During (and after) class on Thursday, I began to consider e-books from an angle I hadn’t before. (That seems to happen to me quite a bit in this class.) A question I began to ask myself was, how responsible are e-books? What I mean by that is this: how do we interact with e-books as consumers with some amount of awareness, and / or responsibility?
The thought came to me as Josh brought up the fact that although e-books cost the same as regular books, they cost basically nothing to make or to reproduce. We are essentially paying for something that is not physically manifest, not tangible, nothing more than data. We understand the charges for a “real” book, know that there are actual production costs that need to be accounted for, and perhaps as a result of that we have been trained to accept these charges for words even as they are a mere “configuration of impulses on a screen,” as Sven Birkert said, not things that actually occupy a position in space.
We don’t begin to consider that we might be getting ripped off, simply because we’ve been paying these prices for “books” (and here I mean the information a “book” represents, not the physical object) as long as we can remember.
However, upon consideration these sorts of prices for e-books seems absolutely ludicrous. It would make just as much sense to charge the same price for an e-books as it would for a song – all you need to pay for is the data, and sometimes an e-book can be just a few megabytes, smaller than some songs.
And how on earth can they ever charge more for an e-book than for an actual copy? I’ve come across this a few times while book-shopping, and it’s completely nonsensical to me. E-books are supposed to more convenient, easier, better for us. Charging more for an e-book seems like a step backward, if nothing else.
Where do the extra charges come from? E-books are not a commodity. They are infinitely reproducible with very little effort or output cost, and if they are “used” they don’t change at all. You can’t ruin an e-book. You can’t spill water on it, can’t burn it, can’t tear it up. Even if you do damage to your e-reader, the loss of the data is negligible. Even more than that, e-books are far less convenient in some ways: you can’t share them with friends, can’t write notes in the margins, and you can’t return them to Amazon (or wherever you may have gotten them) because what would be the point? E-books don’t change once they’re used, so the bookseller couldn’t reasonably take them back and sell them for less, and there would be no point even if they could, because making another digital copy of the book would probably a much smaller hassle than doing the digital return transaction.
So, what I’m wondering is whether there is more to our attachment to physical books than merely some sort of tactile nostalgia. Do we have any sort of responsibility to abstain from e-books until the terms of their use are more reasonable? Can we allow ourselves to buy them as they are priced simply because “that’s how much they cost,” as opposed to letting publishers and book-dealers know that we won’t settle for that sort of abuse? I don’t know what the answer is, and I might be looking at this from completely the wrong angle, in which case I’d love if someone could explain this nonsense to me and correct me if necessary. But really, where does our responsibility as consumers lie with this issue? How can we justify submitting to these absurd charges, and what is there, if anything, that we can do about it?
I’d like to represent another point of view here before we get to wowed by the “human program” theory. There is a way in which we are “world-forming” individuals, in which we create meaning in the world by attaching meaning to things. This capacity–this capacity which is more than language, though it has a lot to do with language–is what I feel differentiates us the most from, well, other forms of beings in the world. I’m not arguing for human exceptionalism; it is perfectly possible for other species of animals to develop those capacities which Peirce (and then Walker Percy invoking Peirce) called “triadic behavior.” What I am saying is that it is a totally different thing to want to replicate this triadic behavior in other beings when we don’t even know where our world-meaning-giving ability comes from. Yes, scientists say “the human brain,” (Walker Percy called this “staring at the San Andreas fault in the modern mind,” wherein a scientist, for lack of better words, creates a term, like “human brain,” that has no meaning and at the same time acts as the motor of human consciousness, that is, the foundation of a worldview) and religious people say “the soul.”
ReplyDeleteSo, are we programmed? Perhaps, but the “on” button of that program, where it originates, how it operates… we don’t know. And I’m willing to consider the proposition that we’ll never know. I’m even more so willing to consider that it is immaterial. But that’s another subject…
This is my first rant that I needed to get out of my chest. I’ll say something more articulate later.
elsecretocero