Last week, my mom got a Kindle. Although it took her a few days to start using it (she says new technology intimidates her at first) she is now extremely into it and has been reading up a storm. I've been thinking lately about traditional paper books, and whether they have a place in the future. I'm going to just weigh out some pros and cons here between paper books and electronic books.
Storage Space
No doubt about it, this is one of the biggest reasons to get a Kindle or some other e-reader. If you're limited in terms of storage, a single tiny machine a little bigger than a novel but much thinner is much more attractive than shelves of books. It's also the way to go for portability. My inner collector still loves having lots of books, though.
Cost
A lot of ebooks are being sold for almost as much as - or even more than - physical copies. This is greed. An ebook requires no publishing, no shipping or handling, no warehouses to be stocked in. It's a digital file, and has far, far less overhead for the company. They should be significantly less expensive.
Other ebooks are cheap or free. Free is always a good price. You can get paper books free (or incredibly cheap) as well by visiting libraries, yard sales, and the like.
There is also, of course, the cost of the reader itself. A Kindle can be bought fairly cheaply (Amazon makes their money on ebooks, not readers) but it's still a pretty decent investment to make before you can start reading. Something to keep in mind.
Visibility
This is something most people my age don't think about. My mom loves to read, but she has difficulty with small type. The Kindle came to the rescue with an adjustable font size, allowing my mom to read clearly once more. It made her very happy to be able to read again, and it's something I thank the Kindle for. It's also something paper books utterly fail at, because A) not every book has a Large Print edition and B) you can't make your existing books into Large Print books with the press of a button.
Book Selection
The number of books that only exist as ebooks is growing and will continue to grow. Think back to the early 2000s, and how movies were released on both DVD and VHS for a while, but more and more movies were DVD only over time. However, at the same time, there are movies that came out on VHS in the eighties and nineties but were never rereleased on DVD when the new technology came. I think this will be the case with books - there will never be an electronic version of every paper book ever made, therefore paper books are not completely irrelevant and may be very useful in certain situations.
The Cloud
For those who don't know, "The Cloud" is shorthand for storing things on the Internet instead of on your own computer or owning a physical object.
This is something I've been hung up on for a while. Something I think is very important - if I pay for something, I want to own it. I don't want the company to be able to edit or remove it. I don't want to be charged a fee for continuing to own something. I want to be in control, not the company and their cloud. After they sell something to me, I should have the right to do as I wish - to lend it out, to read it over and over, to resell it.
For the same reason, I've been wary of the recent popularity of digital game downloads (although I've bought a few I couldn't get any other way). Services like Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo's Virtual Console are neat and all, but should something happen to my video game system, the games stored on it are gone. I want to have a physical object, like a cartridge or disc. It is much more reassuring and solidly mine. I also hate that digital books and games can't be resold. I can't go to a garage sale and buy a used ebook. This movement towards digital and intangible things can crush the resale market, a market I have frequently relied on for both books and games as a way to buy things cheaply.
Conclusion
I've said before that I generally embrace new technology. This is true. I think ebooks have great potential. But I want to be the sole owner of things that I pay for, and so I personally believe that paper books will remain relevant to me as long as I live, even if they don't to anyone else.
That said, I may browse my mother's Kindle and see if there's any free nonfiction books about animals...
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