Have ebooks changed your reading habits?
 

While I always loved a good series and frequently read them before I started reading ebooks, I have to say the way I read now has changed.

I tend to read by series more (and rereading is so much more pleasant with not having to search the entire house to find book 2 lol)

I also tend to read by author when I find one I like, searching for all the books available.

What about you?

I've been reading primarily ebooks for so long (about 30 years now), that in all honesty I struggle to remember what my reading habits were before I started doing so. I started out with books from PG, but even many of my commercial ebooks are approaching 20 years old!

You're right, though - ebooks makes it a lot easier to read series in order, which is exactly what I generally do.

Self published books. That is the only change, and a very good change.

I also tend to read complete series now and in order, and hunt down books by similar authors that I've read and liked. Plus just reading a lot more since it's become so much more convenient.

Like Ripplinger said, I just read so much more now. I was very bad to my PBs - bending them, damaging the spines, losing my bookmarked place - so we divorced by mutual consent.
I have also found that, by using Calibre to organise my library, I am far better at ensuring I alternate between genres (using my own assigned tags) so that I never follow a book with one from the same genre.
The interesting test is about to come because I have just bought my first paperback for 8 years (spotted in a charity shop a copy of something I have wanted to read for years but is not available in ebook), but will I still be such a cruel lover to my PB?

I'm more likely to put a book down if it's not catching my interest now. I think it's because there are always more on the reader - where before I just had the one (or maybe two) paperbacks in my purse.

For the first few years of the modern (long after Harry started) era of ebooks, I found that most of my reading time had switched from print to ebooks. But within the past 18 months or so, I found that I have returned to print books for about 75% of my reading. What I find off-putting about ebooks is the price combined with the limitations.

However, ebooks have changed one significant aspect of my reading: I am now interested in finding good indie authors in the genres I like to read for pleasure. (I rarely read nonfiction ebooks; probably 98% of all my ebook reading is fiction.) I don't mind spending a few dollars on an ebook and I like that I can often preview an ebook.

But the love of ebooks that readers like Harry have and profess eludes me. Perhaps it is because most of my reading is nonfiction or perhaps it is my age, but I find I am less interested in ebooks than I was previously.

There are two main reasons for it, Richard:

1. Storage space. By the mid 1990s my house had reached the stage where I had double-stacked bookshelves along every accessible wall surface, and no room for any more. Ebooks allow me to have as many books as I want without running out of storage space. These days I use my bookshelves for my non-fiction books that aren't available as ebooks (or which are easier to use as paper books), and a very small number of my particular favourite fiction books which I have as good-quality hardbacks, such as my 3-volume illustrated versions of "The Lord of the Rings".

2. I travel a great deal, both with work and for pleasure, and ebooks allow me to have a large number of books with me at all times. Prior to ebooks I would always agonise about which books to take with me on a trip; now I just take my Kindle and I have close to 2000 books with me.

This was my situation too. To many books and not enough book shelves.

I do not travel as much as I used to but, when I do I can take all of my books with me.
Apache

I read a little more than I used to. But I buy a lot more than I used to. Because ebooks are cheap, easy to get and often impulse buys. Also my TBR pile is no longer a physical thing that stops me buying.

I started reading ebooks in the late 1990's when Baen started putting out his ebook bundles.

The biggest changes for me are

1) I tend to read by mood more since I don't have to search the house for a book that fits my mood.

2) I read multiple books at a time. Well, actually I did this before, but it's a lot easier not to lose track of what books I'm reading

3) I tend to go on reading binges more from the stand point that I'll find a series, author or subject that I find interesting then read several of that in a row. For example, I just finished John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series. I had bought the first one as part of a bundle some time ago and never got around to reading it. Then a month ago, I gave it a shot, liked it, bought the other three and read those (also got the audio books since Amazon had them real cheap if you had purchased the ebook). I just finished Anonymous Soldiers, a book about the Struggle for Israel from 1917 to 1947. That peaked my interest, so I bought several more books on the various Israeli-Arab wars.

4) I have all my books with me at all times, so I read more at lunch more and in the various time periods when I'm waiting.

Actually, I would say that the biggest change is more in how I buy books (which leads to how I read). It's easier to buy whole series now. I normally try to read series in order, so before, if I happened to see a book in the book store that looked interesting, and I saw it was the 3rd in a series, but the first two where not stocked, I didn't buy it. Now, I see a book online line that I like, I see it's the 3rd of a series and I buy all three.

A. I live in Oaxaca, Mexico, and prefer to read in English. So, for twelve years I read what I could find. It wasn't totally hopeless but sometimes it got a bit grim. With my Kindle I can read what I want to read.

B. I used to read series but have abandoned most of them. I got fed up with Mathew Scudders alcoholism and AA fundamentalism. I got tired of hearing about Kay Scarpetta's lesbian niece who was the FBI agent. And Inspector Ian Banks' love life is a bore.

