One of those interesting paperless questions that tends to torture me.  Do I read e-books?  Yes, I have the Kindle app as well as other assorted e-book readers on both my iPad and my Windows 7 phone and I’ve read books, technical documents and short stories on them.  Obviously, this is the truly paperless solution and more than likely the one we will all be using exclusively in the future.  With more and more authors choosing to e-publish only, schools incorporating more digital texts, libraries providing e-book downloads and readers getting cheaper and cheaper, it’s pretty much a done deal.

It’s going to be a sad day for me.  I love to hold a book.  Books never have low batteries or glare issues.  You can tell from my much older articles I think PaperBackSwap is one of the best sites around and I’m still a religious user.  That said, it’s a lot heavier to carry a selection of books than an eReader and you don’t have to worry about the bookmark falling out.  I love being able to switch from device to device and synch up to my last stopping point.  Electronic publishing has made short stories and novellas more accessible as individual products.  It’s certainly easier for new authors to publish electronically and for established authors to promote shorter works.

In truth, I’m just looking for the perfect tablet to add to my paperless arsenal.  While I doubt I’ll be jumping to new release books anytime soon, you never can tell – I would dearly love to see a format for eBooks similar to the all-you-can-eat Zune Pass model for music.   That, my friends, would probably be the start of a serious reduction in physical books around our place.