E – e-Book
04/05/2014 8 Comments
So part of the goal in the A to Z Challenge is to keep the posts short, so I’m not 100% sure why I decided to tackle e-books in a short format! What sorts of topics could I discuss on e-Books?
- What’s your favorite reader or vendor?
- e-Books at the Library
- Sharing e-Books
- Self-Publishing and e-Pub
- Will e-Books kill Print Books?
- I just got settlement money from the whole thing with the price of e-Books – what should I do with it?
- I can use my e-Book reader during a whole flight in the U.S. now!
I think really, the point of this post, to keep it short, really just needs to be, aren’t e-Books neat? The ability to have a whole bunch of books, on a single device. Being able to carry a virtual library with you wherever you go. Great for travel, which is when I get a lot of my reading done. Which might be bad, since I don’t travel enough…
But are e-Books neat enough? The answer is probably, not yet. What do you do when you’re done with it? Keep it forever. Okay… that’s a long time. So no donating it to the local library, no loaning it to a friend, no giving it to someone as a gift. No downsizing your collection – since, after all, it’s portable, so who would want to ever reduce the size of the collection? (Librarian Sarcasm)
Okay, there’s elements of some of those things you can do. And, better yet, there is a growing capacity for checking out e-Books from libraries. However, there is by no means an industry standard to this yet, as some publishers want to charge a ton for electronic access – something that’s done with print journals in databases, as well – because more people can access the book then. Or, they’re limiting access to how many people can have the book at a time. Or they’re adding a limit to the number of times a book can be checked out before it must be bought again. So it isn’t perfect yet.
So while I like my convenient books, I like my free access to books too – maybe especially books I’m not sure about, or books I know I won’t be reading again.
Where are you at? Completely adopted e-Books? Waiting to see? Half and half? And have you checked your local library for e-books? Let me know in the comments below!
About CompGeeksDavid
DBCII 
I chose Ebooks as my “E” topic today, too!
I like my kindle for the ease of borrowing library books and for taking lots of reading choices with me when I travel, but NOTHING will ever replace my love for physical books!
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Same here! But then, I said that and more in reply to your post. Thanks for stopping by!
And you can check out her post here: http://bookmammalmusings.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/e-is-for-ebooks-the-april-a-to-z-challengeday-5/
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I personally love actual books but recently for convenience sake I have switched to e-reading on my kindle app but I miss books…
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It’s tough. Our space for physical books is pretty much completely tapped out; in fact, if we finish reading the books on our bedstand bookshelves that are our “need to read” books, I don’t know where we would put them!
There are distinct advantages to e-reading, for sure. You say you miss books, but how have you liked e-reading?
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I resisted the offer of a Kindle for several years, but glad I had sense enough to say yes one Christmas. Intrigued with the e-book world, I have now published a novel with Book Baby publishers and have been happy with the results. Your blog is well presented and the $Challenge posts informative. Thank you. May I make a suggestion. Occasionally when posting, think of older readers who are on a new learning curve and thankful for you young folks who are in the ‘KNOW.’ Picking about who I follow, I’m following you.
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Congratulations on your e-book publication!
And thank you for the advice; a Challenge post I read on Audience (http://gno112.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/april-a-to-z-day-1-audience/) has me actually thinking a lot more about that as I write my blog posts. As such… how would you say my posts for the challenge have been – accessible, or only for people in the “Know?”
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ebooks are a conundrum – but we will figure them out as we go. i have a cloud library, so they aren’t all on my device at once, but where is this cloud? it’s funny, isn’t it? and loaning is being done like rentals, they expire and disappear after a time which makes me feel better as a writer.
thought provoking f post!
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Yeah, with the items just “in the cloud” it makes it a concern – if something comes up, they could just be removed like that – which happened a few years ago with, ironically, 1984. Or if your seller goes out of business, what happens to them? That happened with Borders!
The library side with them is getting better, but it would be nice if an industry standard arose, for payment on these. However, it sounds like even with electronic journal access – which has been around even longer – they’re constantly trying new business models still. It’ll be interesting to see where these all go in the coming years and decades – or will we have moved on to something completely different?
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