C. I agree with a previous poster. When I bought paper books and lugged them home I tended to read them. Now, if a book a bad I'll dump it. My record was a book that started with five pages of detailed torture and when it shifted to the gang rape of the tortured woman I dumped it. I think I was on page six.

D. FWIW, when I was working my reading was 98% non-fiction and was work-related. Once I quite working I flipped and now my reading is 95% fiction.

E. I know it's just a business but I appreciate Amazon making the first Kindle, pursuing the market when it was almost non-existent, and being a source of books for me to read. Thanks, folks.

My record for giving up on a book was about the same. I bought it back when I was a teenager because the blurb on the back compared it to Tolkien (this was during the first Tolkien craze in the mid 70's). It started with an illicit act on a sheep. I tossed it in the garbage. What was funny is that my mother got it out of the garbage and because it had a colorful cover, put it in the bookcase. For years, she had a hard core porno book in the living room bookcase. Being a typical teenager, this provided me endless mirth. :D I don't think I ever got around to explaining what the book was about to her.

I stopped buying and reading paper back in the 90s because of space issues as well as too small font size. I switched over to reading fanfiction on my pc. I bought my first Sony reader back in 2010 and never looked back.

My library consists of 95% series, with authors I like. Some of them I have stopped purchasing their books because they just went off the rails or became too repetitive.

But that's the wonderful thing about my pc & reader/tablets, I have plenty of room to find a new author to add their books to.

I read a lot more than before and even if I have paper books at home I am only reading ebooks now. I love reading on my Kindle.

I just read more novels and narrative non fiction now that they are physically easier for me to do. I have poor eyesight and some physical handicaps.

Since I got my Nook a few years back, I haven't read a paper book.

One way e-books have changed my reading habits is I read more classics. I enjoy downloading from Project Gutenberg and other free PD books.

Like (I'm assuming) most everyone else here, I have WAAAAAY too many books in my house. Surprisingly, I've noticed I don't have a big emotional attachment to my paper books. If I have an e-book version, I can happily donate/toss the paper book, live a more Spartan life.

The main change since getting an ereader is that I now buy most of my books new, because the ebooks are so much cheaper than paper, and that has had quite an effect on what I read.

Before I relied mainly on library borrowing and buying second-hand paperbacks, and so I didn't always read what I would have most liked to read, but instead made do with what was available. As a result I often only read one or two of an author's books or of a series, simply because the rest were either out of print, hard to find, too expensive to buy new, or too expensive to ship from overseas.

Now I am reading a lot of the backlist that I missed out on before, including re-reading and completing series that I had only read a few books from before.

Mostly in the area of clutter. A few years back, and I had a K2 for a while,, I was cleaning out a storage building and came across books I had been lugging around for years. I decided I'm done and took a yellow pad and a pen and started writing down authors names and book titles and aside from those I considered my collections I donated them all to the local animal humane society and started to rebuild my library in e-book form.

I buy the occasional hardback and may pick up a used paperback on occasion but even the. I prefer the kindle version.

My wife on the other hand still will only read a pbook and they arrive in the mail on a regular basis.

Well first and most important my habits have changed from not reading at all anymore to being able to again. My first ebooks I read with my first kindle in 2008. My eyes could not handle the small font anymore and my hands hurt with paperbacks. And the smell of some of the old used books. :eek:

I also have one bookshelf only now for space. I used to borrow a lot of paper books before and bought and resold to not keep to much in the house.

I read much more now, its just easier on e-ink for my eyes. Its easier to follow series now.

And one of the most happy things I found was back list. In the genre I most like to read the 90's and early 2000's were haydays of some of the best of books. Yet, many were out of print and often with a very high price for a nasty old books. I am so happy to see a lot of this backlist being out there for me to read finally. Or again.

I been able to read and find more books in the genres/subgenres I like now with ebooks. Partly of course because of all the social media and online readers that have also embraced ebooks.

I read about twice a fast on e-ink compared to paperback, so I can now read twice as many books in a year. Win win :D

Oh yeah. I love finding re-released stuff. Mid-list writers are getting a second chance, republishing old cult classics. And they tend to be cheap. $1.99, $2.99. Such a deal!

I first started reading "ebooks" in the 80s when I could get some classics, public domain novels, and reference books as text files on CD-ROMs. But even then, I had to read them on the computer screen -- I had no way to carry them around with me. I've been doing much, much more reading since I got a JetBook Lite, my first ereader.

The first reason is portability. When I go to get some work done on my car, accompany a relative to a doctor's appointment, etc., I can bring an ereader and choose from hundreds of ebooks. I especially like short (and very short) stories in these cases, and in the ebook world it's much easier to get short stories -- you can buy them (lots of them!) individually -- as opposed to the paper world, where you have to buy magazines or anthologies. Of course, I do also buy ebook magazines and anthologies.

And cost is very different for much (but not all) of the ebook world. It's not unusual for the first book in a series to be offered free or at a steep discount, so I'm much more likely to take a chance on a new series that I might like. I think that I go on to buy additional books in these series about half the time, so this strategy is paying off for quite a few authors.

