电子书五宗罪

原作者：
来源5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
译者DroopyPapa

There are no two ways about it: E-books are here to stay. Unless something as remarkable as Japan’s reversion to the sword occurs, digital books are the 21st century successor to print. And yet the e-book is fundamentally flawed. There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can’t replicate (at least not easily) — yet.

对电子书你别无选择：它不只是一时风潮。除非发生像日本剑道复兴那样引人注目的事件，否则它注定将成为纸质书籍21世纪的接班人。不过，电子书有着其根本缺陷。有一些纸质书籍文化是电子书目前尚且无法（或者说至少很难）取代的。

Let’s put this into some context first. Amazon sparked the e-reader revolution with the first Kindle a mere three-and-a-half years ago, and it now already sells more e-books than all print books combined. Barnes & Noble, the century-old bricks-and-mortar bookseller, is being pursued by Liberty Media not because it has stores all over the place but because its Nook e-reader is the Kindle’s biggest competitor.

让我们先来了解一下背景。三年半前，亚马逊首先用Kindle点燃了电子阅读革命的星星之火，而现在亚马逊的电子书销量已经超过了它全部纸质书的销售数量。自由传媒公司（Liberty Media）有意收购有着百年历史的老牌实体书店巴诺书店，也并非因为巴诺的门店遍地开花，而全因它的Nook电子阅读器是Kindle的最大劲敌。

Reasonable arguments that the iPad would kill the e-reader seem laughable now, as both thrive and many people own one of each. One thing E-books and books are equally good at: In their own ways, they’re both platform agnostic.

曾经关于iPad是否会抢占电子阅读器市场的争论看似很有道理，但放到如今来看则显得有些可笑，因为两者都在竞争中存活了下来，而很多人拥有两者之一。有一点电子书和纸质书都做得不错，那就它们各自都与平台无关。

But for all of the benefit they clearly bring, e-books are still falling short of a promise to make us forget their paper analogs. For now, you still lose something by moving on.

然而，撇开电子书带来的好处不谈，它至今仍然无法做出一个承诺，能够让我们忘记它的纸质同胞。就目前而言，如果抛弃纸质书籍转向电子书，我们仍然将会有所损失。

It isn’t always that way with tech: We rejoice at cutting the phone cord, we don’t fret that texting causes lousy penmanship and we are ecstatic that our computers, tablets and phones are replacing the TV set.

在科技领域，情况并非向来如此：我们曾因可以切断电话线而欢欣鼓舞；打字的普及导致荒废了书法，我们却并未为之发愁；当电视机终于被台式机、平板电脑和手机取代时，我们欣喜若狂。

I’m not resorting to variations on the ambiguous tactile argument (“The feel and smell of paper is an integral part of the reading experience….”) that one hears from some late-to-never adopters. And — full disclosure — I have never owned an e-book reader, because I have an ingrained opposition to single-purpose devices. But since getting an iPad on day one, I haven’t purchased a print edition of anything for myself.

有些人因循守旧，迟迟不肯转投新技术怀抱。人们经常能从他们口中听到关于触觉的含糊辩解（“纸张的触感和味道是阅读经历的基本组成部分……”）。我并不是这样的人。而且——让我们敞开了说——虽然因为对于单一用途的设备一直持坚决的反对态度，我从未拥有过一台电子阅读器，但打从有了iPad的第一天起，我自己就再也没有买过任何印刷品。

I am hooked — completely one with the idea that books are legacy items that may never go away, but have been forever marginalized as a niche medium. With that in mind, however, here are five things about e-books that might give you pause about saying good riddance to the printed page.

事实上，我为之神魂颠倒了——我只有一个念头，就是书本作为一种遗产永远不会消失，但已被永远打入小众媒介范畴。然而即使这样想着，还是有关于电子书的五件事，也许会让你不那么急着和纸质书籍说“拜拜”。如果这些问题都得到了解决，那么电子书的发展才真将无可限量。

Fix these problems, and there really will be no limits to the e-book’s growth.

1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

1）要记起一本没有读完的电子书并把它读完不是件容易的事儿。

Two months into 2011, The New York Times tech reporter (and former Wired reporter Jenna Wortham) wrote excitedly that she had finally finished her first e-book — how is such technological tardiness possible for someone so plugged in? Wortham had an excellent explanation: She kept forgetting to pick up any e-book she had started reading. It took the solemn determination of a New Year’s resolution to break that spell.

