Image via WikipediaI read this post on LifeHacker and it got me thinking.Books: In Defense of Buying Books. The post is about actually buying as opposed to checking out books in the library it still got me thinking about the future of the paper book.

When the Kindle came out I was very, very skeptical. I’ve had a chance to see a few in action and they are very cool. I don’t know that I’m quite ready to get one yet but I’m softening.

Then more recently I’ve discovered the BeamItDown app for my iPod Touch, I love it. For $.99 you can buy any number of individual classic books. Or $1.99 you can by entire collections of a single author or themed collections like Politics or American Classics.

I love these digital books for two reasons:

• $1.99 gets you more books than you can read in a month. Granted they are “Classics” which means they are public domain books but in print these will cost you $5-6 a piece new.
• They make nice emergency books. You know those books you read when you have a spare 10-20 minutes of unexpected waiting.

Between the BeamItDown apps and the ByLine app, which allows me to sync my Google Reader for offline use, I find myself doing a lot more reading on mobile digital devices.

I still love physical books though and don’t ever seeing myself giving up this tactile pleasure. I love seeing my bookcase full of books. I still have the same childhood dream of having a whole room I can have dedicated as my “library”.

But I also see the market for digital books being much, much larger than the market for physical book. Maybe not anytime soon, but definitely by the time my grade school aged kids graduate college.

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