Tablets as e-readers

I’ve had a few months to wring out a couple of tablet computers. I can finally take a stab at the question of whether or not they’re useful for reading e-books. Will a tablet replace the paperback book in those iconic images of paradise, where someone ensconced in a hammock, drink in one hand, novel in the other, is enjoying a lazy day at the beach? And instead of walking uphill both ways to attend school, will students someday just tote tablets instead of textbooks? More to the point: Should you buy a tablet to use as a book reader?

My answer: I don’t know. I’ve found tablets to be a great solution to some problems, but as for replacing books, I think it’s such a personal and subjective gig that there’s no generic answer.

I know a lady of meager means who just spent $1,400 to give her grandkids a couple of tablets. The kids told her they’d fail out of school otherwise. Whether the lady was being bamboozled, or whether she was being a true savior, isn’t up to me to say. But I’ll heed the bigger point: Tablets as “e-readers” are an important enough trend that people who aren’t otherwise into technology are going to be thinking about opening their wallets.

Just to cover a contextual base, I’ll note that “PDF,” Portable Document Format, is the famously ubiquitous format blazed by the Adobe company. Many books, documents, and forms are put into this format, and it’s pretty much the legacy format for a lot of important stuff. Many books that predate computers have been put in PDF to archive them digitally. Anyway, being able to conveniently read a PDF file is a big deal.

On the other hand, many newly produced e-books are in other formats, which have advantages when used on dedicated e-book readers (as opposed to tablet computers). The text on dedicated e-book readers, which use “electronic ink,” is far easier to read than text on computer (including tablet) screens, especially in the bright sunlight, which is no small matter in the tropics. The technology also offers far longer batter life than tablets offer. But the rub here is that dedicated e-book readers can’t do all the stuff that tablet computers can do. So for all the glitz of modern technology, we’re caught in an age old conundrum: a specialized tool that does a very specific job (black text) really well vs. a generalized tool that is master of no single task but that is adequate at many.

I think the general tool is pulling ahead, since I see far more tablets around me, especially iPads, than I see dedicated e-book readers.

So, here’s how I react to reading on a tablet, though you might react the opposite way: For studying technical information, I strongly prefer a traditional book to a tablet. I’ve asked one math professor and one airplane captain their preferences, and their preferences match mine on this note, but they both use tablets as e-readers in some cases anyway, as do I.

The professor pointed out that she does use an iPad to read some math books, since in some cases the physical books would be far more expensive than their PDF counterparts. She said she’s pointing her students in the iPad direction more and more these days.

For his part, the pilot pointed out that he pretty much goes belt-and-suspenders on the gig, preferring physical books for home and office use, but using a tablet for road duty.

So in these two cases we see tablets being supplements to physical books, as opposed to being complete replacements for them.

For light reading, where I’m just digesting simple, uncomplicated text, I found that I still prefer a physical book to a screen. But I use my tablet anyway sometimes. Incidentally, for some reason my tablet’s battery life seems to get sapped by about 40 percent when reading PDF books, but that’s an unscientific observation and I have taken zero effort to refine it, solve it, or understand it.

If I had to sit in an airliner and entertain myself for an entire trans-Pacific flight without recourse to physical books, then despite my enthusiasm for tablets, I’d punt the tablet realm entirely and just go the dedicated e-reader route.

The bottom line? The bottom line is that there is no bottom line. It’s too squishy of a realm to strike a fixed answer. Sure, books are inanimate lumps of matter, but for many of us they are such important parts of our lives that they take on lives of their own. How we relate to, and live with, these books is up to us, not up to any “experts.”

But look on the bright side: It’s all going to change in a few years anyway, at which point we’ll look back on these days and laugh at how seriously we took these decisions.