The eBook Explosion

Depending on your personal preference, you’re probably either quite excited or tremendously concerned about seemingly exponential growth of the eBook medium. It seems like, right now, people tend to sort themselves into either team Paper Book or team eBook. On one side of the coin, you may excited as eBook technology is making it books more accessible and the more accessible the medium, the more likely it is to find a readership. This assertion that has been demonstrated through statistics published in the Wall Street Journal which state that the average number of books read by e-reader owners in a month was found to be 2.6, considerably higher than the 1.9 average for print-book readers. Another advantage that eBooks have over print media is the convenience that is being able to carry 100s of books on a small device. This has proved to be a great advantage for those who travel regularly and don’t want to deal with the extra weight and baggage space taken up by print books.

E-readers have become particularly popular with those who travel regularly
Credit: goodereader.com

The third, and currently the most poignant, advantage that eBooks and e-readers have is an added level of privacy for the reader. This has been evidenced recently with the astronomical success of the erotica novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The “Fifty Shades” books were originally released as eBooks by the Writers Coffee Shop, an independent publisher based in Australia. They were instant hits, drawing attention of fans and Vintage Books, which acquired the rights in March and published them as eBooks first and then as paperbacks. For woman around the world, what was once their dirty little secret could now be read in public without the fear of embarrassment.

With Fifty Shades of Grey, woman were able to hide their deviance behind the Apple logo
Credit: coverthink.com

This eBook ‘explosion’, however, is not an entirely positive thing. This surge of popularity of e-books has put many book retailers out of business, the most notable of these being Borders who closed the doors of over 800 stores across the globe in 2011. I personally much prefer reading print novels simply from a collectors mindset. I love having material, tangible copies of books that I love which I can put on a bookshelf and pick up again years down the line. I love buying old, first edition copies of classics whose bindings have cracked and whose pages have yellowed with age.  A good book has more of a soul than an eBook ever will. In fact I would venture to say an eBook lacks any kind of soul altogether. I understand that eBooks hold a certain practicality that is absent in print media but this is forged from a loss of sentimentality and it is for this reason that I still plan to have a library room if I ever work up the funds to realistically achieve such a thing. I’ve always considered myself someone who is eager to see technology reach its full potential and it is a natural inclination for me to hope the the eBook continues to grow in popularity. However, if this ends up being at the expense of the print novel I can see myself becoming the guarded conservative I always knew I’d become.