Read an E-Book Week, March 6 - 12, 2011

This week is Read an E-Book Week. E-Books have become immensely popular in the past 3-4 years, but did you know that e-books have been around for 40 years?

Dedicated e-readers such as Kindle, Nook, and others have exploded in sales and tablets like the iPad, which can also be used to read e-books, have practically gone nova is the amount of their sales.

A report made last October from the Association of American Publishers stated that eBooks sales grew 193% between January and August 2010, and a recent report from Amazon indicated that e-book sales have outstripped paperback book sales.

I have my wife's old Kindle reader that I inherited after I gave her a new one for her birthday last year. Even though I had been reading e-books on my desktop computer, laptop computer and iPhone for years and had used the Kindle Reader App on my laptop and iPhone, I had never had a dedicated e-reader and wanted to see if I liked it well enough to add another device to my collection.

I like the ease of downloading books immediately from Amazon, but that is perhaps the only thing I REALLY like about the Kindle. I feel limited by it's proprietary book format and it gets old having to email .pdf format documents to them so they will convert them to Kindle format so I can read them on the Kindle.

I LOVE the idea of an e-reader though! I travel a great deal and it is so much easier to load books (TEXT books. Anything with a lot of illustrations or graphics or color is a waste on the Kindle) on the e-reader and take one item instead of a multitude of books. E-books are economical, though they have been rising in price over the past several months, and I enjoy the ability to search them quickly and to make notes.

So I probably will eventually buy a more up to date e-reader to replace this first generation Kindle I'm currently using. I just haven't decided which one it will be, except that I'm reasonably sure it won't be a Kindle.

Do you read e-books? Which e-reader do you use?

Happy "Read an E-Book Week"!!

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