How do you read your books?

Good afternoon all!

This really is an amazing time for readers.  More authors, more voices, more stories than ever before are getting out into the public thanks in large part to electronic publishing.  But how many readers are using the new technology?

I have one of the original Sony e-readers.  I have a few books loaded on it, but honestly, I don't use it.  I like it.  I love the idea of the space it saves me, but I don't take the time to charge it, mostly because I'm charging my phone, my iPod, my laptop.  So, when I think about it and use I like it, but I don't use it that much.

Today's readers are far more advanced and way easier to handle.  The strides the Kindle, especially, has made in the field is magnificent.  You can read a book a very nearly any hand held device, including your phone.  

With the ability to read a book on a device we always have with us, we of course are reading more than ever, right?  We're storing books on our tiny devices and not dragging heavy print books around with us.  The demise and down sizing of many book retailers would seem to suggest just that.

But are we really?  I have more space devoted in my house to books than I do any other kind of media, and I'm a complete DVD hoarder.  I have three full sized book cases, two shorter book cases, and several plastic storage bins full of books I simply can't bear to part with.  I am the person who goes to the second hand book store to gobble up anything in print at a bargain price.  I buy them, I read them, I shelve them.  A couple times a year, I take a box to the half price book place and sell them to the store for pocket change.

What is it about the printed book that we cannot let go of?

The music industry has gone through its revolution.  Music is all but completely digital now.  The resistance, mostly my twenty year old son, buys RECORDS, and there are some big box stores that still supply CDs to the listening public, but really, for practical purposes, music is digital.

Movies are fast going that way as well.  Why waste storage space in your house when you can have all your movies stored in "the cloud?"  (I don't trust the cloud.  I like dvd and blue ray disks I understand them,  I trust them.)

Books are the last media hold out.  When the e-reader fist came out my thought was, "This will solve the back pack problem."  You remember, when parents were screaming about how their kids' backpacks were too heavy with text books.  I thought e-readers would be perfect for that, but never really for the casual

book reader.

Funny, the textbook companies don't seem to care much about kids' backpacks, and school districts haven't all figured out how to use technology like this to their advantage.  Two years ago my daughter's school finally rolled out iPads to the students.  But long before our school district got on board, I, and others like me, were publishing novels for the readers and normal, middle aged women like me were reading scandalous books on our devices.

I'm not here to stir the pot today or talk about what's write and wrong in publishing.  I just want to know:

How do you read your books?

Print?

Kindle?  Nook?  E-reader?  some other device?

Do you wait for the movie to come out?

How do you read your books?  I'd love to hear from you!