Quote:
Originally Posted by PurpleStar
I don't think paper books should be phased out at all. A lot of people can't afford fancy e-readers or have credit cards to buy the e-books, or even money to buy the e-books. What would happen to public libraries then, if paper books were gone?
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I think that inability to afford an ereader would be a legitimate concern in 2005, when these things easily cost €450 or so, but now you can have an ereader for the price of about 10 paperbacks. (In the Netherlands, that is, where an English paperback will cost you around €9.95.) Buying the ereader costs you 10 paperbacks, but gains you the ability to quite easily read hundreds and hundreds of books for free; quite literally. Books for which you would have needed to pay money (at least, to loan them) to be able to read them.
Even iff I'd *only* read classics on my ereader and nothing else, I will have saved huge amounts of money. I save even more by buying books from BooksOnBoard and other non-Dutch sites; there, I can get some books for under €4, while the ebook or paper version would cost me €9-12 in the Netherlands.
In the end, the only thing I worry about is future readability or usability, but this is the problem with almost all digital formats. IMHO, un-DRM-ed EPUB is the safest format to have your books in, at this point in time, as it is just plain HTML/CSS with some small additions, so it can be relatively easily converted.
In the end, I'd like to have all my paper books as ebooks, and apart from some (very) obscure ones, such as Dutch versions of English and German works of which I don't know the original title (as it's not in the book), I'm quite a ways along to making this happen
Quote:
Originally Posted by xendula
I hope paper books will be around forever. I love them, and they look nice on sheves and in libraries, I just can't be bothered to read them if I can find the ebook instead.
There a some ebooks I read this year that I loved so much that I thought I should get the hard cover versions - only, I realized I would get them for the sake of getting them, as I would never read them.
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It's the same with me. I'm about to finish "IT" in ebook format. I already own the hardcover version in English. It's more than twice the size of a paperback (I can put two mass market paperbacks on top of it, and "IT" is still bigger), and it's 1250 pages thick. That book is one HUGE ***. I've tried to read part of the story in it, but after half an hour I have to put this book down because it's so *** large and heavy. I can read hours at a time when using my Kindle.
Still, I'm thinking of creating some sort of "über-collection", just because I like paper books: getting hardcover versions of books I REALLY like, just to have a book case. I did the same with DVD's: I've started to split up my DVD's into Oscar-winning stuff and getting special editions of that, where possible, and DVD's I just liked well enough; and the stuff I don't like (anymore) is being sold. For books, it would be hardcover versions of the stuff I really like, ebooks for the rest that is OK to good, and I'd sell of the rest of the paperbacks I don't like (anymore).
Ebooks quite saved me from crashing my second floor down to the first at some point in time...
To be honest, I'm still a bit torn between books and ebooks. I love paper books (even the heavy ones), but when an ebook is made up well, the custom fonts and fontsizes, ereader frontlight, lesser weight, smaller size, savings on free books in the PD, in short... the convenience, is what makes me to finally choose the ereader for day to day reading.