eBooks vs Paper books

For the longest time, I couldn't understand why eBooks cost almost as much as paper books. They don't take very much to create and you have nearly an infinite supply of them available for readers. With paper books, you have to destroy some trees, convert the wood into paper, brew up some ink and glue, create the book, pack the book, ship it, and store it until it is sold. That's a lot of resources and people involved there.

One day, I read an argument that tried to explain the high price of the eBook. It went something like this. An eBook lasts forever. You buy one copy and never need to buy another. A paper books however, has a limited life span. Eventually you'll have to replace it. This means that publisher sells more copies of the book and makes more money. Basically, publishers make more money on paper books than on eBooks. So they want you to buy paper. Well, that kind of makes sense. But I don't buy into it 100%. I don't think publishers have figured out what the heck an eBook really is, so they're treating them just like paper books.

I have this belief. The price for the book, be it eBook or paper, is not for the medium, but for the content. Back in the old days, the publishers only had paper to transmit the content to me. But I believe that if they had access to eBooks, they would have gone that route instead of paper because of the ease and savings in transmitting the content in that medium. Paper would still exist, but it would be more of an exception than a rule. Kind of hard to take an eReader into the Everglades or jungle. In fact, in our hurricane kit, we have a paper copy of the FM 21-76 US Army Survival Manual.

What brought up this topic for this post was a discussion we had in English II yesterday about which was the preferred medium. In the end, it came down to the cost and convenience of the eBooks. Publishers are willing to sell eBook versions of their textbooks for less than the paper versions. Probably because you can't resell them which means the next group of students taking the course will have to buy new books.

Anyway, I have no problem spending the same amount of money on an eBook version of a paper book for the reason I stated above. I'm paying for the content and not the medium. I prefer my content to be served to me in electronic format versus paper. I love the convenience of having access to my huge library of books at almost any time ^_^ And now with the new color eReaders, almost no book is out of bounds for me. I got my Kindle Reader for Christmas a couple of years ago. It's small and black and white. So large books and color books were out of the question. However, my iPad removed that limitation for me ^_^