I write ebooks. I read ebooks. I love ebooks. Ebooks are eco-friendly in some aspects, though the devices you read them on aren't. Ebooks are great if you're on the go, or if you're visually impaired.
But I'm a sucker for print. Call me old-fashioned, but print, to me, has many wonderful aspects.
A print book can go anywhere with you, without the need to buy some pricey bit of electronic gadgetry to make it possible. Kindles and other readers sound like great toys, but I'm a bit of a Luddite and more than a bit cheap, so I'm still reading ebooks on my computer. Nice big screen, and my desk chair is one of the most comfortable seats in the house, but it's hard to read a few pages during my lunch break or while I'm waiting for the dentist.
A print book is sensory. It has a shape, a texture, a scent. There's a new-book smell, and there are a million variants of used-book smells. Some, granted, are more pleasant than others--I just read a library book that had been living with a smoker and I found my nose and eyes itching. But twenty years after her death, my grandmother's books still hold a faint aura of peppermint and lavender. You don't get that with ebooks.
A print book can be shared legally. As a writer, I love it when people buy my books. But I'm also a reader. I know the best way to fall in love with a new author is to have a friend hand you a book and say, "Read this! It's great." Sure, people do this with ebooks, but it's against the law--and totally defeats the author's hope that, when your friend tries to take back her book, one of you will end up having to buy another copy.
You can read print books faster, so you can get through your TBR pile faster. According to
one article I stumbled across recently, it's slower to read on a Kindle or iPad than to read print. You have to wait for the next page to display, you see, and sometimes that just takes too long, if the page break falls in the middle of a sex scene or a big battle or something else where you just can't bear to wait.
It's easier to skip ahead to the ending in a print book. Which, according to my husband, is a bad thing, but sometimes I can't stand the suspense and have to see that both hero and heroine will survive to the end. (I read a lot of urban fantasy. Survival of the love interest, at least in a non-zombified form, is not always obvious.)
My mom will read print books. Which, given what I write, isn't necessarily a good thing, but I like to know she can read my books if she chooses to. And your mom and everyone else's mom will read print books. So your mom can buy my books and my mom can read buy books and each can pretend
her darling daughter isn't writing sexy paranormals.
Most of all,
print books are comfortable and comforting. There are pictures of me as a tiny child hugging my books the way another kid might hug a stuffed animal. (What can I say? I come from a long line of geeky academic types.) Many years later, I still regard my print books like teddy bears or security blankets.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying "
Lions' Pride releases in print tomorrow and I'm so excited I'm ready to dance around like an idiot."
Where do you fall on the print versus ebook scale? Or do you care about format as long as you can read it?
