Book dinosaur, reading

When I first started telling my friends about the book I was writing, I was surprised to learn that only one of them had an e-reader.  The rest read printed books.

I read both print and ebooks.

I find that I primarily buy print books that I want to make notes in and plan to keep.  And of course, the impulse buys in bookstores are printed books.  Right now, I think that about one third of my new books are hard copies, and the other two-thirds are digital.

I believe that e-readers, like all technology, will stop working and become outdated at some point in the future, and the “content,” as the books are often called, we have loaded onto them will be lost.

Plus there is the troublesome fact that we don’t actually own this “content” we purchase.  We are renting digital rights, which can be withdrawn at any time.

But still I was surprised to find that only one of all the people I knew read regularly on an e-reader.

My audience had just become very much like these friends I have never met in person, the ones out there reading and writing in this ether, in the space between us.  Transmitting thoughts, words and ideas over an invisible electronic ocean.

So my book will being transmitted through space via waves and frequencies I don’t fully comprehend, through the magic of Internet retailers.

Yet I will trust my finished work to it, a balancing act between the new and old worlds of reading.

And I will keep print copies.