Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly)

[kentauros]

108. I guess I'm not "most people."

I make back-ups of any book I download (I'm not a fast reader, so I don't buy very many books, print or otherwise.) Plus, I've got software on this computer that's twice as old as it is (computer is five years old, some programs are almost 12 years old) and I still use them. Everything is backed up, and I can read things I've had since 1993, when I got my first PC. Txt, rtf and pdf are pretty standard formats and I can always convert them if newer software can't read them.

I noticed that you avoided my point about paper deteriorating over time. Sure, some books won't fall apart as fast, but, unless it is specifically "non-acid paper", it will deteriorate. I "renew" my digital copies every time I get a new external drive for back-ups. Drives also deteriorate, but you can anticipate that as well and plan ahead. Burnable CDs and DVDs don't deteriorate anywhere near as fast, so you can use them as archival storage for a longer time. And you can always back up your stuff in cloud-storage. That's still far less lifetime energy consumption (by my best guess) than for the same wood-pulp books.

As for buying books secondhand and so forth, I've downloaded (for free) many Golden Age science fiction titles online (I'm currently reading some old A.E. van Vogt I haven't read in decades.) The Gutenberg Project has been around much longer than eReaders, and there's probably more there available for free download than any one person could read in a lifetime. Same goes for the Internet Archive. The list is growing every day for what's available online for free. Maybe we need to compile a list for a thread somewhere, like the Writer's forum or one of the book forums here. And I would suspect that people will find a way of sharing or selling ebooks, just like with any other "used" media.

You might want to look for my post in the GD forum on this same subject. For those not wanting to do that, I admit that I'd like to see pretty much my entire library converted to digital. Other than an almost literal handful of coffee-table type art books, signed books, and antique books, I'd rather not have a home "library" in the physical sense. That's probably one of the major reasons I haven't moved in over fourteen years; it's too much of a hassle to box and carry all these damned heavy books!