Poll Electronic and Physical Books

[Tirius]

Dead trees only. I've tried reading from a screen, but there's just no substitute for cuddling up in bed with a good book. I found digital reading annoying enough that it's meant I'll never buy e-books - which is a shame because I've seen a few titles go by that I'd otherwise be very interested in.

 

[JoeZhang]

The only books I have these days are text books that publishers sent me - I never actually open them but I have a book case in my office because academics don't trust academics who don't have books.

 

[JoeP]

Physical books for hardcovers and larger-sized paperback, ebooks for MMPB.

 

[BillJ]

E-books.

Getting older, it is great that I can control the size of the text. It makes reading more enjoyable.

 

[Galileo7]

TOS "Court Martial" Defense attorney Samuel T. Cogley used physical books too.

 

[Kor]

Parchment all the way. Too bad it's all in museums.

Kor

 

[Little_kingsfan]

Personally, I prefer the physical books, but, especially with Trek books that come out every month or so, I get them on my Kindle because the nearest bookstore is just too far away. However, whenever I'm in the area, I always go to the bookstore and pick up a book or two.

 

[Reanok]

I buy Physical Paper back books especially the Star Trek books novels I'm interested in. Personally I prefer going to my local Barnes and Nobel to get them or Amazon.com if I can't find the latest Star trek novels in the local book stores in town.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I still love the smell of second hand books from a traditional second hand bookshop. My iPhone never smells like that, no matter the eBook app.

My Trek Bantam and Ballantine novels are mostly second hand then, from 1980 onwards, my Pocket Books collection is all first edition, first printings. I have bought a few eBook-only publications and am very grateful to have them on hand when a hardcopy novel suddenly runs out on a long plane or train journey! I have also bought a few non-Trek eBooks when short printrun hardcopies make it impossible to find certain books at retail.

I can't imagine a day when I choose eBook over hardcopy, but I did run out of room here about a decade ago. Every new book purchase decreases personal space, but not ready to cull. I'm drowning, but loving it.

 

[Greg Cox]

Personally, I prefer hard copies, but I have no objection to ebook royalties.

Just got a royalty statement on one of my older TREK books. All the recent sales were ebook sales with NO physical copies sold in the last accounting period.

Interesting.

 

[jaime]

Personally, I prefer hard copies, but I have no objection to ebook royalties.

Just got a royalty statement on one of my older TREK books. All the recent sales were ebook sales with NO physical copies sold in the last accounting period.

Interesting.

It's sometimes a bit of a sod to get the physical books...they are usually more expensive, especially if you are trying to get old ones to catch up.
So the recent books of yours I have bought have all been ebooks, as it's far and away the cheapest and easiest way to get them.
Saying that, I had to but atonement (VOY -beyer) as a paperback because it disappeared from the kindle store just before it came out.

From a space perspective, it's probably better that way too.
Trek books pioneered ebooks, so it doesn't feel unnatural.

 

[Csalem]

Personally, I prefer hard copies, but I have no objection to ebook royalties.

Just got a royalty statement on one of my older TREK books. All the recent sales were ebook sales with NO physical copies sold in the last accounting period.

Interesting.

For me this one of the advantages of ebooks. It helps to discover older novels I have missed. Often people here have mentioned a book from the late 1980s or 1990s on here and I have gone to the Kindle store, found it there and bought it. If I went to my second-hand bookshop there is no guarantee they will have it and I could miss out on it then.

I imagine it also has to be good for the authors if readers buy an old novel new as an ebook and they get the royalty than through the secondhand bookshop where I assume they get nothing.

 

[Relayer1]

Both have their place.

Anything I collect, I generally want as a physical copy - i.e. my Trek novels. However, e-readers are very convenient.

To give an example, I purchased all of the Game of Thrones / Song of Ice and Fire novels as paperbacks for a very reasonable £2.00 to £3.50, but large as they are, I found them hard to carry around without getting dog-eared, and as much of my reading is done on public transport, they went unread.

Some months later, Amazon's Kindle deal of the day was the series for £0.99 each. I purchased them all and read them one after another. I'll probably buy the rest on Kindle as (if) they come out and buy a cheap paperback for my collection as and when.

I've also purchased other series as deals of the day that I haven't yet read, but if I like them sufficiently, I may buy hardcopies later. Conversely, I purchased some cheap Tolkien e-books I've read and had physical copies of for years, just to have them 'to hand'.

E-readers are very much a secondry option to me and I'm unlikely to ever spend more than £0.99 for an e-book (G.o.T. 6 and 7 excepted), but they are useful.

 

[jaime]

Both have their place.

Anything I collect, I generally want as a physical copy - i.e. my Trek novels. However, e-readers are very convenient.

To give an example, I purchased all of the Game of Thrones / Song of Ice and Fire novels as paperbacks for a very reasonable £2.00 to £3.50, but large as they are, I found them hard to carry around without getting dog-eared, and as much of my reading is done on public transport, they went unread.

Some months later, Amazon's Kindle deal of the day was the series for £0.99 each. I purchased them all and read them one after another. I'll probably buy the rest on Kindle as (if) they come out and buy a cheap paperback for my collection as and when.

