Room for improvement

E-Books are, to me, an emotional topic because I'm so viscerally connected to the book as a physical artefact and the bookshop as a physical place. Yet e-books are undeniably eating away at paper and shelves.

Europe has lagged behind the U.S. in widespread adoption of e-books, but a new report suggests that they are finally taking off. The e-book market in Western Europe grew by 400 percent in 2010, a new report finds. By 2015, e-books should make up 15 percent of total book sales in the region. (By contrast, in the U.S., they were already at 6.4 percent in 2010.)

[From Western Europe Sees Huge Shift Toward E-Books | paidContent]

I find myself using e-books more and more and I think I have developed a reasonable strategy. The thing is, I love books. I can't stop buying them. I love browsing around bookshops, I love buying books and reading them on the train home, I love ordering off of my Amazon wish list ready for an upcoming business trip. I'm writing this in California. On the plane on the way over I finished the excellent "Forgotten Fatherland" by Ben Macintyre (I enjoyed it so much I've added his "Agent Zigzag" to my wish list for my next trip) that had been recommended to me by my brother-in-law and started a new Christopher Priest novel "Inverted World" that I'd picked up in Forbidden Planet the other day (I decided I fancied some Sci-Fi but wasn't sure what, so I went for a potter about their shelves). Books, all of them.

On the train from San Francisco down to San Jose, though, I was reading Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones". I've discovered that there are hundreds of classics that I can download to my iPad's Kindle app for nothing. Free. I read Charles Dicken's Christmas Carol for the first time a couple of weeks ago, using the iPad on the train when I can't get a seat (which is actually making me think of buying a Kindle because the iPad is a little heavy when you are standing up on South West Trains). Downloading the free classic novels and reading them on my iPad in addition to buying physical books of one form or another is really working for me! I feel as if I've discovered an useful balance between the real and physical that is actually "improving" (in the Victorian sense)..

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes