I love books, and am getting used to the idea that a book isn’t necessarily a physical object. These days, I buy more books made of electrons than books made of dead trees.
The photo shows the first three books in Lemony Snicket’s current series, All the Wrong Questions. Each is in different form.
- Who Could That Be at This Hour? I have in hardback. I’d been meaning to try out the series for a while. I bought this particular edition because it was only $4 at a book fair at my kids’s school. Reading it made me want more books in the series, preferably in dead tree form. Although this is not a long book, this is a pleasingly chunky volume, with apt illustrations by Seth.
- When Did You See Her Last? I have in paperback. I bought it from Amazon, where the paperback edition was $7
, and the Kindle edition only 35c cheaper. Still I wanted more.
- Shouldn’t You Be in School? I have as an ebook: on Kindle
, to be specific. That edition was only $2 when I bought it (it now, a couple of weeks later, $4). I did have some concerns that the illustrations wouldn’t work as well on a tablet’s screen, but the cover and other illustrations show pretty well, I think.
As you can see, price sways me toward ebooks, but a lower ebook price doesn’t always defeat dead trees. But sometimes time defeats dead trees: a download takes seconds, rather than the hours or days involved in dead tree pickup or delivery. Sometimes ebooks win because they don’t take up shelf space, or gather dust.
How do you make the decisions between the ebooks and dead tree books?