My Conversion To E-Books

I do love printed books. There’s nothing like that feeling of a book in your hands - the weight of the book, the texture of the paper, the smell. I would buy a perfume smelling like old books, really. Yet, I’ve decimated my collection of them from four full bookcases to about one and a half.

 

Why did that happen? Because of e-books, of course. You see, I do love printed books for the feels and smell, but first and foremost I love reading. Reading is no longer tied to printed books and e-books take far less space in a flat which isn’t that big to begin with than printed books do. I admit that a lot of my printed book collection got sold when I moved into a new flat - I wanted to get rid of them and the move gave me a valid reason to really look into it, so I made a hard cut and sold everything but my art books and my most favourite other ones.

The good thing about e-books is that they need so little space and are so easy to take along. I prefer an e-reader to my phone, even though I could use my smartphone as well, yet even an e-reader is much easier to carry around than a stack of physical books. I always take a book along when there’s a chance that I might have to spend some time waiting. You never know what you get in a doctor’s waiting room and government agencies aren’t known for providing a lot of interesting reading material for the waiting citizen with an appointment, either.

If e-books had been around when I’d been a kid - well, let’s say I’d have had all my books with me on every vacation with my parents ever. I’d have had a lot to choose from during the breaks between classes in school, too. Yes, I’ve taken a book with me to school for most of my time in secondary school.

 

When e-books came out, however, I was not convinced (like it took me a while to get into audio books). I do like the physical side of books, as mentioned above, and found it hard to imagine walking away from that. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be bound to a company who’d offer those new e-books to me, either.

My first e-reader was mostly for stuff I’d downloaded for free from Feedbooks. Old books out of copyright and books written by others and distributed for free were what I got from there. However, Amazon with their large collection of e-books beckoned and I’d already bought a lot of physical books from them. I was prepared for a commitment and when my e-reader got damaged, I went to a nearby electronic store and bought my kindle paperwhite which I’m still using. Since then, I’ve built up a respectable library of e-books, both bought and created on my own.

 

Of course, I have a completely different position on e-books now that I’m releasing my own stuff in this format. I can hardly say they’re bad and then produce them myself, now, can I? I’m not that much of a hypocrite.

There are a lot of good things to be said about e-books, too. My dad has his own e-book collection and one great thing for him, as a man of 80, is that you can easily adjust the letter size. What meant getting special books, highly expensive, in the past, is now just a question of pressing a few areas of a screen to make sure the letters are large enough for comfortable reading.

Lately, my collection of e-books has also expanded beyond the regular stories to comics and manga. I’ve got a small collection of digital comics (both in e-book format and in .pdf format) which is nice to read on a tablet and I’ve begun to collect at least one manga series (“Moriarty The Patriot”) digitally, too. It’s too bad that some older manga, like “Hellsing”, are not available digitally.

 

Physical books can be damaged easily - especially when your account says you’re going to buy paperbacks - and then you have to say goodbye to them or re-buy. I’ve bought Steven King’s book on horror, “Danse Macabre”, three times: once in German, which has disintegrated, once in English, which has disintegrated, and now once in English as an e-book.

Theoretically, an e-book could be ‘destroyed’ by no longer being available anywhere and by me no longer having a suitable reader, but the chances of that aren’t that high. As long as there’s a way to convert formats or to store my e-books somewhere I can retrieve from later, they’re not lost.

 

For me, the change to e-books hasn’t been easy. It took me a while to accept that I would rather have a file than a book, that I could say farewell to my well-read, nice-smelling books and go with a simple bit of data in the future. Yet, it has come with many advantages - not just with being able to publish books myself - and I recognize that.

It’s also not just the e-books. Audio books have been a lot of fun as well, something to listen to while I’m doing other stuff, something which makes my bedtime more fun, too, because I don’t have to keep my eyes open. I can start the audio book, set a sleep timer, and just lie there, dozing off as a professional narrator reads me a book - bliss! I also buy new music as download by now - I used to transfer the CDs to mp3 format, but there’s no reason to do that any longer. Buying mp3 and downloading it right away is a lot more fun, works every day of the week (the same goes for e-books - I can read as soon as I’ve bought, no waiting for the parcel to arrive or for getting home), and allows easy transfer between different devices, so I can also listen to my music on my smartphone or a tablet.

 

E-books have a lot going for them and there’s no longer a reason not to buy them. It’s cool to have a library full of books - and don’t get me wrong, if I had the space, I’d have one -, but for practical purposes, a file on your devices can be much more useful than a physical, printed book.