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"  I&amp;#039;ve finally given up on e-readers. When my last Kindle broke, with its cracked screen of frozen e-ink smearing poor Agatha Christie&amp;#039;s face, I decided not to repurchase. I was only picking it up for books I&amp;#039;d already bought anyway. For at least a year, I had been reading actual print books \u2014 like some caveman, like some Medieval scribe. E-reader sales shrunk by 28 percent in 2012. There are lots of reasons offered for that decline \u2014 the rise of tablets, the saturation of the market, and others \u2014 but I think one reason has not been sufficiently considered: E-readers as they currently exist suck. I really, really want to have an e-reader. I have loved e-readers from the beginning. They were the one technology, of all the wonders of contemporary life, for which I was an enthusiastic early adopter. In the Wall Street Journal, before the launch of the Kindle 2, I wrote that it would transform reading, and for the better. To say I was excited was an understatement. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.  I was not afraid that it would wreck publishing as so many others were. I loved the Kindle so much I bought it before it was available in my country and bought books from the American website at a premium. The romance of paper is real, to me, but the advantages of digital books are staggering. I hate having to cart around my library when I move. I hate having to go to bookstores to see if they have a particular title. I hate not being able to find stuff. The first time I found myself alone on a remote beach in Nova Scotia and bought myself a new novel from the whisperdrive, I was in love. But that was the Kindle 2. I assumed that the difficulties with the machine \u2014 the awkwardness of the notes, the difficulty of navigating through text \u2014 would be rectified in future iterations. Since then the trend for e-readers has been to become much cheaper, in cost and in looks and in substance. The Kindle Paperwhite was the best leap forward in the technology and its goals were clear: slightly more contrast in the screen, a frontlight, and a longer-lasting battery. The functionality of the mechanism itself, the experience of reading, hasn&amp;#039;t expanded at all. The smartphone has become more magical every six months or so. The Kindle and various competitors compete for price point and a few little screen details and virtually nothing else. I am certainly not like Andrew Piper at Slate, who recently argued that e-reading isn&amp;#039;t reading at all. But on the other hand the experience of reading a book on an e-reader is significantly more irritating if you are reading for meaning. E-readers are designed for people who consume books. If you&amp;#039;re knocking back a thriller that you can&amp;#039;t put down, they&amp;#039;re perfect. If you&amp;#039;re reading a book that you have to try to understand, they&amp;#039;re dreadful. Clearly the focus of their development has been to replace mass-market paperbacks. E-readers are not designed for people who interpret books. No effort has been put into design questions for serious readers, for people who try to figure out the meaning of texts. They are hard to flip back to an old section and they are still awkward for note-taking. There are a significant number of people who want the best possible, coziest experience when they read, and they have been for the most part ignored. Books are the ultimate consumerist fetish objects and yet e-readers have the least character of any object you can buy. Maybe all of these problems will some day be solved. I sincerely hope so. The accessories are improving. There are vintage covers to humanize them already. There&amp;#039;s finally a keyboard stand that you can put your Kindle into. But the experience has not really changed since the original iteration, and it remains far from organic. The anthropologist Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed found a surprising number of examples of societies that have rejected technologies. It seems incredible that the Polynesians didn&amp;#039;t need pottery anymore when they arrived on the islands from the mainland, but they went back to cooking on stones because it was actually better for the kind of food they were eating. I worry that the e-reader may go the same way for me. It&amp;#039;s the most surprising possible result of the digital experiment: I&amp;#039;m not giving up my beloved Kindle because I&amp;#039;m particularly in love with paper. I&amp;#039;m giving it up because it fails to do what I need it to do. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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