The Death of the Book

Well it's finally happened, the e-book is taking over the book. It's been in works for many years now, and then battle will probably last forever. Hopefully the old paperback can hold out.

From NY Times:
Since April 1, Amazon sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, including books without Kindle versions and excluding free e-books. 

“We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, in a statement. “We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.” 

But people should not exile their bookshelves to storage quite yet, many analysts warned. Over all, e-books account for only about 14 percent of all general consumer fiction and nonfiction books sold, according to Forrester Research. 

“E-book reading is a big deal and it’s going to continue to be even bigger,” said James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester. “But we are not to the point where e-books are a majority of unit sales and certainly not a majority of revenue.” 

I don't know about you, but I like books. I'm an English major so obviously I'm more of a reading nerd than most. But there is something just satisfying about cracking open a book and digging in. And I can't read for shit on a little Kindle screen.

Kindle: $114

Eyes: Free

Think about it this way. If you have a bunch of books downloaded to a Kindle and your it breaks, what happens? I'm sure you get to keep your e-books. But what hoops do you have to jump through to get them back? And if you invest in a Kindle and buy a shit-ton of e-books for it, then you are stuck. If you break it, you have to buy another one to read your e-books right? It just seems like they are selling you a $100 device just to read books (if you remember five years ago we did it the old fashioned way), oh wait, that is exactly what they are doing.