I've also purchased other series as deals of the day that I haven't yet read, but if I like them sufficiently, I may buy hardcopies later. Conversely, I purchased some cheap Tolkien e-books I've read and had physical copies of for years, just to have them 'to hand'.

E-readers are very much a secondry option to me and I'm unlikely to ever spend more than £0.99 for an e-book (G.o.T. 6 and 7 excepted), but they are useful.

That's pretty much my approach too. But reading trek ebooks on my ancient ipod touch is what got me back into trek novels, so because of that and the fact that preorder prices can be as low as 2.50 mean I tend to stick to ebooks. That and if it turns out to be awful I can send it back fast.
I do think the trek books could stand being lower priced for the older ones, or at the very least turn up in more deals than they do, but then royalties work different for them than for all the titles that crop up in deals, and especially for the self published or borderline self published stuff that does extremely well on Kindle.
The Martian started out as kindle self pub didn't it?

 

[Relayer1]

preorder prices can be as low as 2.50 mean I tend to stick to ebooks.

Wow, most kindle books over here fall between £4.50 and £6.00 ($6.50 and $8.70). Even the Trek novellas are around £4.00 ($5.80).

We are being overcharged...

 

[jaime]

Wow, most kindle books over here fall between £4.50 and £6.00 ($6.50 and $8.70). Even the Trek novellas are around £4.00 ($5.80).
I
We are being overcharged...

I am in UK too. But sometimes the pre order price goes low, and I think once the destiny books were in a sale. I find the novellas to be horribly expensive and often avoid them. I am also a lot more damning of them sometimes as a result.
I went through a stage of being proud I was always first in with a review ( I read ridiculously fast. Which probably also affects my opinion of the worth of a book sometimes) bit found I was losing interest in the less than stellar ones, but had too much I wanted to say about the good ones (to the point the resulting essay would probably take about half as long to write as the book takes to read)
The problem is, you can get hefty, good, sci fi for a tiny price, either as a sale item or because it's an unknown. Star Trek is something I love, and some of the books are amazing....but when you can get something like Dune for a quid fifty in a sale (or a run of Peter f Hamiltons, andre Norton...I think I got the first Culture novel by Banks for 99p over Christmas) then you really want the books to feel like they are worth that money. (also relevant here is my own income of course, lol)
With ebooks, you have a relative ease of dealing with all these things (price checking, fast to get. User reviews right there by the checkout, and as a very rare last resort, the return and refund is as easy as the sale) which makes it easier to keep on reading them rather than swear off them after a bad book comes out. (I got back into Trek lit by finishing destiny part 1 without realising it was a three part thing....and went back for 'just one more then I will sleep' until I found myself well into catching up on the ds9 relaunch and having spent too much money that month. But what the hey....so there's an upside to all that easiness too.)
On a sadly related note, there seems to be a ton of...shall we say...fake? Star trek books turning up on kindke recently. And they are chunky tomes at lower prices, but I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. (they even use the official logos, but it's all a bit Axanar)
One final thing that bugs me, is that too this day no one has fixed the Imzadi omnibus, it still calls itself Sta Trek. Which alphabetises horribly next to the others, despite 'letting the publisher know'.
But then half the ds9 books have badly messed up titling too (unity ends up down in u, rather than St) and some of the older books still have black and white covers, so I suppose I should quit my whinging.
Hope we get the new German trilogy translated too....they have much better covers than us, which ebook readers really notice.

 

[JD]

The fan fics you mention drive me crazy, they look completely official. Several times now I've clicked on one trying to figure out how I could have missed a Trek book, only to realize after a couple minutes that it is actually fan fic. I really wish they had some kind of an indication on the cover or the page that identified it as fan fiction and not an officially licensed story.

 

[Therin of Andor]

... only to realize after a couple minutes that it is actually fan fic. I really wish they had some kind of an indication on the cover or the page that identified it as fan fiction and not an officially licensed story.

In the 80s, as vanity press publishing began to get cheaper and cheaper, a few cheeky fanfic writers started making their Trek fanzines resemble Pocket Book novels! They were swiftly sent "Cease and Desist" letters.

Unlicensed and bootleg eBook fiction that pretends to be "official" should be reported to Simon & Schuster.

 

[Ktrek]

If a Star Trek book is available in paper I buy paper but if ebook only I will buy it in Nook format. I own both a Kindle and Nook and do like ebooks for many things. I will not buy reference or textbook type of books in any format other than paper. Ebooks are too cumbersome trying to find the particular passage or reference you want quickly. Outside of Star Trek most of my other purchases are ebook.
Kevin

 

[Therin of Andor]

Ebooks are too cumbersome trying to find the particular passage or reference you want quickly.

Really? I would have said the opposite is true. A word search, or even a phrase search, so much better than flipping hardcopy pages and skimming and scanning. And an electronic bookmark that never falls out accidentally!

In the 80s, I had a rather awkward series of encounters with a Trek fan in our club. When he heard that I had all the commercial blueprints and tech manuals, he told me how his house had once flooded, and he lost everything made of paper, so therefore I should be kind and lend him all my Trek stuff - for free - so he could scan it (very early days of scanners) and put it all into his computer. He persisted for months. I just didn't trust him, not to mention it was breach of copyright.