tiredI'll start with the clinical: according to the dictionary (and Wikipedia), poverty is "the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions." So if you don't have as much as everyone around you, you're poor.
I'll move on to the personal. Poverty is the state of waking up freezing in the middle of the night because it's a waste of money to run the heat when everyone is sleeping anyway, and you need that money to buy lunch meat from the "eat it tomorrow or it will kill you" clearance bin. Poverty is the state of making that lunch meat last a week and a half, even after the edges have started turning green. Poverty is sending your little sisters to beg staples off the people in the crap-ass apartments surrounding yours, because everyone is poor, and everyone is hungry, and cute little girls stand a better chance of success than anybody else. That's poverty.
The U.S. Census Bureau said that 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009. According to the report they released this past Tuesday, the national poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010...and we still don't know what 2011 is going to look like.
This is the "official" poverty level, by the way; there are a lot of sociologists who think that the actual poverty level is much higher, since we calculate using a "socially acceptable miniumum standard of living" that was last updated in 1955. To quote Wikipedia again: "The current poverty line only takes goods into account that were common more than 50 years ago, updating their cost using the Consumer Price Index. Mollie Orshansky, who devised the original goods basket and methodology to measure poverty, used by the U.S. government, in 1963-65, updated the goods basket in 2000, finding that the actual poverty threshold, i.e. the point where a person is excluded from the nation's prevailing consumption patterns, is at roughly 170% of the official poverty threshold."
Things that did not exist in 1955: home computers. The internet. Ebook readers.
It is sometimes difficult for me to truly articulate my reaction to people saying that print is dead. I don't want to be labeled a luddite, or anti-ebook; I love my computer, I love my smartphone, and I love the fact that I have the internet in my pocket. The existence of ebooks means that people who can't store physical books can have more to read. It means that hard-to-find and out of print material is becoming accessible again. I means that people who have arthritis, or weak wrists, or other physical disabilities that make reading physical books difficult, can read again, without worrying about physical pain. I love that ebooks exist.
This doesn't change the part where, every time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to "Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier," what I hear, however unintentionally, is "Poor people don't deserve to read."
I don't think this is malicious, and I don't think it's something we're doing on purpose. I just think it's difficult for us, on this side of the digital divide, to remember that there are people standing on the other side of what can seem like an impassable gorge, wondering if they're going to be left behind. Right now, more than 20% of Americans do not have access to the internet. In case that seems like a low number, consider this: That's one person in five. One person in five doesn't have access to the internet. Of those who do have access, many have it via shared computers, or via public places like libraries, which allow public use of their machines. Not all of these people are living below the poverty line; some have voluntarily simplified their lives, and don't see the need to add internet into the mix. But those people are not likely to be the majority.
Now. How many of these people do you think have access to an ebook reader?
I grew up so far below the poverty line that you couldn't see it from my window, no matter how clear the day was. My bedroom was an ocean of books. Almost all of them were acquired second-hand, through used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and library booksales, which I viewed as being just this side of Heaven itself. There are still used book dealers in the Bay Area who remember me patiently paying off a tattered paperback a nickel at a time, because that was what I could afford. If books had required having access to a piece of technology—even a "cheap" piece of technology—I would never have been able to get them. That up-front cost would have put them out of my reach forever.
Some people have proposed a free reader program aimed at low-income families, to try to get the technology out there. Unfortunately, this doesn't account for the secondary costs. Can you guarantee reliable internet? Can you find a way to let people afford what will always be, essentially, brand new books, rather that second- or even third-hand books, reduced in price after being worn to the point of nearly falling apart? And can you find a way to completely destroy—I mean, destroy—the resale market for those devices?
Do I sound pessimistic? That's because I am. When I was a kid with nothing, any nice thing I had the audacity to have would be quickly stolen, either by people just as poor as I was, or by richer kids who wanted me to know that I wasn't allowed to put on airs like that. If my books had been virtual, then those people would have been stealing my entire world. They would have been stealing my exit. And I don't think I would have survived.
We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a "have" from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the "have nots" also exist, and that we need to take care of them, even if it means we can't force our technological advancement as fast as we might want to. I need to take care of them, because I was a little girl who only grew up to be me through the narrowest of circumstances...and most of those circumstances were words on paper.
Libraries are losing funding by the day. Schools are having their budgets slashed. Poor kids are getting poorer, and if we don't make those books available to them now, they won't know to want them tomorrow.
