Today saw a pretty active conversation on Facebook after I posted a comment that books were going the way of the dodo bird.  The reaction was passionate by those who feel that paper books will not be going away.  Before I go any further let me clear something up.   I love reading and I love books but those two things are not the same.  Reading is the act and books are the medium.  I have personally never bought a book just because I wanted the collection of paper and ink that made it a book.  I tend to buy my books because of the content not the medium.

Once the content is decoupled from the medium we can express an opinion about the preferred medium.  There is something quaint and comfortable about reading a printed book.  It’s the traditional way.  The smell, the feel, the weight all contribute to make reading a paper book a joyful, sensory experience.  Reading an electronic book just isn’t the same. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.   When you read a really good book the medium isn’t going to have that much of an impact on whether or not you enjoyed the book.  The reaction to the content will far outweigh how you feel about the medium.  Is a bad book made better because you read it in printed form?  I’m going to guess that it doesn’t.

There are two types of advantages the ebooks have over printed books, those for the reader and those for the publisher.   Printing and distributing books costs a lot of money.  It’s an expensive process that doesn’t really scale well.  Once you reach a certain volume printing books is only marginally cheaper when you print more of the same book.  An ebook on the other hand costs as much for 10 as it does for 10,000 copies once you’ve met your overheads.   This reason alone will drive publishers to ebooks over printed books.  This is great news for authors as they’ll be able to make/sell more books.

It appears that consumers are already voting on which way they want to go.   According to Techcrunch : “Kindle eBook sales surpassed Amazon’s hardcover sales back in July 2010, and they surpassed paperback sales in January of this year [2011].”   In the last year  ebooks sales were 3X higher than the year before.

There is some amount of subjectiveness when it comes to evaluating e-books from the reader’s perspective.  The ability to randomly search for words or phrases is something you can’t do in a paper book but you can with an e-book.  How much value is that to the reader?  It’s hard to say.  It might be a little it might be a lot depending on the situation.  I can carry hundreds or thousands wherever I go with my e-reader.  This is not something you can easily do with printed books but how often would you really need to have access to your entire library especially if you can just google the content using Google books.  How this does help is if you are reading 2-3 books at one time which happens quite frequently  I’m not a very patient person so being able to acquire a book anytime, day or night is a bonus for me.  That has real value for me.  Ease of access whether for multiple books or one device or for getting new books makes an e-reader much more convenient than a printed book.  The ability to read the same book on multiple devices means you don’t ever need to be confronted with the situation where you left your book at home.

Lending electronic books today is hard.  Most books use some kind of digital rights management that makes lending them hard.  DRM free books are easy to lend.   This is a problem that needs to be solved.  It will probably get solved the way music rights were solved.   The music was pirated until the legal purchase got cheap and easy enough to make it better to buy than to steal.

Printed books aren’t going away tomorrow but they will become less available.  If everyone has access to an e-reader then why print the book at all?  As more people get e-readers there will be fewer and fewer reasons for a publisher to print books.

I didn’t even touch on the cost of books to libraries.   How much real estate is devoted to libraries just to house books?  If every book was digital how big would the library need to be?  Would we even need libraries?

There was a time when photographers used film because it was “better” than digital.   There aren’t fewer photographers because we don’t use film anymore.   This will be the case with authors.  There will be more books “published” the sooner we move to digital distribution. The barrier to entry will be lower.