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Comfort Books
The relationship of ebooks to pbooks is going to be complicated for awhile, and romances are a good example of this. I read somewhere (it was a few years ago) that romance readers read more titles per unit time than any other genre. Most of those titles are read only once, but when an individual reader identifies an author that he/she really likes, the favorite books by favorite authors are read more than once, generally as pbooks. My wife has a "comfort" shelf of pbook romances she reads in stressful times, like the Christmas Angels books by (I think) Debbie McComber. ("Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy will follow me wherever I go...") She's read them more often than I've read Startide Rising. It's a different process and a different psychology; there are times when you want a sort of "comfort read" and as with comfort food there's more on the table than the food itself. Particularly for those who grew up bookish in an era of paper, comfort = pbook. I've seen that effect in myself. There are times when I don't want to be surprised; I want to know precisely how a story unfolds--and I want to read it the same way I did in the bygone, happier times of my life.
This may be true for another 30 years or so, until an entire generation grows up with ubiquitous access to ebooks.
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