E-Readers Again

An interesting article from Wired discussing how e-books are inferior to paper ones. The author gives five reasons and I thought it would be fun to go through them.

1. An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
He feels that the sight of a book lying there nags him to continue in a way that e-books don't. I have some sympathy for this. I've raced through good books on the Kindle but bad books really drag. That's true in real life I suppose, but they're easier to avoid in digital form.
2. You can't keep your books all in one place.
This is a problem for people who buy books from several different stores and devices I guess. I've got just the Kindle so this isn't an issue for me. But I can see where it would be. I'm hoping that eventually we'll have common formats and buying books from all over will be like buying music MP3's. So far that isn't the case.
3. Notes in the margin help you think.
He wants a better system for making notes while reading than what's out there already. I keep running into this complaint and I don't get it. I almost never write in a book. Are other readers really so different? In any case, this seems like a problem that will almost certainly be solved sooner rather than later.
4. E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
This complaint is common too and I don't agree with it. There is this idea that e-books should be much cheaper because they don't have to be printed or transported anywhere. This ignores so much of the real cost; things like you know, paying the author and editors and publishing staff. Think that may be important? And besides, items aren't priced by figuring production costs and then adding some percentage of profit. Prices are based on finding the right spot on the demand curve to get the most money*.
5. E-books can't be used for interior decorating.
This is a good point and I'm going to quote the author here at length.

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

This is true but it won't be a problem for some time. I can't imagine anyone buying an e-reader and then getting rid of all of their bound books in one fell swoop. But maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part. If I had an e-reader twenty years ago my bound library would be much, much smaller. Maybe my kids won't have one at all.

*I've got a pet theory that if the laws of supply and demand were taught early and often in school, our entire populace would be smarter about money.