We cannot forget the digital divide. And we can't—we just can't—be so excited over something new and shiny that we walk away and knowingly leave people on the other side.
We can't.
September 17 2011, 05:28:51 UTC 5 years ago
Of course, arguing about it doesn't change anything. If the market isn't there for paper books, they won't get made. I'd rather subsidize readers/internet access devices than prop up a physical printing industry, if it comes to that.
September 17 2011, 05:56:46 UTC 5 years ago
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September 18 2011, 01:36:22 UTC 5 years ago
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September 17 2011, 06:07:47 UTC 5 years ago
As a child, I had the following stolen by people who either couldn't afford it, or wanted to resell it: pencils, paper, a binder that was too "nice" for the poor girl, shoes, a jacket, toys, books, my crayons when they were new and I was dumb enough to play with them outside, my glasses...if something can be sold for a quarter, it will be.
I think the market for paper will exist for quite some time. The main bulk of the population isn't there yet. But I worry when people trumpet the death of print over and over, and never think about the side effects.
September 18 2011, 16:30:12 UTC 5 years ago
And that's light. Something we consider fundamental. Books *should* be fundamental, too.
*When people think about saving money on food, they neglect such facts as that proper refrigeration and freezing can be essential to getting the good deals. We had an apartment once with a freezer that stole the flavor of foods stuck in it, so freezer foods were out—and this includes healthy and cheap things such as frozen vegetables.
September 19 2011, 14:18:27 UTC 5 years ago
Manuscript books continued to be produced for 150 years after the invention of the printing press.
We have enough time to make the ebook cheap and ubiquitous like paperbacks, if we START NOW AND PAY ATTENTION.
For all of the reasons that you mentioned, Seanan. Yet another librarian thanking you for talking about the digital divide.
September 17 2011, 06:22:03 UTC 5 years ago
First off, Project Gutenberg is not some magical little library of digital stuff. From what I can tell, it has 36,000 books in countless languages. I suspect the number is much, much greater than that. Those 36,000 books aren't going to be preloaded onto an eReader. It isn't feasible. There are a large number of issues and sub-issues that come with doing that. For example, one of the books available through Gutenberg is the Kama Sutra with pictures. I'm not saying that this is inappropriate, but some people do. So, someone's going to be making decisions what is and what isn't on there. And someone's going to have to maintain it. This costs money.
Now free readers, lets talk about that. They cost $89 or so bucks for low-end models. That's 1 reader. Assume a huge discounted deal and the library can get them for $50. On the surface, it looks nice and simple. $50 and it stores thousands of books. Except, it is only one device. You can't have one. You need many devices. How much? Thousands upon thousands. I'll explain.
When that last Harry Potter book came out. My wife and I bought two copies. I read all night and donated it to the local library the following morning. They had a single copy of the book in the library and were grateful. The waiting list was "two months long" for the book. A two month waiting list for 1 book. With readers, you can theoretically have access to all books, but you need the reader. Well, you proposal free readers. How much of a load can it handle?
According to the ALA, the number of people who use the public library system is 87.8 million people. At $50 a pop, that is $4,390 million in subsidies. That doesn't include maintenance costs. That doesn't include repair. That doesn't include replacements. That doesn't include staffing to make sure that the readers have what are needed on them. That doesn't include staffing to teach people to use the technology.
Your suggestion just isn't feasible.
Side note: In my digging, I discovered that an average of 5% of library patrons have access to electronic book reading devices. The ones with the most access are the 47-56 age group.
September 17 2011, 16:04:10 UTC 5 years ago
I design electronic equipment, I have a fairly good perspective to see that this is very likely.
It is the provision of content at a price that works for poor people that may turn out to be the stumbling block. In theory it could be solved, but whether it can be in practice, or will be, is another question. Theory and practice are only the same in theory.
September 17 2011, 16:57:57 UTC 5 years ago
Books aren't without their hidden cost. Pulping releases chemicals into the air just as well. But the resources are renewable and recyclable, or at least moreso than electronics.
Furthermore, the electronic industry has a terrible history of inflating price. I don't know your work and I don't mean to disrespect you at all. But, my last three computers have all cost the same and the old computer was of no value given how obsolete it was at the time. My eReader was bought off Woot for half-price. My wife tried to get my a case for it and the model had already been replaced with a newer size. So the current cases don't fit. If electronic companies wanted to help consumers, they'd make the parts interchangeable between generations as much as possible. Instead, they design products that go obsolete in three to four years or wear out quickly.
