E-reading isn’t reading.......

[getting old in mke]

23. I'll give you long term power failure

but if power is out for more than the two weeks my nook lives, I've got a lot more problems than reading...I sleep with a CPAP.

The rest depends on comfort level with technology.

If you are comfortable, then sharing a book is not hard. Calibre, free and open-source for those who care about such things, converts the formats readily, including out-dated ones from obsolescent readers. It does require learning the program, which is admittedly more work than handing a book to someone, but on the other hand, I can now send books as email attachments (they are rarely more than 250K) to my family in Germany, which is harder with a physical volume. Earlier this year I was reading through a series of books that was only available in an old Palm-Pilot format, and just converted it through drag and drop into the epub format my nook wants without having to tell Calibre anything--it knows nooks and pretty much any other reader and what formats they prefer. And even if not, then it's a right click to tell it which format to change to.

If you're going to remove DRM from purchased books, as easy as dragging and dropping the file onto your Calibre screen if you have the plugins installed, you'll need to decide where your ethical boundaries lies with respect to lending them. Since eBooks are still priced pretty closely to physical books, certainly for newer releases, I have no qualms about lending them to individuals. I certainly wouldn't put them out to the torrent-verse though. And sources like Project Gutenberg, or the University of Virginia, or University of Adelaide which house large eBook collections will certainly keep up on the various formats.

I'm not saying that eBooks are the way to go for everyone--as I mentioned above, I consume large quantities of ink on paper books--just that there are no particular reasons not to include them in a balanced reading diet. You may choose not to include it, but that's simply a personal preference, not a drawback of the platform.

Of course, you can only lend books to folks with an eReader or computer, whereas a physical book can go to anyone. Still, for me, I spend maybe half a dozen hours with a book, give or take, and for 99%, never re-read and for most don't lend, either because they were from the library in the first place or my friends and relations read other things. My wife and I share some tastes, so maybe 20% get shared with her. If I become an evangelist for a book (_Peace Is Every Step_ by Thich Nhat Hahn and _Hook and Jill_ by Andrea Jones), I buy the physical book many times over as a less avoidable reminder for those around me Physical definitely rules there.

But given my lack of re-reading, what I'm interested in is a one time transfer from the author's brain of story and language into my brain. I'm no more interested whether HOW it gets there is ink on paper or bytes on a screen than I am in whether the author wrote it out long-hand, dictated it, or used a computer.