Agreeing that books are a thing you read is easy enough. Stop and reread that last clause, because the key to understanding why you love or hate ebooks is pressurized into it. And you have been able to scroll through Word (or WordPerfect or WordStar or plain text) documents for as long as computers have existed, even if few would call such an experience reading. Adobe’s PDF format, first released in the early ’90s, made it easy to create and share print-formatted documents, viewable on any platform with a PDF reader. Before all of these, it was always possible to read on computers, portable or not. Barnes & Noble still makes the Nook, a Kindle competitor that seems like the Betamax of ebook readers. The first commercial e-ink reader was made in 2004 by Sony, not Amazon, although you’ve probably never heard of it. Microsoft made a reader for its equivalent, Windows CE. Ebooks appeared on Palm handhelds in the late ’90s. Competitors are out there, including tablets such as the iPad and the various software that can display books in electronic format.

When discussed in the present tense, ebooks means Amazon Kindle ebooks. Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. Perhaps you like being able to carry a never-ending stack of books with you wherever you go, without having to actually lug them around. If you love ebooks, it might be because they are portable, and legible enough, and capable of delivering streams of words, fiction and nonfiction, into your eyes and brain with relative ease. If you hate ebooks like I do, that loathing might attach to their dim screens, their wonky typography, their weird pagination, their unnerving ephemerality, or the prison house of a proprietary ecosystem. I don’t know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful. Maybe I can’t stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I’m a secret Luddite. I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them. P erhaps you’ve noticed that ebooks are awful.

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