Its like my rant on Microsoft. Every new operating system has a higher demand on system resources. Instead of focusing on a system that uses less resources or the same resources and runs more efficiently, they create more needlessly complicated systems with just as many flaws as the last.
Before I ramble too much, I do understand your point. Me, I see the red tape side of costs when it comes with making things needlessly complicated. The more complicated something is made, the more it costs. And, more importantly, the more it hurts when cutbacks are demanded by the government.
Reference:
http://storyofstuff.org/electronics/
September 17 2011, 20:19:36 UTC 5 years ago
I recently bought a new TV because the old one went bang, and I had already mended it 3 times. The reason I didn't fix it that time was that the UK is going to have all digital TV, and a 30 year old analogue TV is not very useful. You can't keep an old standard *forever*. If you took that view, we'd still be seeing by candle light.
In the UK, many products, including electronic equipment, are increasingly recycled. The question of toxic waste is reduced year on year. Also, EU regulations about hazardous materials have reduced the toxicity of waste considerably. OK, some of the things they have banned may not be genuinely dangerous, and there are still a few things that probably should be banned which haven't been yet, but the situation is better overall.
Things are designed to be recycled, so, for example, plastic cases use all the same sort of plastic if at all possible. If not, the different materials are marked with recycling marks and designed to separate easily.
All this is good but a bit beside the point. I would be very surprised if the energy, materials, and environmental cost of manufacturing an e-reader today was as much as that of one tenth of the books I have. If each person can only have one book, or one e-reader, then the book probably has much less "hidden cost". If it is a few shelves of books or one e-reader, then in the foreseeable future, the e-reader will be the environmentally sounder of the two choices.
I disagree.
September 18 2011, 05:00:16 UTC 5 years ago
Right now, MS has to be one of the worst examples of spec creep given the requirements for W7 are lower than the requirements for Vista. In general, ALL programs have specs creep, and as much as I like to hate on M$ sometimes, they're actually pretty good about it. All programs have specs creep because people are complicated and want complicated things; as much as programmers would love to wave their fairy wands and just "make it happen", adding features and fixing obscure bugs is going to add bulk, period. Optimization and balancing the speed/size tradeoff just right is HUGELY important to programmers, so I have to wonder exactly what kind of experience your comment comes from if you think software developers do this on purpose. In most cases, SW developers have no financial connections to HW sales, and would only be shooting themselves in the foot by needlessly producing SW with high requirements, since that limits their market. Besides that, programmers who come up with a more efficient algorithm for a common problem are worshiped by other devs as deities, get the cream of the crop jobs (if they want them), and make a ton of money. There are entire fields of academia where all people do is figure out how efficient different algorithms are and how to make them faster or use less space. Most SW developers with a college degree will take multiple classes in it, and in other classes you may be heavily penalized for writing inefficient code. Software's "features versus specs" issue is basically the same as hardware's "specs versus price" issue. If people wanted DOS today, we could build it much more quickly and efficiently than we did the first time around. But people don't want DOS, they want the new thing. Funnily enough, lots of developers are perfectly happy with the "old thing" and choose to use the command line as much as possible. It's not us that's pushing software to become shinier and more complex.
And PCs have got to be one of the worst examples of poor part compatibility. Spend an afternoon learning how and you could replace the parts in your own computers instead of buying new ones all the time. The ability to mix and match parts is way superior to any other common machine I can think of (cars, appliances, etc). They're pretty much built to slot together with minimal complaint whenever it's at all possible to do so. Again, it's not the evil computer folks who jump to buying the new thing whenever a little part breaks, nor are they forcing you to do it. Most of my colleagues will repair, and if they can't self-repair they can hire professional computer repair. The only people I know who decide to buy the shiny thing are the nontechnical consumerists who will ALWAYS choose to buy the shiny thing, regardless of what it is. If they were born a couple hundred years earlier, they'd buy new jewelry every time their silver got tarnished, or new clothes instead of learning to sew a popped button back on.
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September 19 2011, 15:42:46 UTC 5 years ago
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September 17 2011, 15:07:23 UTC 5 years ago
In practice... Really cheap POD would help, because though I don't think print is dying, it may well be on a path to becoming prohibitively expensive for mass-market. There needs to be a critical mass of people who buy in print, to keep the economies of scale going.
