I railed against e-books about a month ago.
My biggest issues were their cost and use of DRM.
In the interest of doing my best to see the other side of things, I committed to reading only e-books for the rest of the month.
And you know what? I loved it.
I used the the Kindle and Stanza apps on my iPad to read e-books from Amazon and other storefronts. Because I have my iPad with me pretty much all the time, I found that I was reading far more than usual. Time that I'd normally spend playing a stupid iPad game was spent reading books. You know–engaging with culture.
I still cringe at the price of most e-books. My perfect world is one where most e-books cost a flat $10, like most albums in iTunes. At most e-book prices, I'd like to get a physical object instead of a bunch of ones and zeroes. But I don't buy music on physical media anymore, so I'm quickly changing perspectives here.
As for the DRM, a means to break it is nothing more than a Google search away.
On top of it all, the highlighting, annotation, dictionary, search, and bookmarking features turn it into a no-brainer.
After a few weeks with e-books, I never want to touch paper again. When there's a new book I want now, I'm going to opt for the digital version over the analog every time.
I'm a convert. I've seen the light, and it's coming from the white glow of my e-reader apps.
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