{"id":6969,"date":"2026-07-06T09:32:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T16:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=6969"},"modified":"2026-07-06T09:32:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T16:32:29","slug":"ebook-use-case-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=6969","title":{"rendered":"Ebook Use Case Found"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/blog\/new\/?p=6606\">Almost exactly a year ago<\/a>, I wrote: &#8220;Unless \u2026 I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don\u2019t seem to make much sense to me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Well, use case found: technical floras. I have found ones for both <a href=\"https:\/\/a100.gov.bc.ca\/pub\/eirs\/viewDocumentDetail.do?fromStatic=true&#038;repository=BDP&#038;documentId=19910\">British Columbia<\/a> (where I live) and <a href=\"https:\/\/floraneomexicana.org\/flora-neomexicana-series\/\">New Mexico<\/a> (where I visit periodically) downloadable for <em>free<\/em> online. These are real static files, with all the rights of ownership. Of course, being available for free, I can&#8217;t expect to sell them for money, but who cares. The main thing is that someone can&#8217;t set a record in a database somewhere and make my books vanish from my reader.<\/p>\n<p>The print version of even a single such flora costs over twice what basic ebook reader costs, so such a device pays for itself basically immediately. Sure, there&#8217;s a good chance the reader will be dead in about a decade, making me replace it, but even then, the cost disparity makes buying two readers justifiable. By then, we&#8217;re getting to around twenty years, by which time a) it&#8217;s likely I won&#8217;t be going on long hikes anymore due to my advanced age, and b) the floras I have will be obsolete anyhow, due to nomenclature changes.<\/p>\n<p>A further bonus is weight and bulk: an ebook reader is lighter than even a condensed, single-volume version of a technical flora, and the two above are only available in their full-size, multivolume versions. That&#8217;s really important for something I want to take along on hikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote: &#8220;Unless \u2026 I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don\u2019t seem to make much sense to me.&#8221; Well, use case found: technical floras. I have found ones for both British Columbia (where I live) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}