Ebooks, Good or Bad?

I am still a lover of the paper book. I love the smell and feel of the pages and the beauty of the binding, even if it is a mass market novel. I think I will always want to have a paper book around to read. I sure don't know how my religious devotions would fare with an ebook - I tried the Bible on Kindle and I just couldn't make it work for me.

But I see people I know and people I don't really getting into ebooks. I myself love to read the ebooks I purchase. But I have some doubts about the statistics.

In April, I read a statistic from the "Big 6" publishers in the U.S. that said that from February 2010 to February 2011, sales of print books was down 46% and sales of ebooks was up 150%. That translates to print books going from 100 to 54 and ebooks going from 100 to 150. I don't dispute the statistics, I just dispute the meanings.

I remember fondly in 2006 and 2007, while in library school, my friends and I going to the local Barnes & Noble (and then me to the Books-a-Million alone) and browsing the hundreds and hundreds of titles they had on the bargain book tables. These were books that they could not sell at full price and had to sell at insane discounts like $1 and $2 and $5. From February 2006 to May 2007, I remember seeing the same titles on these tables - they just were not selling.

I think what really happened in America is that the number of readers increased with Generation X and Generation Y coming of age as adult, but the number of book buyers decreased a lot, too. The fact of more readers made the print publishers publish more and more titles, but there were just not book buyers out there. This was, I believe, because these new buyers were not really readers, just eligible readers. They had stopped reading.

When I was teaching college classes to Freshmen, I asked them, every semester, how many had read a book in the last six months that was not assigned for a class. Invariably, out of a class of 30, only 2 or 3 would raise their hands. See, I think that that Generation X and Generation Y were not trained to be readers. Their attention span is too short for them to actually read a book. Sure, they'll read magazine articles and Facebook posts, but not long books.

Then, ta da! The advent of the ebook and the ereader. Then sales started picking up because a reader could buy short or long books for as low as $0.99 (some even free!) and read what they wanted to read when they wanted to read. They could polish off a short story in a few minutes and say they had read a "book." Print publishers cannot publish individual stories by themselves, but ebooks can be individual short stories. So if I read one book of ten short stories in print, I read one book; but if I read ten short stories in ebook format, I can claim to have read ten books.

The reason ebook sales have gone up, I believe, is because few, regardless of generation, wants to read a print book anymore. An ebook will do. Print book sales went down not only because of the lack of new print book readers, but because ebooks are cheaper and easier to manipulate for the wireless generation we live in.

So ebooks, are they the future? Yes, in part. But I think print books will still be around, just in smaller numbers.