e-books are fantastic. Especially now that they’re so easy to come by, and use!
And nope, you don’t need a dedicated e-book reader such as Kindle. You can use your tablet (eg. an iPad*), or your phone (not necessarily an iPhone, for example). Or your computer.
Of course, you can use dedicated e-book readers too, of which the Kindle is only one. There are also others, such as the Kobo.
Which is awesome.
But, short of pirating books**, or using free e-books where either the copyright has lapsed (Project Gutenberg is good resource for this), or copyright holders have released the book _as_ free, e-books aren’t always as cheap as one might think. Which means that there’s a huge range of e-books out there which many people cannot, or will not, access due to their cost (USD $10 is still a lot of money for some people, for example).
Society already has structures for people to be able to read books for free, and then give them back so that other people might enjoy them. They’re called libraries, and they’re absolutely magical places. And, apparently, they’ve gotten in on the whole e-book thing, too!
Some of New Zealand’s libraries, including Wellington City Library, now have a stock of e-books available for loan. WCL, apparently, has over 1,500 (if memory serves me correctly).
My mind did boggle initially at the idea of ‘borrowing’ digital content – mostly around the question ‘how do I give it back?!’. There’s a solution, though – the content expires after a set time. In this case, one can loan an e-book for 2 weeks.
I’ll admit I’m a little confused about why it’s a shorter period than one has when taking out physical books, but nonetheless – pretty cool.
Can’t believe I only heard about it today :)
And if anyone knows when this ability came online, I’d love to know!
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Sidenote
I’m very, very pro paper-based books in many ways. I love the way they smell and feel, for example, and that I can drop them in the bath or fall asleep on them. However, I’m also aware that they use up an awful lot of tree and carbon footprint, and in many cases, a digital version is just as good as the real thing (and, if built properly with interactive features such as dictionaries, even better).
And I can see why art books, for example, don’t work digitally. But for most novels? Digital makes tonnes of sense. Took me a while to convert, but there: I said it :)
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* Although I have to admit, the iPad feels like it was designed for the sole purpose of reading comic books. Which is a very, very good thing. We like our comics :)
** Which is considered to be Not Cool.
This actually came up at the Retake the Net barcamp. Some of the producers of the ebooks have some kinda retarded DRM on them. Not only the short ‘borrow’ time but also the library has to pay for a new licence to the books once loaned out a limited number of times. The number of loans that was mentioned was low too. Around 26 times was the number being mentioned.
Big publishers of print media appear to be making the same mistakes that Big Audio made in not being able to adapt to the new technology.
eBooks do also have the advantage of being incredibly easy to self publish with also so I don’t see that becoming an issue in the long run.
I see myself becoming a big consumer of ebooks once I start my walk. So much less weight than carrying the actual books. :)