I’m not going to lie, amid the pandemic I thought this was going to be a year where e-books experienced a bit of a resurgence in our annual poll.
Nope.
If anything, this year’s results reflect the continued resurgence of paper book optimism, which bottomed out between 2011-2013. Not coincidentally, this was around the time when publishers moved to the “agency model” and began raising e-book prices.
Maybe we miss and want to support our independent bookstores, maybe paper books continue to be an antidote to our omnipresent screens, maybe e-books still feel too expensive relative to their paper counterparts.
What do you make of the results?
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E-format isn’t good for my eyesight. I don’t tolerate it well at all. I already.spend enough time on electronic media. When I relax, make it paper, please. I also like the ability to touch books on the shelf… old friends, close by.
I think it does show that books are works of art as well as works of literature. No one prefers an e-ink version of a painting or ceramic piece to the real thing. A tangible object that you can handle and turn the pages gives a lot of pleasure if it’s well designed. I also buy a lot of my books as ebooks, but I’m not giving up my hardback copy of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.
I’m waiting for Mr. Bezos to beam the books directly into my brain. Unless it’s “1984” and he decides to take it back like he did with the Ebook version, along with the rest of my thoughts. Oh wait…
As a digital nomad, I’ve been reading almost exclusively digital books for several years now. It’s great, because I can carry my whole library with me wherever I go. But once the pandemic set in and I became aware of how Bezos was treating his employees, I immediately stopped buying anything from them, including ebooks. That has been a real sacrifice, because I have been pretty dependent on my Kindle, and they have it set up so that you can’t put epub formatted books on it, so I’ve been limited to what was already on my kindle plus whatever I can find on Project Gutenberg. I’ve considered buying another e-reader, but my finances won’t allow for it now, and amazon’s biggest competitor is apparently Walmart, which is another one of the giant retail monopolies that I don’t want to give my money to. I’m not sure where to go from here. I can’t build up another library from scratch, because I never know how long I’ll stay in any one country. I’m happy to buy used books and pass my fiction reads on to someone else after I’ve finished, but I read a lot of non-fiction that I need to use for reference purposes, so I need to find an ethical source. I have noticed that ebook prices are rising, and it doesn’t seem fair, considering that there isn’t a physical object to be manufactured, and the authors receive so little. Readers of the world need to unite to find an alternative that is both ethical and affordable.
Books are tangible art. Nobody needs (many eschew) more screen time. I love my Kindle when traveling and audiobooks are awesome while running, but a book in hand is the best portal to another world or way of being.
I check out e-books from the library but buy real books. So while most of my consumption is digital, technically my answer to your survey would be that, no, I don’t ever think I’ll buy mostly e-books.
The only thing I ever liked better about e-books was the price. Now that they are priced about the same, there is literally no reason to buy e-books.