by Jeremy Kahn

As promised with my last article, here is the aforementioned digital versus physical medium opinion piece. Since the turn of the millennium (you can even argue the early 90s) electronics began making their way into our everyday lives. I remember in the early 90s logging on to Prodigy where I would go to a site that hosted tons of interactive children’s books. Reading these books online was always fun for me. This idea of reading books, minus the physical book, always was of interest to me.

Today you don’t even need an internet connection to read books in this form. Of course digital books have come a long way since then. Over the years, through the mid-90s for example, comic book publishers released a variety of interactive comic books on CD. These comics were digital versions of physical comics but with added extras. Marvel’s releases included animated clips form corresponding animated series currently airing for the specific comic being read. For example, I had a Spider-Man comic on CD of this type that included clips from the Spider-Man 90′s Animated Series. DC Comics had something similar, just with a few less trimmings.

Also through the 90′s into the new millennium saw the beginning of e-book readers. At one point I acquired an e-book reader from Franklin dubbed the E-Bookman that was modeled after a PDA. One thing to note was these e-book reader were also capable of playing audio books. All these ideas and new technology eventually paved way for what we have now. Today we have devices like the iPod, iPad, Android, Kindle, Nook, Kobe, to name a few.  Through these devices we can pursuance digital forms of books, comics, and depending on the device audio books. Here is the question though. With so many things going digital, is there room for physical media to share the same space? Let us take a look at some of the disadvantages and advantages of both and base a decision on that.

Obviously with digital you can carry more items with you when you travel. With any device, you can download say, 30 e-books, and still have room for more. If you tried carrying 30 physical books with you on a trip, well, you’d need a really large duffel bag. So with digital comes convenience.

Physical medium is still important, don’t get the wrong idea. First thing to remember is a digital book doesn’t exist. Rather, a digital book exists as pieces of data. Let us say you have a comic collection. This comic collection contains some rare issues in it. Now you also have a digital version of the same collection. With one has more value? The physical collection of course. Another way of looking at this is you have a first printing of a book. Obviously there are no first prints of a digital copy. This in turn makes the physical one more valuable. Another issue comes up with the group of people who like taking their copy of their books to conventions to be signed. This can’t be done digitally. See, here is the thing, so far most of the advantages for physical print applies to collectors. The vast majority of consumers don’t really fit this demographic.

With both digital and physical you can bookmark where you left off in a book. Some devices let you highlight sections of text as well as make digital notes (look at my digital text book article for an example). You can even rent books from libraries digitally now. In addition some places allow you to download an item multiple times to multiple devices.

Basically, at this point anything you can do with a printed book you can do with a physical one (well, besides sell it after reading it). I would even say now it is even best to get some sort of e-book reader (even a cheap one) as most e-books are cheaper then the list price when sold in stores. So with e-book you actually save money. This holds true to digital comics as well (with most single issue digital comics selling for $1 or more off the list price). E-book reader also can be found inexpensively. While there are Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Nobles’ Nooks, the now defunct Boarders’ Kobe, all the tables running on Google’s Android and Apple’ iPad, there are still many dedicated e-readers out there.