Reasons why eBooks are Rubbish: #2

They Might not be all that Ethical

I'm probably the last person in the entire publishing world to hear about this, but Apple iPads aren't made all that ethically. The company (along with others) has it's £750 device manufactured in the Foxconn factory by workers, mostly women, who are paid as little as £27 a month.

This has been going on for some time: the report linked to ahead is dated June 2004. The Mail carried out a special (and unusually socially conscious investigation) back then into Foxconn's Longhua plant, then manufacturing Apple music players, and after completing the process, their report claimed the following:

•  Longhua's workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted.
• Workers put in 15-hour days when making Apple products.

It finished by concluding that Apple is just one of thousands of companies that now use Chinese facilities to manufacture its products, the report observes. Low wages, long hours and China's industrial secrecy make the country attractive to business, particularly as increased competition and consumer expectations force companies to deliver products at attractive prices.

Apple then issued a statement claiming that it was dealing with the information the report had found, and that it valued working standards and conditions highly. I'm dubious to count journalistic findings from the Mail as gospel, so this would have perhaps shut me up if ten workers at the plant hadn't then gone on to commit suicide within a year of each other, with three more attempting to. Clearly Apple hadn't taken much notice of the report filed six years earlier by the Mail. Workers were still reporting long working hours, intense pressure, low salaries, military discipline and abuse by supervisors.

After the tenth suicide, all workers at the factory were offered a 30% payrise and were asked to sign a no suicide pledge.

Reader users shouldn't sleep easy either - Sony uses the same company to manufacture their products. Amazon are idiosyncratically quiet about where they manufacture their Kindles, but the extreme likelihood is that they're made in China - a country known to be lax to say the least about human rights, working conditions and communication with the rest of the world.

Elegy for the Paperback?

An article I wrote for Running In Heels appears here - please give it a read! 
A short section of the article is below:

Not since the advent of the Gutenberg press has there been an event such as this: one which has made typesetters, editors and copywriters across the land gnash through their red pens and has forced booksellers to torch their stock simply to keep warm. Shelving systems can be heard splintering up and down the country, and each bin is overflowing with library cards and bookmarks. The eBook is here to stay, and the humble, dog-eared paperback is no more.

You only have to open a paper – sorry, flip your laptop open – to see it. In the past month alone, HMV has announced Waterstones may be sold after staggeringly low profits, Amazon has reported that its new Kindles are their “fastest selling ever” and the Oxford English Dictionary, that venerable, traditional old Grandfather of the book world, has virtually ruled out the possibility of publishing the next edition in print form. US Borders, whose sales are down 11.5% on last year, is in such turmoil that it has had a hissy fit and is refusing to talk to the press. 75 years on from the first Penguins going on sale, the once indispensable travel companion, bedtime ritual and posing tool for intellectuals everywhere – the paperback – is in dire straits.....

Click here to read more..
 

Reasons why eBooks are Rubbish: #1

I plan to make this an ongoing series. This will be very easy, because I can come up with infiinite reasons as to why ebooks are ultimately and irrevocably awful. I hate ebooks. I despise them with every ounce of my being. I think this is because they tear my soul apart: I am a secret geek and I covertly covet a lovely shiny iPad with its little app squares like polished cut gems and clever touch-screens that make it look like you're turning a real page and its smug little rounded edges that make everyone in a five mile radiance want to avoid and then kill you.

But, if I'm anything, I'm completely grounded in physicality, and I don't think I'm ever going to be able to give up the smell of a new book, the perfume of an old one, the blank margins to scribble in, the pages I can stick an old train ticket into or lining up a bunch of colourful spines on a shelf. Also, I'm very poor and I like reading in the bath - I can't afford to hold £700 above a tub of soapy water.

ANYWAY. Reasons why eBooks are Rubbish #1:
You can't do this with an old iPad.

 

 

Suck on that, Steve Jobs!!!!

Treehugger.com has lots more brilliant uses for old books here.