FWIW I am not anti Kindle. I also have plenty of Kindle books too.
How so? With eBooks, you can search the text itself, making finding anything in the book much easier (IMHO).
That said, I’ve only read two or three eBooks in my life, and the other eBooks I have are reference manuals and things of that nature where the search function is a timesaver over traditional books, hence my reason to keep them.
But for any kind of book for leisure, I prefer paper books by far.
Now, magazines, I’ve started to become sold on the electronic format. My Cooks Illustrated subscription is now electronic only, and I love it, especially since each recipe also comes with a video, and the electronic version has some bonus recipe variations I don’t think I’ve seen in the dead tree editions.
Sure, I like print books, but I’m buying more on Kindle. If it is something like an SF novel, I’ll only buy it on Kindle since the chances of me reading it again anytime soon are quite slim. My apartment is only 520 sq ft, so I don’t have endless storage space for physical books. Plus, anytime I move, there’s always the tough decision as to what to donate and what to keep.
Those of you who are big paper devotes, have you tried the Kindle paperwhite? I just about can’t read a “real” book anymore. I do a lot of my reading in bed, and the slightly-lit screen is just so good for that, plus you can prop it open easily, not having to balance a heavy book in your hand reading on your side…and the ability to change font size, and highlight and make mulitple bookmarks. It’s a really good technology, and not at all like reading on a tablet.
I’ve donated almost all of my paper books at this point. They’re just things that I have to dust.
I have always loved books. In fact, I love them so much that I periodically have to purge my library, simply in order to have space for myself in my domicile.
Unfortunately, I also love re-reading books I have enjoyed before. As a result of the interaction of these two loves, there are books I have purchased several times over.
This is where a Kindle shines. I can have hundreds of books on it and never have to get rid of them.
I also always have another book ready to go when I finish the one I am reading. I can choose any of the books on my Kindle anytime I want, anywhere I am.
My only qualm about using the Kindle is the dwindling market for bookstores. But, I figure the future is coming, whether we like it or not. I’ll do what works for me.
I still have a lot of physical books and don’t plan to get rid of them soon. But I am gradually divesting some into several mini free-libraries in my area.
The flip side of that is it’s so much easier for new authors to self-publish. If you self-publish with Kindle, you keep 70% of the profit as an author, vs. about 10% for traditionally published writers. Granted, that low barrier to entry means the reader ends up sifting through a lot of terrible self-published dreck, but it does offer a nice way for people to get writing out that might be too niche for the big publishers.
This is true.
In fact, one of my favorite recent books, “the Martian” by Andy Weir started as a self-published e-book, before being picked up by a publishing house and then getting the movie deal.
On the other hand, I encountered it by buying a paper copy in a bookstore.
The resolution on current Kindle readers is really not that great- at most 300 ppi as far as I can tell. It does have the distinct advantage of taking up less space than thousands of books.
I love the words in the books. Whether the words are on paper or on a screen matters little to me.
What does this mean, exactly? If I self-oublish, I expect to get no less than 100% of the profits. And if I manufactured dreck, I would not expect any publisher to pick it up. Or is it known that Kindle will publish literally anything as long as it’s an e-book? (Which is where I can come in with thousands of computer-generated novels…)
Basically it means that an author can upload a text file and cover image and blurb to Amazon’s software, and that software will make it play nice with kindles, and offer said book for sale in the Kindle store. This costs zero dollars on the part of the author. I think also these books can be ordered print-on-demand for readers of paper books. (note: I have not personally done this, I’ve just looked into it, don’t quote me on this.) It also allows you to list the book in the Kindle Unlimited program, which is amazon’s subscription library thing ($10 or $12 a month?) and you get paid for pages read by subscribers.
So it’s kind of free marketing. I mean, you can also market the book on amazon. And you’ll probably want to. But it’s a pretty good deal for writers, and there are a lot of people making a living off it that would otherwise not be making a living writing.
Edit: the books still have to find buyers, and Amazon is very strict about computer generated content and other ways people have tried to cheat this system. Amazon isn’t paying you an advance.
Yeah, you’re doing the writing, but you’re taking advantage of something like Amazon’s platform and marketing, so basically they’re getting an agent’s fee for connecting you with readers. Is that really so unreasonable?
Or… you could purchase your own web domain, set it up for payment and download, do your own marketing…
Your choice.
Fortunately, bookstores are doing ok.
From here.
Sure you can find anything on Amazon, if you think to search for it or if Amazon recommends it to you. But only in bookstores do you fortuitously stumble over something you had no idea existed.
