I do not see an either-or choice between printed books and ebooks. Often it is "both-and." One of the reasons is that books that are printed on acid-free paper and maintained in proper storage conditions will outlast whatever formats of ebooks are current today. Books will remain readable as long as we have eyes, provided that we can translate from an archaic language. Sure, somebody will provide a converter from Kindle format to 2150 format, whatever that might be. However, even the Kindle format suffers from occasional inaccurate conversion from the original, whether printed or electronic; that might happen with whatever is available in 2150.

The same problem already occurs with documents in one of WordPerfect's Envoy formats, intended to be a competitor for the Adobe PDF. Envoy documents were incompatible even within the family of Envoy documents, because WordPerfect had to change its compression technology. There was the Envoy Distributable Viewer, which could convert Envoy documents to an early PostScript format that could then be converted to a PDF. This 1994 software has not been maintained and might not even run on current versions of Windows. In 2002 some people were using customized Tumbleweed software to convert Envoy documents; the same may still be in use today. In the meantime, printed books and documents remain readable.

Long ago but not in a galaxy far, far away there was an article bemoaning the rush to electronic formats by libraries. One reason then was and still is that libraries typically do not own materials in electronic format as they own books and bound journals. A publisher cannot take away access to a book or journal if the library stops paying an annual fee. They can if a library ceases to subscribe to their electronic service. Libraries did not wake up soon enough to realize what they had contracted away.

The lead of that article concerned a future family trying to locate the last will and testament of a recently deceased relative. There was nothing on paper. What they found instead was a shiny disk about 120mm in diameter. There was no machine downstairs and none to be found outside the Smithsonian that could read this shiny disk -- and the Smithsonian had not considered it to be its responsibility to keep that machine working. How could they? It relied on technologies that were no longer in use anywhere. It was once said (but undocumented) that because the French had gone into 1978's laserdiscs in a big way, when that format became obsolete the government purchased and still has stored in a dry cave functioning laserdisc readers that would otherwise be completely unavailable.

The one case where I strongly favor ebooks is for college textbooks and that only if the cost to students is sharply lowered without reducing quality or ease of use. I do not expect today's major textbook publishers to provide such ebooks, which is why I am cheering on the demise of the greedy textbook publishers. Elsevier has experienced increases in pre-tax profits of 5% or more for the last decade, while prices for college textbooks have soared. A very good intro sociology textbook now sells from Amazon for $111.20. This is not sold to a small market; a majority of college students take the intro sociology course.

As far as I am concerned, the e- in all of the items in the title stands for 'ephemeral.' Do not depend on them to last. Same for 'cloud' computing. It's great to store stuff on someone's else storage lockers, but expect it to evaporate when they go out of business or any number of other things.

For this reason, I will not accept any of the banks, credit cards offers or pushes to 'save a tree' by stopping the mailing of hard copies What happens when do don't have an account with them anymore and you cannot access your records? There have been times when I did not have access to a computer for several months. It became very difficult to keep track of anything that depended on e-mail of accessing accounts on-line. I lost one e-mail account and all the archives and history and confirmations. Never again. Sure, businesses want to save postage and printing costs by transferring the costs to the customer. If you want a hard copy, you have to take the time to print it out with your expensive toners. Pffft!

I agree about the business of textbooks and the unnecessary expense added to the cost of education. There are businesses now that are doing something about that.

Here is one called Chegg (which came first...chicken or egg?) which is a Santa Clara start up. Some of the top managers started with Electronics Arts, the Learning Company, Netflix and have moved into textbook rentals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chegg

Now, there a good idea and a way to reduce textbook costs for students and eventually for all schools and school districts that furnish books to students.

Textbook publishers have a habit of issuing new or "customized" editions every year or so. This is why college bookstores buy back used textbooks for less than a quarter of their purchase price or refuse to buy them at all. Textbook sales personnel constantly show up in professors' offices to push their line of new and improved textbooks. I think this practice of incessant revision is intended as a means of reducing the market for used textbooks and fending off rental library programs. If they could get away with it, publishers would issue a new edition of Shakespeare's plays every year.

Used textbooks were unpopular with both publishers and authors: they do not earn royalties from sales of used textbooks. If they could do so, I suspect that they would want the same condition as is found in sales of software: you are not permitted to sell your software to someone else because you did not purchase the software. You purchased only a personal or organizational license to use the software.

When I use printed textbooks, I try to make certain that I am using an edition that is still widely available as a used book. The version differences are often trivial. However, the campus bookstore often cannot find 80 or 100 copies of an out-of-date edition. They do not keep old editions in inventory; they must order them. The old editions seem to vanish, I suspect into pulping machines.

For many years there was a variety of scam artist who also showed up in professors' offices. These were people offering to "buy books," by which they meant the examination copies that had been sent to professors without request and without charge. I must get at least 25 unwanted books every year. The professors who sold what they had been sent were cheating, but they made a few hundred unreported dollars each year. Some publishers stamp their "examination copies" as that, but it apparently did not diminish the value to these scam artists.

