Two posts the same day? Yep. Consider that my first attempt at doing a Black Friday promotion. Save that I discounted it a tad too much, as I keep my content fully free of charge.
Also, it’s not really a second post. It’s a second thought about that book I just mentioned. This time it’s not about its past experiences with other readers. It’s about its reliability.
It’s a nice word, reliable. It’s a word that refers to something or someone we can rely on. Like a good friend is reliable.
Sure, that book is beaten down, its cover is ready to start falling apart. Also, its pages are yellowed. But even yellowed, they’re still perfectly readable and they do not come apart the slightest. And the book itself, well, despite its now fragile cover, it feels sturdy enough for me to be confident to carry it with me as my new reading companion for the time being.
A hundred years old and still fully usable. That’s reliable.
And that’s a word I learned to never associate with anything related to digital reading. Nor to associate with anything digital, in general.
Be it with ebooks being remotely deleted from our e-readers, or remotely edited to reflect whatever political correctness now prevailing. Be it with our devices spying on our reading habots and reporting everything we we read to their real owner (which was never us). Be it with those reading devices needing to be recharged when we would like to read, or them suddenly stopping working or requiring some update to just keep doing what we purchased them for. Page layout is also not reliable at all as far as epub ebooks are concerned.
The sad thing to realize is that there is no reason for digital reading and for electronics in general to not be reliable, to not be trustworthy. It’s a design choice to make them so. To turn them into spyware that track us and our reading habits, instead of being mere tools at our service. By making them a lot more fragile and a lot less fixable than they could have been.
Ultimately it is also the choice of the whole society to turn ourselves, its citizens, and I mean all of us, into mere consumers and users instead of true owners.
I like that I can still fully own a paper books I buy, and that I can read it however I fancy without anyone hunching over my shoulder to check that I’m not reading anything wrong.
Published: 2025/11/27