2011年刚过去两个月时，《纽约时报》科技版记者詹娜·沃特姆（她曾经是《连线》杂志的记者）曾激动地写道，她终于读完了她第一本电子书——为什么对于一个在科技方面如此与时俱进的人来说，还会有如此的拖延？沃特姆对此给出了一个绝妙的解释：她老是忘记再次点开那些已经开始阅读的电子书。最后她不得不在在新年计划中严肃地下了决心，这一魔咒才得以打破。

E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started. They do not serve as constant, embarrassing reminders to your poor reading habits. Even 1,001 digital books are out of sight, and thus out of mind. A possible solution? Notifications that pop up to remind you that you’ve been on page 47 of A Shore Thing for 17 days.

因为电子书并不存在于你生活中随处可见的地方。它们并不会在一旁嘲笑你，迫使你看完已经开始的书。对于你那糟糕的阅读习惯，它们并不能给予持久而叫人尴尬的提醒。即使有1001本电子书，只要它们不在你眼前，你也就会想不起来。有什么办法可以解决吗？你可以设置弹出提示信息，提醒你《岸上的事情》（A Shore Thing）第47页你已经读了17天了。

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.

2）你无法把所有的电子书收在一个地方。

Books arranged on your bookshelves don’t care what store they came from. But on tablets and smartphones, the shelves are divided by app — you can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. There is simply no app for that. (With e-readers, you are doubly punished, because you can’t buy anything outside the company store anyway).

不管纸质书是从哪家书店买来的，你都可以把它们排列在书架上。但是在平板电脑或是智能手机上，“书架”根据应用程序划分——你无法在一个地方看到自己拥有的从各家网上书店买来的所有电子书。没有这样的应用程序。（如果你是一名阅读器使用者，那你还将受到双重惩罚，因为你无法从阅读器所属公司的商店以外购买任何东西。）

Apple doesn’t allow developers to tap into root information, which would be needed to create what would amount to a single library on an iOS device. If that restriction disappeared, there would still be the matter of individual vendors agreeing to cooperate — not a given since they are competitors and that kind of leveling could easily lead to price wars, for one thing.

苹果公司不允许开发者接触到程序的底层信息，而如果想要在iOS（苹果公司为iPhone开发的操作系统）设备上创建一个单独的图书馆，则必须要拿到这些信息。即使没有了这一限制，还存在另外一个问题，就是个体电子书程序提供者是否愿意合作——这是个很实际的问题，因为这些程序提供者互为竞争对象，而将他们的电子书放到同一个平台上，首先就容易导致价格战。

But the way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out. In the digital equivalent, we would see everything we own, tap on a book and it would invoke the app it requires — Kindle, Nook, Borders, etc. With the current sequence — open up a reader app, pick a book — you can easily forget what you own. Trivial? Try to imagine Borders dictating the size and shape of your bookshelf, and enforcing a rule that it hold only books you bought from them, and see if that thought offends you even a little bit.

然而，在我们阅读电子书时，常规的阅读方式被推翻了。当我们需要阅读下一本纸质书籍，我们会浏览早就排列好图书的书架，然后挑出一本。那么在电子书阅读器上，我们也应该可以看到所有的电子书，点击想要读的那本，调用相应的应用程序——Kindle、Nook、Borders（美国第二大连锁书商博德斯集团推出的电子书店）等等。可是按照现在的步骤，得先打开阅读应用程序才能挑书，这样你很容易忘记自己都有些什么书可以看。这是小事吗？想象一下，如果由Borders来决定你书架的容量和形状，并且强制规定上面只能放从Borders书店买来的书，你是否还能对此一笑而过，没有一丝一毫的愠怒？

3) Notes in the margins help you think.

3）纸书书页空白处的笔记可以帮助你思考。

It’s not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original — a separate notebook is ridiculous, even with a clever indexing system that seems inventable but is yet to be invented.

