[Berlin_Freeper]

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/free-ebook-websites/3734667.html

[naturalman1975]

I’ve never seen the conflict. I love real books - and have thousands.

But I also like the idea of being able to carry a thousand ebooks in my pocket for those times when I’m away from my library and I have a few free minutes.

And when I am travelling doubly so.

[mad_as_he$$]

Fascinating. Around here us older folks are dumping “printed” books for the ebook - ease of storage and use. And I don't have to dust the ebook.

[OttawaFreeper]

I like going to used book emporiums myself. About a couple of weeks ago, I went to one and found and bought a compilation of Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and poetry.

[VanDeKoik]

EBook readers never improved. No dual page versions, and no color!

I have an used nook, and it just seems weird to use.

I also have more real books than ever before.

[Malsua]

My wife and I both worked for different publishers in Manhattan. We collected thousands of books as the publishers encouraged people to read their product. We also buy a lot of books and we both read a ton of books. We have one room with 3 walls, floor to ceiling of books.

Neither one of us has read a paper book in years. Now it’s all on our Kindle Paperwhites. We don’t go anywhere we might have downtime without it.

[cba123]

Might be related to computers continuing to get smaller.

I think they are now too small for books. As laptops, or desktops, they competed with, and were better than books.

But now, everyone has a computer which fits in their pocket, it is just too small. That is my view anyway.

Not much of a reader though, so I could be wrong.

[wyowolf]

I used to have tons of books, they went to the library. Now I just use my kindle.. sooooo much easier to have whatever book I want to read at my fingertips...and with Lending Library at Amazon I get a free book each month on top of all the ones I already have...

[exDemMom]

I much prefer the feel of a real book.

Plus, when I read, I like to thumb ahead and read bits and pieces of what is coming up. While you can do that with an electronic reader, it’s a bit harder to come back to where you were originally reading. You can’t stick your finger between the pages to mark your spot.

Plus, if I want to refer back to something, I remember it by the position in the book—e.g. about a third of the way through, on the left page, in the middle of a long paragraph that continues on to the next page, etc. My very visual means of remembering where book passages are does not work with ebooks. Sure, ebooks have search functions, but that isn’t the same.

[Psalm 73]

I never got on the e-book bandwagon - I like turning physical pages the way I enjoy putting vinyl records on my turntable.

Some things are fine just the way they are.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

There seems to be price fixing in the cost of ebooks. It is not uncommon to see something like the the hard cover version of a book priced at $12, while the ebook version is $10.50. Ridiculous.

And sharing or giving away an ebook is close to impossible (although technically there are schemes that allow this).

If you are willing to wait a few months, the price of a used best seller hard cover book will drop to about 1/4 of its original price in the secondary market on Amazon and other sites.

If you want free ebooks of the classics and various books in the public domain and so on, sites like archive.org or Gutenberg have thousands of free ebooks to choose from.

Frankly, I'm spoiled by the fact that when I was a young man, I could go into the drug store and buy a Dell Pocketbook for 25¢.

[Terry L Smith]

You cannot spam printed books.
You cannot hack printed books.
No battery required.
No software update, only your increased learned lexicon.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Perhaps the biggest problem of ebooks is that they are unable to properly display mathematical and scientific material. There aren’t any math books of note published in ebook format because of the difficulty of making the equations display properly. Same goes for engineering and science texts too. This is a show stopper for me.

[Salgak]

This again ? This is based PURELY on TradPub numbers. Indie ebooks continue to boom, but Traditional Publishers demand prices sometimes higher than the paperback price, for the ebook edition. So, people aren’t buying TradPub ebooks.

You might note that Amazon, the largest seller of Indie e-books, is NEVER mentioned. . .

[Ulmius]

The Kindle DX was the best ebook reader I've ever used, but I don't think Amazon supports it anymore.

You could hook it up to your computer, download any PDF you wanted (I usually used the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg to get old books for free), and you could view it in full resolution.

[ThePatriotsFlag]

I do not believe this. Written by print media.

[circlecity]

I use my ipad as a e-book reader and it’s sure nice to be able to adjust the font to make things easier on these aging eyes.

[RayChuang88]

While I LOVE printed books, unfortunately books in hardback form weigh a lot nowadays. And you can't adjust the text font size like you can with the Kindle (or the Kindle App for my iPad in my case).

[CIB-173RDABN]

I have not read a “real” book in several years.

For me it is my eyesight. With e books I can enlarge the print to make it more readable.

Besides Amazon there are several free sources for ebooks - I don’t even have to leave the house to find more to read.

[DallasGal]

Have never move to e-readers. I love the feel and smell of real books.