Like the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me crossword puzzle book I found in a bookstore on the Haight a few weeks ago.
Owning lots of paper books is just lovely, UNTIL IT’S TIME TO MOVE! Speaking as someone who owns a couple thousand paper volumes, and who has just moved from a very large house with lots of built-in bookcases to a much smaller one with no built-ins (until we finish the basement), I have, for the first time in my life, begun to rethink my attachment to paper books.
Yes, they look nice on the shelves. Yes, they are impressive to visitors. Yes, they feel nice and smell nice (mostly). And yes, they serve as a kind of portrait of you and your interests throughout your life. (For me, this is the real reason I am so reluctant to get rid of them.)
But let’s face it: if you own, say, 2,000 volumes, how often do you actually go back to reread or even briefly refer to any one book? How many have you read once, put on the shelf, and never touched again? How many have you started and never finished? How many have you bought and never even read?
On this last move we used movers, so I didn’t personally carry those 70 fifty-pound boxes of books from the house to the van or from the van into the new house (in the July heat). But I packed them all myself, and I’ll be moving them from the garage and unpacking them when we eventually get the shelf space. And it’s not as easy for me at 63 as it was when I was 53, or 43, or 23.
If you’re lucky enough, as we were, to have space for your books, and your if life is stable enough that you aren’t likely to have to move (ours wasn’t), there may be little downside to owning a big private library. But my wife and I are less than a decade from retiring, and at that time will probably move to an even smaller house or condo. So the cons of owning lots of books are beginning to outweigh the pros, for me.
I propose that we lobby congress to enact a law that gives purchasers of paper books the right to a free digital copy, as is the case now with music and videos. It’s criminal that publishers can charge as much for a digital version of a book as for the hard copy. Either make the digital copy very cheap, or make it a package deal: full price gets both editions. And it should be retroactive: I should be able to get a free digital copy of every book I already own. Then I could happily free myself of the burden of tons of physical books.
To me, the point of a library is surrounding myself with things I’ve never read.
I prefer to read digitally just because it’s so handy. I frequently find myself waiting in waiting rooms, offices, car lines at school, etc…and don’t happen to have a physical book along. But I always have my phone and I have hundreds of books stored on it.
Yeah. I hear some people complain about e-books: “But they could remotely alter or delete them! I can’t be sure I’ll always get to keep them!” Maybe there’s some small risk of something like that (which you can protect yourself against if you’re really worried), but between the possibilities of fire, flood, and having to move to a much smaller place, there’s no guarantee you’ll get to keep your paper books forever, either.
In fact, facing mortality means accepting that, paper or electronic, you’re not going to get to keep your books forever, because even if they last forever, you won’t.
I’ve often thought that it would be nice if you could easily “rip” a book to digital format, the way you can with a CD. You could indeed scan them, page by page, but that’s much more cumbersome than ripping a CD. I don’t know about the legality; IMHO if it’s not legal to do this for your own personal use, it should be; but even if it’s not I kind of doubt anyone would mind, if it is indeed only your own personal use.
When you say “there oughta be a law” that someone else should be required to provide you with digital copies of paper books you own, that’s a little more dubious. It’s hard to see how that would work on a practical level. Of course, you can already do this with books that are freely available from sites like Project Gutenberg; and I’ve taken advantage of this to trim down my collection and get rid of some of my public-domain paper books.
And Amazon has a deal (or did the last time I checked) where, for a book you bought directly from them, you can get a big discount if you want to also buy the Kindle version. Should they be free, instead of just cheap? I don’t know. If it’s worth something to you to have it in digital format, it seems fair to pay a little for it.
This is more practically done in bulk, using robots, by organizations such as the Internet Archive than by individuals at home. It is less of an issue for newer books since these are produced digitally anyway.
On a practical level, of course various publishers are not going to send you extra copies of books you already purchased, but they are all freely available online on either legitimate or “grey” sites, so censorship by Amazon or cumbersome scanning are mostly non-issues. (The legality of format shifting and private copying may be, but that is its own long-standing issue.)
First, I wasn’t entirely serious about my proposal, since, obviously, big businesses aren’t going to be in favor of the plan, so politicians aren’t going to consider it, either.
However, I didn’t know about the discount for Kindle editions of paper books bought through Amazon. That is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, and I just bought the Kindle editions of 21 books (mostly Discworld) I had bought there over the past 11 years. Thanks for letting me know about this, Thudlow!
For reading, all about the print. The only time I prefer digital is if I have to search - or copy block quotes 