September 17 2011, 19:51:09 UTC 5 years ago
Hm. I never thought about that side of it. I want paper books to continue to be available new, secondhand, and third hand, for those that want them, but my choice has been to buy all my new fiction (which isn't that much compared to some people) in ebook format, or to check "one time reads" out of the library. When I can find cheap epub editions, I'm also buying my favorite books as ebooks, even if I own (multiple) paper copies already because (much more than I anticipated I would) I love my ereader and carrying around 65 books with me at all times. After reading this post and the comments I had already decided to donate my nice editions of some of the books that I now own as ebooks to the library instead of selling them back.
But I think what some of the comments are getting at is that the change to ebooks for popular reading material is somewhat inevitable. And frankly I don't think equipping elementary school kids with ereaders which can be lost, broken, or stolen is going to work as a solution--I can't see them ever being cheap enough to be replaced non-trivially (not to mention the time involved in re-loading the ebooks every time one gets a new ereader). And I can't see parents saying, "Well, since you lost your ereader, you can't read anymore."
I don't read books on my laptop unless there is no other option. One of the things I like most about my ereader is its portability, and that it *feels* like a book in my hands.
But someone commented that there may not always be power to recharge an ereader--and I didn't think much about that either. I take my access to electricity for granted. But I live in an earthquake zone--what happens to my cell phone, laptop, and ereader if my power is out for several days, or if I have to evacuate, and cope with numerous people all trying to access the few electrical outlets that exist at one time? That won't be fun! And is, in the overall scope of that kind of a disaster, a very small matter at best. But I know I would go nuts without reading material, which makes me re-evaluate what should go in an earthquake evac kit.
And some people can't afford electricity...and libraries with free computer access are not within walking distance for many people, so their resources aren't available to all for that reason alone.
I think it is really hard for the "haves" to understand what it is like to be a "have not."
September 17 2011, 20:06:49 UTC 5 years ago
Yes. It is.
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September 18 2011, 05:47:59 UTC 5 years ago
AGREED.
Here's a story:
When I was 15, in 1987, my calculator broke. We couldn't afford to replace it. My deskmate was kind enough to let me use her calculator once she had finished, but by the time we got to trigonometry, it was important to follow the instructions on how to use your calculator to do the exercises.
Consequence: I went from a solid B student with the occasional A, to a C student to C student with the occasional D.
Further consequence: I didn't go on to take any maths options in senior high, I did biology, which was the least maths based of the science options.
That's one piece of equipment, a piece that at that school in that year was considered standard and necessary. But there were kids like me who lost or broke theirs, and there was no safety net in place for us.
In early high school, I loved maths and chemistry. I didn't pursue them not because they were too hard, but because I was lacking a piece of background knowledge.
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September 19 2011, 18:36:25 UTC 5 years ago
What I want to see if how k-12 textbook licensing ends up working for ebooks. We lost SO MANY textbooks to kids moving without warning or losing them (or, in some cases, deciding that they wanted a copy to keep at home in case they wanted to look at it later and telling us it was lost), and it's not like sending home a bill would result in us getting money for new copies. If the licensing worked such that you were buying x licenses and you could revoke them from one device and put them on another at will, my guess is that many schools like mine would have bought $50 e-book readers for all students because losing $50 when a student disappears or refuses to return their books is less than we lose now. I don't know how well that'd work in terms of them not being stolen, but theft of the bright yellow "school" graphing calculators stayed at reasonably manageable levels so I'm optimistic.
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September 17 2011, 15:54:53 UTC 5 years ago
Plus, you can't take useful notes in the margins (not speaking of library books here, obviously, but of used books yes). Sorry, but the limited abilities built in to something like the Kindle are nothing like what I can do with a REAL book and a pencil.
Not only do I not think print is dead, I don't want print dead for selfish reasons, and I don't think eReaders are the Second Coming either.
September 20 2011, 12:55:26 UTC 5 years ago
There is already a government program that (partly) subsidizes cellphone service for people who make less than 135% of the poverty line or who are on other government-assistance programs. At some point, I think, the price of smartphones will drop to the point where the cheapest phones on the market will also be capable of running an ebook-reader app. This will probably also be the point when Wal-Mart stops printing its employee handbook on paper and you will need an ebook reader to read that document that is not a legal contract but enumerates the seventy-one excuses your manager can use to fire you.
(Even at that point, I still think paper books will be useful, for reasons others have pointed out: not everything is available electronically, cell phones need charging, they can break, they can be stolen....)