We have adopted and posted a policy that requires anyone wishing to buy books, equipment, or supplies to check with the campus police, so our experience may now be different. However, the current low number of "visitors" may mean that the number of these scam artists has sharply declined simply because textbooks lose their value so swiftly.

It would be great if rental libraries could succeed, but I think the more important change will be to reduce the initial purchase price. The only way that I see to do that is to move to ebooks. They eliminate most of the printing, shipping, and inventory costs. In addition, the college book store no longer needs all that shelf space. The advent of color tablets with high resolution has made ebooks practical in almost every field.

The fact that these ebooks can contain hyperlinks to materials on the Web makes them more functional as teaching tools than bound books ever were. Some ebooks now link to videos, which are far more effective in conveying a point than are pictures. Viewing photographs of mitosis is less effective than viewing mitosis in action. Photographs of the marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge are far less effective than http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s00-OoZAWno. An ebook can also link to computer programs that do calculations or simulations that help students understand such things as "sampling distributions." Rice Virtual Laboratory. Even in the area of law, the Oyez project offers something that no book can offer: access to both transcripts and oral arguments. Science ebooks can be kept up to date with the latest findings; my intro biology textbook barely made mention of the double helix. One of the reasons for that was that revisions are much cheaper than are complete rewrites. Science cannot be frozen on a publication date.

I think the printed textbook will be perceived as a transition between the days of the "say-everything-twice" lecturer and the world of active participation by students in searching out information. Then they might actually read the material!

W2 points out that buying Amazon is selling out. Amazon is bad for authors, traditional publishers, bookstores, local and state taxes, and their CEO is funny looking.

No, no, W2. Amazon has put authors in a more powerful position than they've held in decades. Traditional publishers have been asking for just what they got for a long time. I have no pity for the industry. Bookstores, I do, but not the big ones, so much. Independent bookstores are finding their way. It's a shakeup, but a necessary one, imo.

Ditto. Traditional publishers have become barriers to authors and to readers. New authors are mostly published by small, independent publishers, for whom ebooks might reduce the risk of publishing a work by an unknown. Big bookstores specialized in having no specialists on their staffs who actually understood what was on the shelves; little bookstores can offer a knowledgeable staff who actually know their customers as well as their shelves. What was once a honorable industry that enlivened the cultural life of the country and informed it about current issues has become a set of industrial conglomerates focused on the next quarter's profits. There is not a Maxwell Perkins to be found among them.

My physical library isn't harmed at all by my kindle collection. It's still an evolving process. Verb and I use librarything to keep track of most of our physical collection, and we've just started adding a small number of our kindle collection as well to the librarything database. It's trickier, as we are finding that our e libraries immediately became more personalized than the overall physical library is.

Now when we consider purchasing a book, we have a tendency to compare interest levels in the proposed addition: do we think we'll both read it? Do we think we'll refer to it frequently? Both of those tend to drive us towards the physical version. I also am noticing that I'm asking myself whether I'll read such-and-such a book more than once. If so, I'll probably buy the physical version. So the new Stephen King book -- not something Verb is terribly interested in, not something I'll read more than once (probably): kindle version. The new Umberto Eco, probably physical version.

Like I said, it's evolving.

Yes, Listeme. That is so true. Last night I downloaded six detective novels. I know I'll read them and delete them from my Kindle after. I won't have six paperbacks I'll never look at again just taking up space and gathering dust. Several years ago there was a small movement going on to leave books you've read for somebody else in public places. Remember that? Maybe it still is around. I would leave books I knew I wouldn't read twice on the train, in coffee shops, and other places, in the hope someone would read the books after me. What I'm really looking forward to is the next time I move, having fewer cartons to lug with me. That will be nice, too.

A new Umberto Eco? The Prague Cemetery? I just bought it on the Kindle for 35% of the list price of $27.00. Historical characters are said to abound.

Interesting survey results.

Forbes

I've bought a number of E-Books for the Kindle, but all at 99 cents (Kindle Deal of the Day), or free. I also have a number of games and apps -- but all were the Free App of the Day.

On the other hand, I also have an iPad -- the Kindle books work there, too, and the 3 full-price e-books I've purchased have been done from it. Also the apps (and selection) are bigger and better, and I probably have spent $40 or so on apps for the iPad. But even so, the apps I pay for tend to be productivity tools I use all the time, and now that I have Keynote and Garage Band, I won't need to keep buying them.

Publishers took heart from Bobby Haft when he opened Crown Books. One of his crazier ideas was to get the publishers to charge shipping to him. Used to be it was picked up by publishers. Pretty quickly publishers changed this practice and started charging freight to all their customers.

Well. Because Bobster bought in huge bulk and had them delivered, at first, to his warehouse (this was when he only had three stores and they were all in DC) to be distributed to the stores, his freight was manageable. He also had the policy that all stores had to carry the same books,, so no store was getting small shipments of books not warehoused.

But all the little independents and small chains were operating on a very slim profit margin. I think at the time it was, like, 6%. It didn't take long at all. The cost of shipping was about 5.5 % of the total invoice, so bookstores began closing all over the place, just from this one change Haft forced. Then, of course, when he started expanding into t'other states and the distribution became too unwieldy, he tried to take it back.

