I get it now.
For the longest time, I was having trouble understanding the craze over Amazon's Kindle. It seemed small, delicate, a bit of a hassle and cruelly deprived of the tactile satisfaction of a glossy cover, musty pages, and the wonderful sensation of your thumb gliding over course cellulose every time you turn a page. Is the Kindle really 'green'? It's not that easy. Mass production electronic devices like cell phones have become an environmental nightmare. They're full of unusual metals and tons of synthetics and plastics and they end up in landfills. Paper is also a flawed medium, from an environmental perspective, but it is recyclable and renewable, and there is a real culture of paper recycling these days.
Now flashback to yesterday. I was thinking about Robert Boyle and about how his legacy is still being re-interpreted today. And I got a big hankering to read one of his important works, The Sceptical Chymist. Amazon had a number of cheap versions, which Jenn kindly ordered for me, but then I stumbled upon this. For the same price that Starbucks would charge you to combine water with mass produced syrup, you could instead purchase the digitally photographed version of the original Sceptical Chymist and have it at your finger tips, in under 60 seconds. I was impressed.
This is good news right? Maybe not for everybody. Dover Books has made a solid business and earned a deeply loyal clientele by republishing beloved out of print books in all fields that have very little mass market appeal, especially in the sciences and mathematics, books just like the Sceptical Chymist. Dover's editions are extremely inexpensive, yet very high quality, respectful, photographed reproductions with no meddling, editing, etc. Half of my library is Dover, maybe more. Dover books have saved me on multiple occasions. And for now I still prefer the Dover editions. But it's clear now that it's easier for others to offer these unusual titles and to circumvent paper publishing. I could see Dover thriving or perishing and I think they're clever folks and will succeed, but I can't help but worry a little bit.
Well, that's all I've got (plus I finished my Ramen and spicy chicken).