I do still haunt a local used book store, mostly for old paperbacks and science fiction magazines that aren't available as ebooks, yet. But not as often as I used to.

Turkey has a nice system for ordering books. I could order any in-print book with its stock price and have it delivered to me for free, but it took a month. So the biggest benefit for me was not waiting for a month.

For books out-of-print, I usually ordered from Abebooks; but as many out-of-print books are still not available as ebooks, this isn't changed that much.

Of course, the boom in genre fiction is very nice too.

My habits have changed so much that when I read a paper book, I'm shocked that the size of the print can't be adjusted and there is no easy way to look up the meaning of arcane words, British slang, for instance.

I still read plenty of paper books, but I think ebooks have changed my reading in two main ways:

- It's so much easier to get hold of things. It's easy to look them up. Easy to buy them. And you can start reading pretty much instantly. I'm never really stuck reading something I don't care for. I used to pick up cheap books that might be ok just because I might otherwise get stuck with nothing new to read. That's never going to happen again.

- Availability. Even if I don't have my reader with me, I'm still likely to have my phone, and it's easy to make sure I have a few short story collections on there. I can take one ereader on holiday and not worry about running out of reading matter.

Ebooks been berry, berry good to me.

I am ehooked on ebooks. I still have my PB collection, but they are for emergencies like a long complete power failure.
Apache

That's why I have

1) a Kudo solar powered battery case for my iPad (both iPad and iPad mini)
2) a mophie case for my iPhone
3) a mophie battery pack that will recharge my iPad twice (it also holds a charge for a very long time)
4) multiple UPS's.
5) a solar charger from Solio.

and as a last resort, a Sony PRS-T2 which will last for up to two weeks on a charge. (Just need to remember to keep my calbre library synced with my laptop and lots of batteries for the flashlight).

As long as it's not the zombie apocalypse, I'm set! :D

My JetBook Lite and an economy-sized pack of AAs. I've already been through a couple of extended outages, most recently post-Sandy, and being able to read something wasn't one of my problems! :D

I normally read what was available. Reading a series from the beginning to the end was most of the times not possible.

Currently I read a lot more, as ebooks make reading a lot more affordable, and easier, as the nearest bookstore is about 150-200 km away, and a decent bookstore is between 300-400 km.I still read pBooks, Mostly "ancient" ones, those that's not yet digitized (and until I get a Scanner won't be)

I think audiobooks even more than ebooks have changed my reading. I doubled the amount of books/pages "read" this year because of them.
As far as ebooks go, kindle(s) have been very helpful of getting the book I want. I read in English primarily and for last 5 years I've been living in places where they don't sell English books in brick and mortar shops. So Amazon and Kobo are a huge blessing to me. Kobo..though..less and less. It's been getting too expensive.
Also there's the whole deal with moving (which I did a lot, to another country and inside the same country....probably around 5-6 times in last 5 years). Having 90% of your library on kindle, helps a lot.

I forgot about including Audiobooks. I got hooked a few years ago and have gone through a lot more pages if you count that. I have a daily commute of about 1 1/2 hours plus just casual stuff on the weekend. If I'm out doing projects at the house, I'm plugged in and listening.

I can't recall the last time the car radio wasn't programmed to Aux and actually played music.

I got my first Kindle, a K1, in May of 2008, and haven't read a paper novel since. My eyes aren't the greatest (in fact, I'm blind in the right one, due to an aneurysm), so being able to i crease the font size is perfect.

I tend to buy way more books than I did before, because of the ease of finding something new to read on Amazon. I used to go to the bookstore every 2 or 3 weeks, so I reread a lot more, just to have something to read.

Exactly whats happened to me. Additionally, I think I am reading more because I can hold an ereading device in my hand much longer than a paper book. I tend to get a lot of muscle cramping with pbooks in recent years. Bit of a shame, I have several bookcases full of books, many of which I have not yet got round to reading, and which will have to be sold off at some point. (I used to just go on buying binges when out and wandering the bookstores, when I was younger)

I loved listening to audiobooks when driving to and from work, but not so much when sitting about the house. I'll still listen to something on long drives but now I am no longer working, I don't really have much use for them.

I'm reading more since I got my Kindle.

Yea, good point. Audiobooks is a pretty big game changer for me as well.

Audio books are outstanding for those who can't read but that means you're using tablets or cell phones and not ereaders to have books read to you.

Not necessarily, quite a few ereaders have MP3 playback capability and a headphone jack.

30 years? 30 years ago you could read the text faster than it would download!

I can imagine you now...

Not true. I use MP3 player (Sansa Clip Zip).
And I can read perfectly well, ebooks or pbooks. I "read" audiobooks because they are completely different experience and I like how they make me feel. I often find they create a completely different kind of atmosphere and with a good narrator they can enhance my experience of a book, believe it or not.