonderful places that contain a great treasury of resources mostly in the form of books and, in my opinion, books are irreplacable. If I could trade my own petite library for one DVD and $5000 to pay for my grief, I would never do it (mostly because $5000 wouldn't allow me to buy back all of those books at a later date :) ). On the other hand, if I could trade in my e-books for their physical counterparts, I would gladly comply! (Most of the reason why I bought e-books was not because I wanted the e-book, but because I couldn't pass up the deal, knowing I would never be able to afford the whole set of say Luther's Works for the same price.)

A couple of years ago I worked in a book publishing company. No, that makes it sound glamorous. Actually, I worked in a book publishing factory. The place where packets of pages were printed from metal imprints, where the packets were fit together and bound into book format and occasionally where finished books were put into boxes one-by-one with address stickers belonging to U.S. Supreme Court Justices. For a post-college guy, it was a decent job. It paid more than many other jobs I was considering. For a bibliophile, it was an awesome job because I got to be part of the process of making books.

Knowing how all that stuff happens, I'm not about to cut out all of those book factories. Not really for economical reasons, but because in spite of all that hard labor, I still really like books. I don't think they're an invention which has seen it's peak. I own probably around 200 "e-books" or books that are in electronic form and run via Bible software of one kind or another. This is a rather small number compared to some. I know that there are easily tens of thousands of e-books out there. The thing is, I've just never caught on to them. I know there are advantages to e-books (and I will post about this later), but here are just a few of the disadvantages I've found so far.

1. The first and most obvious issue has to be that the e-books themselves come with a ticking timebomb. There are no guarantees that the book will always work or be accessible in the future. What if the company that supports it runs out of business? What if they upgrade their core architecture and it no longer supports that format? What if they come out with version 2.0 of the book you already own, which contains the same text, but more functionality? I have never yet have a REAL book go bad on me, but despite assurances some from Bible companies, I have never been able to erase my fears in this regard.

2. Quality of the e-books is lacking. After purchasing a few e-books, I have to say I have been less than thrilled with the quality of the books I received. Typos are rather frequent, which destroys one of the advantages for which I bought the stupid e-books: search capability. If I'm looking for the word "cloud" and the search pulls up nothing because it contains the word "cloucl" (note: there is a difference), the e-book advantage has been erased. (On a side note: I have always been impressed with how BW has been committed to correcting typos and errors as they are reported. Maybe more of you have reported typos that you have not seen get corrected, but when I report them I have seen them get corrected.) I do not intend on putting all the blame on Bible software companies here. Here I must admit that part of the problem may be business practices in the publishing world. Unless I'm a complete dope I believe all publishing companies have electronic editions of all their texts. They need them in order to produce their master guides for printing presses. The way many e-books are published is not that the Bible software companies are given those electronic editions, but that Bible software companies have to scan hard copies of these books by hand (or have someone else do it) and then they use software to translate a picture of the page into edit-able text. I know from a business stand-point this is a sticky widget, but my point is, I wish publishing companies were more willing to work with Bible software companies to share work and information so this work did not have to be reduplicated. (And incidentally, if I'm wrong on how this whole process works, someone needs to explain to me why I've never seen a real book have as many typos as frequently as some of my e-books.)

3. Utility, utility, utility. I have never EVER read a substantial (more than 50 pages) e-book online. I find it impossible to read a computer screen like a book for hours upon hours. If it's not hard on the eyes, it's hard on the back or some other thing. I have purchased some e-books I thought would be helpful and useful only to find that one year has passed and I've only used that resource once or twice. (There are exceptions to this rule, but I have found this to be the general truth: ) If I have a physical book, it gets used. I read books. I sit at the lazy-boy for hours and digest them. I mark up the pages with underlines and notes. Later on I remember that on the lower left portion of a page there was that one part that I wanted to go back and read again. The point is this, no matter how many advantages people say that e-books have, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is sitting next to me on a coffee table as I read REAL books. Maybe I'm just an old coot, but despite the best efforts of companies to try to replicate the reading process, I have found that no company can ever reduplicate the ease of paging through a book, of writing a note on a page by hand, of making a piece of literature your very own as you make your own memories through that antequated process of reading.

4. (And here I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there is truth to this statement:) Personal pride and honor (of course you can also argue that perhaps it's good to minimize books to eliminate this sin...). As a bibliophile, how often have I lusted after vast personal libraries of friends, pastors or professors. I live in a world where I determine at least part of my worth (even if no one else does) based on how large my personal library is and based on what kinds of books that library contains. The more languages, the better. Loeb books are a dime a dozen, so that's maybe a tenth of a point; but the Oxford Classical Text with Greek only and a Latin introduction-- that's worth at least two. Yet who is intimidated by an empty bookshelf and a laptop sitting on a desk? Sure you might have 5,000,000 books on said laptop, but let's face it I could too if I downloaded them all from sources like Project Gutenberg. No, the point is whose library is bigger. And I mean real books. :)

So am I the only one? Are there still other advantages of real books that I missed?