Digital vs Paper, Why Can't We All Be Friends?

As most of you know, I run an online/e-book fiction magazine called Something Wicked. My entire market is people who own e-readers and enjoy downloading our magazine, so it is fair to say that I depend on e-reader customers to finance my magazine. I myself own two Kindles, and have downloaded dozens and dozens of books and magazines. I have subscriptions to six short-fiction magazines, five of them e-mags, and only one in print.
I think it is fair to say that I am a fan of e-books and the e-reader technology.
Now, as I’m sure you know, there has been an ongoing debate,(for what seems like years) around e-books versus paper books. Each side of the argument tends to be presented with vehemence and certainty, ‘e-books are the future’, says one, ‘noooo, e-books will never replace the beauty and sentimental value of paper books’.
The general gist of the debate seems to be that pro-ebookers tend to think that the printed book is on its way out and those who simply cannot relinquish their sentimental attachment to books say that this technology will never beat a good book.
In the spirit of spewing more words into this debate I decided to put forth my opinion, because I think it is a point of view that neither side has touched upon, or if they have, I haven’t noticed.
What most people seem not to take into account is the fact that, however fantastic and extremely useful e-readers and e-books are, they cannot replace written words on paper, not because they won’t, but because they shouldn’t, for various reasons, but most obvious, is their cost.

A lot has been said about how cheap e-books are compared to real books, but what people forget is that, an e-book is only cheap if you have a $100 e-reader, an internet connection and a credit card. If you don’t have any of those things, then e-books are as easy to come by as a family vacation on Mars.
The world is an extremely different place to the way Americans or other rich nations see it. Most of the population of this planet earns less than $200 per month, in some countries $200 is a good annual salary, but, if you’re literate, poverty or lack of earning power has never made books inaccessible.
Books are not prejudiced about their readers, anyone who can read, can read a book. But without the initial financial outlay for the e-reader, be it a computer, or Kindle, or Smart phone, or iPad, very few people are able to read an e-book.
The ease of transference of literature has made successful entrepreneurs out of people with poverty stricken beginnings. There are millionaires who grew up with barely enough money to feed themselves, but they had books given to them by friends, family, or employers, or found them on the street, and they buried themselves in the imagination of stories, or the knowledge of passed-down or discarded text-books, encyclopaedias, newspapers  - and redefined their financial position.
How will this happen in a future where all we have is e-books, how will you donate your old books to your library, or your gardener if they’re all tied up in licensing restrictions and, more importantly, sealed shut inside your Kindle or iPad.
Even if you actually gave your gardner your old Kindle, how would he even power it if the shack he lives in has no electricity?

The other thing about relying solely on e-books is we are voluntarily tying ourselves, indefinitely, to a single company, whether it’s Amazon, or Barnes & Noble or Apple, is irrelevant, the end result is the same; if you want to keep the books you paid for, you’re locked-in.
I read a tweet today;

“@scarthomas:Let's face it, Amazon's not going to be around until the end of time.Give it 5 years & Kindle will look like a floppy disk”.

Where will our books be then, where will our literature go?
So what happens when a couple of years down the line the battery on your iPad finally gives up, no worries, you can just buy the latest iPad and transfer all your purchases across, or the latest Kindle or Nook, or whatever, which brings me back to my first point, most of the world can barely afford to buy one of these toys with a month’s salary, even if the books themselves are cheap, so when their battery dies, they toss the e-reader, (you couldn’t even use it for firewood) and all that knowledge and money and fiction has been totally wasted, never to be read again.
Now again I reiterate that I love my Kindle, I love that I can fill my it with out-of-print public domain books. I’ve read more classics since purchasing it than in my entire life before then. But short-fiction magazines are what I love the most on Kindle. One of my favourite online magazines at the moment is Lightspeed Magazine, I have an e-subscription and I absolutely love that every month their new issue is delivered right to my Kindle. I LOVE IT, you hear me? LOVE. IT. As someone who used to spend in the region of $150 to get a single subscription to a magazine posted to South Africa, e-books and e-readers have saved me a bundle.

But, the instant Lightspeed Magazine announced their Year One anthology in paperback, I rushed off to buy it. It took three weeks to arrive, but when I took it out of it’s parcel I pawed it longingly, all the awesome stories I had read over the last year, collected, in paper, in a book, which I could keep forever, and put it on my shelf and maybe in ten, or so, years my daughter might find it there and pick it up and read it, and discover those stories for the first time again.

Something Wicked does the same thing, we publish exclusively online and through e-books, but we do a bi-annual anthology in print. We do this because, as the editor, I want a permanent copy of the stories we’ve published. I want to hold it, and show it off on my shelf, and to be able to lend it to people and be discovered by my kids and my kid’s kids.
Also, books smell great.
Ask anyone who is a lifelong reader what is one of their favourite things about books, and most of them will tell that it is the smell, the smell of ink on paper. Nothing can beat that smell.
My Kindle smells of the leather case it’s in.
And now my point.

The point I am trying to make here is that we should stop debating whether one format is better than the other, stop trying to get rid of legacy, or dead tree publishing and understand that both mediums are needed. We cannot replace one with the other because the losses would be too great. E-books are an amazing and vital augmentation to printed-paper, the two together can rule the world in perfect harmony (crack that Coke and sing along).

One is super-efficient and immediate, it allows us to consume at a voracious rate and pay little for our books. It gives (some of) us access to millions of lost and out-of-print books, but, as Jonathan Franzen, points out, there is a sense of permanence to books; they can be lost, or wet, or forgotten or donated or tossed in the bin, but they can also be re-discovered by someone else. The print continues to exist regardless of who is reading it, or whether the batteries are flat. And again, try to remember that most of the world cannot afford the technology that so many of us children of the internet take for granted.

It is vital, especially now at this juncture, that knowledge and imagination be freely available, and even though it might technically not be free for the original purchaser, for everyone else that picks up that book over the years, it can be, whether through a charity or a library donation or a box of magazines delivered to a retirement home.
When I was at school, back in the mid-eighties, we would be given our school textbooks at the beginning of every year.

We would open the front cover, and at the bottom of a long list of names, (sometimes twenty or thirty of them) we would write our own name. Those textbooks had been passed down from student to student for, in some cases, twenty-odd years. They would be filled with arcane doodles from students that had graduated years before we had been born, sometimes the answers to math questions would be scribbled in the margins, or passages underlined as important, and we should learn them for the exams.

I don’t see that happening again anytime in the near future, do you?
Tell me again that e-books are permanent, and that they are forever.