Tante pis, Bobby. Hoist by thine own petard. He tolled the death knell, he thought, for independents. In fact, it's the behemoths who can't keep up.

We have a local bookstore that built a whole, new, big store a year ago. They have a electronic press inside and often publish papers and books from the chaps at JPL and CalTech. Also a coffee shop, where NaNoWriMo events took place.

Long live independents!

I have to disagree that Amazon is bad for authors. I have two books out via Amazon (and other sites); one was passed up by my agent, and the other he couldn't place, altho he came mighty close a number of times.

After much inner debate, I decided to self-publish, first the Savage book, and then, a couple years later, my true crime book. Years ago, I would have had to put up thousands of dollars for printing X number of books, and then pay to have those books stored somewhere while I peddled them. But with POD outfits such as Lulu.com and distributors like Amazon, I'm able to keep my initial investment low -- even lower because I have a background in electronic page layout and was able to design the physical and e-books myself -- and get my books out there.

It is hard as hell to break into publishing now, especially if you don't already have a name in some other field. Publishers have cut way back on advances, and sometimes that's the only money an author will see. I love small bookstores as much as the next person, but I'd also like to one day make a living as a book author, so I'm for whatever channel works. There will always be a market for physical books, just as there's still a market for vinyl records in this age of digital downloads. We may not see the Barnes & Noble megastores, which is fine with me, but I think small book and music stores will survive.

No losers here, huh?

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-j ... ar-factory

(Am I better because I'm using an android phone?)

Kindle Freebie today:
http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Thriller ... alswoot-20

Origin by J.A. Konrath
Desert Places by Blake Crouch
Darkness on the Edge of Town by J. Carson Black
Watch Me Die by Lee Goldberg
Disintegration by Scott Nicholson

Thrillers in a virtual "boxed set," and remember, if you have an iPad, iPhone, other Android device or even a PC or Mac, you can install the Kindle software for free to read these.

Especially for a phone, I like to have some thriller and other "chewing gum for the mind" content for when I'm waiting for a ride or for my lunch to be delivered, or any other time I find myself having to wait without my iPad to keep me company.

And if they turn out to be worth what you paid for them, delete them. But they have gotten a lot of good reviews.

Today's Kindle Daily Deal looks good. $1.99

One of the authors is the National Mall Historian.

A quick note here. As a family, we own a mac pro desk top ‘puter, a 3-g ipad and a dell laptop, that I don’t think has been turned on in at least two months. The i-pad is my wife’s, but my son mostly uses it.
I recently purchased a nook tablet. For reading books and for generic web brozing when I don’t want to sit in the bedroom at the ‘puter.
Just a review / comparison. The nook’s ok, but the ipad is a lot more user friendly when it comes to downloading books and stuff from the library. With the nook, it all has to be downloaded to the mac, then transferred to the nook.
The other serious drawback to the nook is one that I was unaware of before I purchased it, as none of the reviews ever mentioned it. You can not do simple cut and past text management on the nook. Find a web site and you want to e-mail the link to someone? Too bad, you have to copy it down on a scrap of paper and hand enter it into the e-mail program. Doing research and you want to send yourself an excerpt from a book? Tough.

other than that, it works great and has good battery life. It's just that it is not a serious tool.

As for the e-data issue, I have already experienced an issue where I have lost a significant number of family pictures due to a disk failure.
One of my hobbies is buying old glass negatives from the turn of the last century and digitally restoring them. I am also an amateur photographer who is stockpiling a number of 4x5 negative for use in my antique view cameras.

My company has used Windows Mobile Smartphones (HTC Tytans) for the last few years as a crew scheduling tool. When we first got them, no one could connect in Australia. I had a long layover, and got into hacking the phone and solved the problem (firmware issue). After that, I got invited onto the committee that oversaw the development and usage of the devices. After a lot of broken promises and ignored suggestions, I quietly quit the committee about 9 months later, and because the management guy who was in charge wouldn't listen to any suggestion that didn't put cash in his pocket.

Well, the devices are dated now, and replacement upgrade is necessary. The entire aviation industry is going iPad. American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, United/Continental have gotten FAA approval for the iPad as a replacement for paper manuals, American has even gotten approval for the crews to use their iPads during all phases of flight.

So, my company has gone the complete opposite direction. They're in the process of buying about 1,000 ATT Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.9 devices.

Severe grumbling all across the pilot group. But I'm hoping that since the Galaxy Tab is Android (open source) based that I'll be able to port the company software over to the iPad.

Gadgeteer: Does your Kindle Keyboard have fading letters? Amazon might send you a free replacement

You'd have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. Or send me a replacement first. I needz my bookie-wookie.

I've read elsewhere that they do send the replacement with packaging for the return of the original. So, you should be safe. But I understand the feeling. That's why I bought the baby Kindle in case anything went wrong with my DX, so I wouldn't go without, waiting on delivery of a new one.

The thing I love the best about my kindle is all of the free downloads of public domain books that I can get. This week's haul included Fanny Burney, Tacitus and the Venerable Bede. Been in nerd heaven on my sofa all weekend except for a short and ultimately embarrassing trip to the grocery store.