Last night I read it for an hour on my Paperwhite 2.
This morning after I parked my car, while walking from the parking lot into the office, I launched the Kindle app on my iPhone. It picked up where I left off from the Paperwhite and I read a few more pages. Over lunch I will likely read some more on the phone, or maybe on my PC using the Kindle app for Windows. And certainly will read more on the phone later while waiting to get my hair cut.
While cooking dinner, maybe i’ll get in a few pages on my iPad. And finally, back to the Paperwhite prior to bed.
So while I prefer reading on the Paperwhite 2 over the other devices, the book is always with me, even if the Paperwhite is not.
I have a tomcat who pees on books. For this reason I buy e-books almost exclusively. Another reason I buy e-books is that they are cheaper, and I don’t have much money. Recently I bought the paper version of Victor Thorn’s “murder volume” of his Clinton series, but that was only because I thought Thorn might have been murdered and an e-book version of this book was not available. (I think whenever they murder a writer one should purchase his books in protest.) Anyhow I do almost all my reading on e-book readers, and I have been doing this since 2012, when I bought a used Kindle on e-bay. (I have subsequently purchased a Nook and a Sony Reader to go with the old Kindle.) Reading on e-readers has worked out fine with me. I don’t miss paper.
e-readers are a godsend to me. Because of disability, I have limited use of my hands so I find it incredibly difficult to read physical books as I struggle to hold them.
I have a kindle paperwhite and a small stand which fits into a pocket when folded.
I still haven’t bought a kindle / eReader, for many of the same reasons I mentioned in previous posts. I’ve recently started looking at them again, mainly because I thought it might be an easier way to get hold of all the Robert B Parker books, but I was troubled by the fact that eBooks seem… expensive.
I’d always thought that eBooks were significantly cheaper than their print equivalents and would ultimately pay for the device and enable me to justify a significant increase in book purchases. Sadly that doesn’t seem to be true anymore (if indeed it ever was).
I don’t know. I am tempted. I just… I guess I want more analogue in my life.
I had almost every Robert Parker book (all the ones he wrote for Spenser, Sunny, Stone, the westerns, and a few of the rest) and I just gave them away three or four months ago to a local convention.
You want me to contact the person and see if she still has them (since the convention was cancelled?)
I had someone give me an old Kindle e-ink with keyboard. I have been using it to read library books during the pandemic. I have surprisingly not hated it as much as I have at previous attempts. Finally got introduced to the Culture in this fashion.
I started reading e-books before e-books were a thing, with a simple e-reading app on my (dear heavens, has it been that long?) Palm LifeDrive. I also started mobile writing with that Palm… yes, this was before Kindles were introduced.
But my e-book fiction library (all paid for! Honest! Except for the ones that were legitimately free) now is approaching my paper fiction library in number of volumes. I’ve had a dedicated e-reader (a Kobo mini, now deceased), but mostly I’ve just used apps on my various laptop, phone and pad devices.
Yes, e-books are cheaper (compared to hardback publisher editions), but that’s not why I do it. The first airplane trip I took on which I didn’t have to schlep 2 kilos of books to keep myself entertained convinced me.
This always confuses me as, in my experience, ebooks aren’t expensive at all. I’ve just done a search on Amazon for Robert B Parker and the Kindle version seem to be around the £1.99 mark. Before e-readers, new paperback books were around £4.99 or more.
If I just go to the main Kindle books page, everything seems to range from 99p to £2.99 with maybe a handful around £4.
The Big 5 (or the Pig 5, if one prefers) inflate their ebook prices in order to prop up the sale of their seemingly more profitable paper products. It’s backfiring on them, however, and has done so for some time. That’s their prerogative, of course. Now they’re locked into their high ebook pricing scheme with no quick way out of it during a pandemic when paper book sales are down for them.
The other thing the Pig 5 abhors is Amazon, not realizing that Amazon is the biggest seller of their paper production.
Ebook authors take advantage of the Pig 5s’ high prices by pricing their books more conservatively. That works, too.
Love ebooks in terms of in-text searching, annotating, font and line adjustments, syncing between devices, scrolling through books with just a thumb, looking up meanings, having a library of annotated books with me all the time [with no weight added beyond the device itself], and so on.
Three other aspects I love:
Gets me away from the smell of paper and ink – especially the wretched, musty smell of old books – and away from other people’s snot and food spillages on library books
Not having to go into bookshops or libraries (an extension of point 1)
Can be anywhere at any hour of the day or night and get a book from an online store or library
Just wish libraries had better ebook collections in terms of the range of books they stock and the number of copies available. I’d be happy for every bricks-and-mortar library to close and be replaced by better, cheaper [to run], cleaner, more readily updated, more easily accessible, etc online libraries … though I appreciate other people would find that idea abhorrent.
But then where would I go when I need to research Glasgow gangs in the 19th century? The friendly librarians at the brick and mortar libraries are invaluable and need to eat. (To be clear, I’m a wizard at researching most stuff online. But there are times when online won’t work and I’m way out of my subject matter comfort zone.)
Think more can be done with a limited pot of money by providing digital services that give users 24-hour from-anywhere access and all the other benefits that have already been mentioned or which are obvious.
We see right now how much can be done through digital services and how much more could be done if we worked to improve and develop those services (for libraries, education, work, research, medicine, care, etc).
Think librarians can still exist and be available digitally, but so much money could be better invested in delivering “more” to more people if we didn’t blow large percentages of the available finance on (time-restricted and difficult-for-some-people-to-reach) buildings, maintenance, and physical products that deteriorate over time and which are expensive to replace.
I am not advocating spending less, but using the money more effectively for the benefit of a greater number of people … even if such a change is unwelcome by some people. For the greater cause. For the good of the many.
Digital is a medium that enables and empowers. It has reach and accessibility. And enabling and empowering people is a pretty good goal … in my book.
Think a few landmark libraries will survive but that the future will largely be digital. Just depends on how quickly we reach that future. Soon, I hope.
Snap! I started in about 1997 on a Palm IIIxe (the best one with the AAA batteries). I had to convert books to text files to read on it. It was worth not having to carry stuff on train though. I updated that to a Tungsten T3. Colour! Repligo! Good times.
I haven’t bought a physical book since.
Don’t.
An author doesn’t get very much payment for printed books published by one of the great publishers. About $2 is a normal fee for a book selling at $19.99 or more in a bookstore. If I sell the same book myself via Amazon, as e-book for $2.99 or a paperback for $9.99, I get a similar payment from Amazon.
Writers need to sell a lot of books to get financially comfortable, and few authors sell that much. Most authors write because the love writing, not as a way of becoming financially comfortable. And for most authors, indie publishing gives them better profits and incomes.
