A Thousand Books in My Pocket
I carry over a thousand books in my pocket. No format has ever been more convenient than the e-book. That convenience is real, and it’s only half the story.Share on X
I own more than a thousand e-books, and the main reason I love them is simple. They’re mobile. I can carry my entire library in one slim device instead of hauling a stack of hardcovers and paperbacks around. That portability is what the e-book does better than anything else.
I bring my e-reader when I travel. I bring it to restaurants when I’m eating alone. I bring it anywhere I know I’ll be sitting for a while, a doctor’s office, a waiting room, a long line. Dead time becomes reading time because the books are always with me, weighing nothing. Read an E-Book Week, which falls in the first full week of March, celebrates exactly this, the format that put a thousand books in your pocket.
I’ll say there’s one exception to my e-reader loyalty. If I’m in the middle of a physical book, I’ll often bring that instead. But for sheer convenience, for turning any spare half hour into reading, nothing beats the e-book.
The Genre Laboratory
Free and 99-cent first-in-series e-books are a genre laboratory. You can sample corners of fiction you’d never pay full hardcover price to explore. I use them to learn genres I write in.Share on X
Here’s a use for e-books that I rely on as a writer, and that most readers never think about. The e-book is a genre laboratory. Publishers constantly give away the first volume of a series for free or ninety-nine cents, hoping to hook you into buying the rest. I take advantage of this constantly. I grab those cheap first volumes to sample genres I wouldn’t normally read, so I can learn how they work and then write about them. You can’t do that with print.
Nobody is selling you a paperback or hardcover for ninety-nine cents to get you started on a series. The economics only work in digital. So for a writer who needs to understand many genres, the e-book is a research tool as much as a reading device.
It lets you taste corners of fiction you’d never invest real money in, and that breadth is useful when your job is to write across a lot of different kinds of books. If you want to expand your range as a reader or a writer, those free and cheap first-in-series e-books are among the best deals in publishing.
The Catch: You Do Not Own Them
Buy a paperback and you own it. You can sell it, lend it, leave it in a will, or burn it. Buy an e-book and you own a license the seller can revoke.Share on X
On a day meant to celebrate e-books, nobody wants to hear that you don’t own them. When you buy a paperback or a hardcover, you own a book, and it’s yours completely. You can sell it, lend it, give it away, leave it to your kids, or throw it in the fireplace.
When you buy an e-book, you’re buying a license to access the content, not the content itself. Kindle works this way. So does Nook. So do the others. Amazon even updated its checkout language recently to say plainly that you’re licensing, not buying, after a California law forced digital stores to stop pretending otherwise. This isn’t a theoretical worry. Amazon once reached into people’s devices and deleted copies of a book they’d paid for, and the book, with perfect irony, was George Orwell’s 1984. You can’t resell your e-book library. You can’t leave it to anyone. And the company that sold it to you can change it, restrict it, or pull it. It’s the same problem as the streaming services. You might pay full price for a movie, and a week later the service decides it no longer wants to offer it, and it’s simply gone from your library. Try doing that to someone who owns a Blu-ray. You can’t, because they own the disc.
Digital is different, and the difference is enforceable in a way physical never was. I won’t pretend there are no workarounds. There are tools that strip the protection off an e-book so you can keep a real copy that’s yours, the way a physical book is yours.
The legality of doing that’s murky and depends on where you are and what you’re stripping, so I’m not going to walk you through it. But the very fact that people want those tools tells you something. They’re trying to turn a license back into the ownership they thought they were paying for in the first place.
Why I Still Keep My Hardcovers
This is exactly why I haven’t given up physical books, and why I lean toward hardcovers in particular. I like the heft of a hardcover. It feels considerable in the hand in a way a screen never will. It looks right on a shelf, it lasts for decades, and it survives long after the company that sold it’s changed its terms or gone out of business. The only real downside is that hardcovers are a real pain to move, as anyone who has hauled boxes of them to a new house can tell you.
But that weight is also the point. It’s a real object you own. So I keep both, and I use them differently. The e-reader is for portability, for travel and waiting rooms and cheap genre experiments. The physical books are for keeping, for the titles I want to own and pass down.
If you’re building a collection you intend to keep or sell someday, build it in print, because you can’t sell an e-book library, and you can sell a wall of hardcovers. Use e-books for what they’re great at, and don’t mistake a license for ownership.
How do you spend Read an E-Book Week?
Read an e-book, obviously, and appreciate the convenience for what it is. If you don’t own an e-reader, the apps on your phone work fine, and the first full week of March is a good time to discover how much reading you can fit into the cracks of your day when the book is always with you. Go hunt the free and cheap first-in-series titles and use them the way I do, as a low-risk way to explore a genre you’ve never tried. You might find a new favorite for the price of nothing.
But while you’re at it, remember what you’re buying.
If a book matters to you, the kind you want to own forever and hand to someone someday, consider buying it in print too. Enjoy the e-book for its convenience, keep the physical book for its permanence, and never forget which one is yours. That clear-eyed view is the most useful thing I can offer you during a week meant to celebrate the format I use every single day.