Love them or hate them, eBooks have officially sculpted their place in the market and are here to stay. The availability of eBooks has provided an unmatched simplicity to the book buying and book reading activities. While purists maintain that eBooks lack the warmth, feel, smell, weight, history and experience of print (and they are undeniably correct on all counts) more and more people are choosing the speed and ease of having thousands of books at your fingertips. As the formats wage war the two sides become polarized, but there are actually reasons to believe there is a way for them to coexist, and maybe even benefit one another.
New Markets
In the eBook’s journey to break into the market it has created a niche of self-published authors. These are writers who have been left in the cold by traditional publishers, often for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual books. Now your bookshelf (digital or physical) is a forum for the truly free expression of artistic ideas.
Major Differences
The two mediums at hand are, simply put, very different. Different enough, where they will not need to compete directly for eternity (although they may try to). There is nothing like finding a beautiful, aging classic to put on your shelf for the world to see, however not all books are created equal. Some books do not belong anywhere near a visible bookshelf. Nobody wants to show off their Daniel Silva spy novel as a decoration. I don’t even want to carry it on a plane. It weighs five times what a Kindle or Nook does and takes up ten times the space.
History
This scenario has been played out before, perhaps not in the exact same way. Vinyl records were all but dead until digital music totally took over and reminded people of the warmth of analog sound. While print has similar qualities of feel and collectability nothing is lost in the text itself. Vinyl still boasts significantly higher quality than its successors, and it’s lead is gaining with the rise of streaming music sites like Pandora and Spotify.
The Verdict
There is room for both of us. For all the grief eBooks get from literary folks across the world, the popularity of literature in general has increased since their introduction. If you have not opened your mind to the idea of the eBook yet, simply think of them as an alternative rather than a replacement for print and get comfortable, because they aren’t going anywhere.