Comments Solicted
I thought about my two-year-old daughter. She already has lots of books, but they’ve all been bought for her by adults. When she has her own pocket money, will she buy a printed book? At first, I was sure she would. Our house is full of books and she loves exploring them. But the more I think about it, the less sure I am.
Last week, Penguin announced that digital sales now make up 14 per cent of its total business. John Markinson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, described the first six months of this year as “a watershed for book publishers and book retailers alike”.
Fourteen per cent is a small share, but it’s growing. Printed books are doomed – and I’ll tell you why.
I’ve been switching between ebooks and printed books for the past couple of years. I’ve read ebooks on a Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle and on an iPad. I still love printed books: I like the design of them, I like how they feel and I like to browse a well-stocked shelf of books.
However, I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly frustrated with printed books because they don’t have a search function. With an ebook, I can quickly search the text to remind myself who a character is or to re-read a particular passage. It’s also much easier to annotate and highlight an ebook. I’ve never liked writing in printed books. It feels too much like spoiling them. Annotating an ebook, however, just adds a layer on to a digital file. It can disappear if I want it to.
There are other advantages to ebooks, too, such as being able to carry lots of them on a small device and the capacity to download a new book in seconds, but it’s searching and annotating that are the killer functions.
It is convenience that tips us from an analogue medium to a digital one. I have friends who swear by vinyl records and stubbornly resist CDs. We all know that an MP3 player offers inferior sound quality to a CD, and yet overwhelming numbers of people have made the jump. Almost everyone will tell you that they love a nicely printed photograph. Yet most of us now take our photos on a digital camera – or even our mobile phone – and never print them out.
It is convenience that is drawing people to ebooks, and that is what will kill printed books. Or, if not kill them, reduce them to the same minority, hobbyist status that vinyl records now occupy.
My daughter’s generation is likely to have ebook textbooks. They won’t experience dog-eared, vandalised, outdated school books, shared one-between-two. They will enjoy books that are enhanced with video, interactive graphics and picture galleries. And they will see that these things are the norm.
For them, the printed version will be the oddity – a relic from their parents’ generation. They might appreciate the form, but they will see physical books as fundamentally less useful. And useful always wins in the end.
Ken Anderson - The Lulu'ers Professor
What I wonder is if the sale of E-books is extra to the sale of paper books? That is, the sale of paper books has fallen slightly and the sales of E-books has risen, because people who normally never buy books are now doing so?
But it's still new tech really and the likes of Kindle still a silly price for what it is (you can buy other reader type of objects that will play vidoes and MP3s and do all manner of things for a lot less, in full colour http://www.elonex.com/index.php/products/ebook-rea
Of those people I know who actually even read books, they all buy paper books. One of my sons even lugs 4" thick A5 fiction to work, and he can well afford a Kindle, in fact his cellphone is also an e-book reader.
I cannot actually say I have seen anyone with a Kindle or any other type of dedicated E-reader. I have never even seen anyone looking at the large display of Kindle's in stores and they are right next to the shelves full of 'real' books that are always busy. Call me old fashioned but I prefer the feel of a book in my hand to something that feels like holding a tile! Don't get me wrong about such things, I am a gadget freak who loves the latest tech. If it suits my purposes or is an improvement.
PS: Just in case you missed the other link on the above site >>> http://freebook.elonex.com/ 
But it's still new tech really and the likes of Kindle still a silly price for what it is (you can buy other reader type of objects that will play vidoes and MP3s and do all manner of things for a lot less, in full colour
-Yes, the Kindle is a book reader and it does that superbly well. The Elonex has a LED screen with back light - the advantage of tke Kindle is that it doesn't. It uuses the eInk technology tht doesn't strain the eyes, looks close to print on paper, can be read in direct sunlight and doesn't use any power.
You mean like a book? which uses no power whatsoever.
I was dismissiv eof ebook readers until I had a try of a friends Kindle K2 (the previous version) in the US a couple of years ago. When the Kinlde became available in the UK at the end of last year I asked for one for Christmas. I wondered whether it'd be a electrical gimmick I'd tire of or which didn't live up to its promise, but the opposite. It is brilliant.
I buy most of my books (well, not 'my' books, but you know what I mean) from charity shops. Oddly, many seem to be unread 1st editions even! Most cost £1 for 5 and even add colour to my bookcases
Of those people I know who actually even read books, they all buy paper books. One of my sons even lugs 4" thick A5 fiction to work, and he can well afford a Kindle, in fact his cellphone is also an e-book reader.
I haven't bought a DTB (dead tree book) since the Kindle. I just don't want another slab of paper, instead of carrying one book, I can carry all my books.
But why would you need to carry all of your books around with you? That's a bit like people who are hard-wired in to I-pods that carry 30,000 tunes, enough to listen to on a round the world trip in a balloon. Not only that, would you not have to re-buy all your paper books as e-books also? I cannot really think of an instance when I am not in the house when I have the time or even chance to read, but then again, I am nosy!
I Call me old fashioned but I prefer the feel of a book in my hand to something that feels like holding a tile!
I prefer reading and turning the 'page' in one hand, no matter how big the book is. Also, I have shelves and shelves of books here at home, so many that before the Kindle I took read books every week to the Oxfam shop because I had no more storage space. Now I have unlimited.
Well I hope you had them valued first 
For researching I can search not only in one book, but across all books on my Kindle, Any word I come across I can instantly get the Oxford dictionary definition just by moving the cursor to the word.want to
Yes, I can see that can be handy, but then so can a fully-fledged palm-held PC, for example, more so.
It doesn't do eveything well - colour pictures are greyscale on the Kindle itself, and the device and concept are not for everyone but I've not met anyone that has given the Kindle a trial who hasn't been converted.
Perhaps they like to read, but don't like books?
Several people say they love the physical feel/look of books but when I think about it, what I love is the information and stories inside the book, not the physical paper and cover. And I get that with the Kindle.
Ah, there you go then!
Another buzz is reading a book review in the weekend papers and getting it on my Kindle a minute later.
People read newspapers?!!