仅仅划出一些重要句子是不够的。一个认真的读者会想要和作者争论，或者放大一个观点，又或者赶紧把由阅读引发的新鲜感想记录下来。而这些都得和原书紧密关联起来——单独做一本笔记是荒谬可笑的，即使你有一个非常智能化的索引系统（更何况目前也还没有人做出过这种系统，虽然看上去是可行的）。

Books don’t offer much white space for readers to riff in, but e-books offer none. And what about the serendipity of sharing your thoughts, and being informed by the thoughts of others, from the messages in shared books?

虽然纸质书上留给读者的空白地方也不多，但电子书上就是完全没有了。至于那种在公共图书上分享自己的想法并为别人的想法所启迪的惊喜，试想电子书可以提供吗？

Replicating this experience will take a new standard, adopted universally, among competitors whose book tech, unlike paper, is proprietary. For a notion of what this might look like, check out OpenMargin.

想要在电子书上同样拥有这种体验，需要制定一个全新的标准，广泛推广到各家互为竞争关系的电子书商处。和纸书不同，他们都各自为营掌握着不同的电子书技术。对此可以参考OpenMargin（一个电子书笔记分享应用，有兴趣者请苦练飞檐走壁工夫，到这里观看视频），获得一个直观感受。

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.

4）电子书的定位是一次性消费，但定价却不是这么回事。

This one is simple, and also easy to oversimplify since people still have to get paid. But until e-books truly add new value, the way Hollywood did with DVD extras, it’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental. E-books cost virtually nothing to produce, and yet the baseline cover price, set by publishers, is only fractionally below the discount price for the print version of new releases.

这一点很简单，但有时候也容易被看得太过简单，因为人们毕竟还是付了钱的。然而除非电子书真的提供增值服务（就像好莱坞发行DVD时附带花絮那样），不然买一本电子书要砸下13美元，但是得到的东西和租借来的没区别，着实没法不叫人恼火。电子书实际制作成本几乎为零，但出版方制定的价格基线，却只比新版纸质书的折扣价格低一点点。

E-books can’t be shared, donated to your local library shelter, or re-sold. They don’t take up space, and thus coax conflicted feelings when it is time to weed some of them out. But because they aren’t social, even in the limited way that requires some degree of human contact in the physical world, they will also never be an extension of your personality. Which brings me to …

你没法和别人分享电子书，没法把它们捐赠给图书馆，也没法转售出去。它们不占地方，也正因如此，当你想要删除掉一些时，内心难免有所挣扎。但由于它们并不具有社交性，一点也不需要在真实世界中与人接触，它们也就决不能代表你的个性。

5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.

5）电子书没法帮你装点门面。

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It probably began that time you toted The Cat in the Hat, trying not to be dispatched to bed during a grown-up dinner party.

在你对这个肤浅的抱怨抛白眼之前，先这样想一下：曾几何时，在你精神生活中，你没有用书籍装饰周围环境来作为一种无声的自我介绍，把自己介绍给志同道合者们？也许只有当你怀揣着《帽子里的猫》（The Cat in the Hat），但却努力不在一个成人晚宴上被早早打发上床睡觉的时候吧。

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.

It’s a truism that no new medium kills the one that it eclipses — we still have radio, which pre-dates the internet, television and movies. So it would be foolish to predict the death of books anytime soon. And we haven’t seen the end of creative business models — there is no “all access pass” in book publishing, as is the trend now for magazines and the newspapers which have put up paywalls. Getting an e-book along with your print edition (or, the other way around) could be the best of both worlds, or the worst.

新的媒介不会将被其风头盖过的旧有媒介置于死地，这是一条真理——尽管有了电影、电视和互联网，我们仍在使用收音机。所以想要预言纸质书籍的末日是一件愚蠢的事情。另一方面，我们也猜不到创意无限的商业模式会有什么新招——对于图书出版业来说，尚未出现杂志和报纸面临的网上阅读“畅通无阻”的趋势，而后两者已经针对这一现象建立起了阅读的付费系统。买纸质书送电子版（或者相反）也许对于双方都是最好的，当然也有可能是最坏的办法。

It would certainly solve my unexpected home decor problem.

不过可以肯定的是，这样可以解决我始料未及的装点门面问题。

Photo: Anthropologie store window, New York City. (John C Abell/Wired.com)

图片：位于纽约市的人类学商店橱窗 （约翰·C·阿贝尔/Wired.com）

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