Culture Shock 02.10.11: Reading is about to change forever

A few years ago, I spent most every weekend rummaging through the upstairs stacks at this used bookshop in downtown Athens, across the street from the Limestone County Courthouse.

After a few months, I'd assembled a complete set of old "Conan: The Barbarian" paperbacks containing the original stories by Robert E. Howard. I also found most, but not all, of the then out-of-print "John Carter: Warlord of Mars" novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The hunt was almost as important as the prize, as I imagine collectors who thumb through boxes at flea markets and yard sales for rare LPs and overlooked baseball cards would agree. But that bookshop is now gone, and the experience of hunting for used books may not be far behind.

Now I can find all of those John Carter stories for my Kindle, and they cost anywhere from a couple of dollars to free. Click, and it's done. It's convenient, but it lacks the romance of upsetting your allergies as you blow dust off a brittle, yellowed paperback someone else bought for 75 cents in 1972.

Amazon.com announced last month that it sold more Kindle books than either paperbacks or hardcover books in the fourth quarter of 2010.

That's not counting the public-domain e-books Amazon offers free of charge.

Brick-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble's quick adoption of its own e-book reader, the Nook, has helped it avoid the fate of longtime rival, Borders. (Birmingham-based Books-A-Million has thrown in with B&N and now offers the Nook.)

Borders, meanwhile, is likely bound for bankruptcy. While Amazon raked in $200 million more in 2010 than it did in 2009 — no recession here — Borders was hard at work losing $74.4 million in just the fourth quarter.

It's easy to get nostalgic about books. I get nostalgic about lots of things, like the orange-and-brown earth tones of 1970s kitchen appliances. But like it or not, the electronic book is making dog-eared pages and creased spines obsolete. And I can think of some reasons why that's for the better.

Beyond-Black-Friday.com, a blog that follows Kindle news, directed me to a Tampa Tribune story about a Florida school district that spent $400,000 to buy Kindles for its students. The district will get some of that back in savings; electronic textbooks run $15 less than traditional ones. Plus, there's the bonus of Clearwater High's students getting to carry slim, lightweight electronic readers instead of lugging around heavy backpacks.

But probably the greatest long-term advantage is an e-book gives students instant — and often free — access to thousands of works that are in the public domain. That includes most of what students read in their high-school literature classes, from Shakespeare to "Moby Dick."

It's a lot of free material that can replace students buying books with their own money, which is what I did when I was in high school. (I certainly wouldn't pay for "Moby Dick" if I didn't have to.)

E-books will also radically change libraries. The New York Public Library's website features e-books for iPads, PCs, Sony Readers and Android-powered devices. Companies like Cleveland-based OverDrive offer software allowing library patrons to check out e-books for a limited time. The Jefferson County Library Cooperative uses OverDrive's system.

The world is full of free and inexpensive e-books. And devices like the Nook and Kindle are about to put them into more hands than ever.

Culture Shock 09.23.10: Reading a book goes from solitary to social

It was bound to happen. Even the act of reading a book — seemingly that most solitary of pastimes — is starting to plug into social media.

Amazon's Kindle is currently the top e-book reader in terms of market share. And while the company hasn't said exactly how many Kindles it has sold, at least one source puts the number at more than 3 million, as of April, which was before Amazon cut prices, causing a spike in sales, and well before the new third-generation Kindles began shipping to customers this month.

Amazon says its new 3G Kindle is the fastest-selling model yet, and earlier this year, the online retailer said it was selling more e-books than hardcover books.

All that would be impressive enough, but Amazon isn't the only player in the e-book game. Apple's iPad has quickly gained 22 percent of the e-book market, according to Apple, whose CEO Steve Jobs is never shy about telling you exactly how many units his company has moved. Jobs says iPad users downloaded more than 5 million e-books in the first 65 days the iPad was on the market.

Is your head spinning yet? Well, hang on. Brick-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader has about 20 percent of the e-book market, according to company figures. The Nook is the one truly bright spot on B&N's balance sheet.

And none of this includes Sony's e-reader or tablet devices powered by Google's Android operating system.

But what does any of this have to do with reading becoming a social activity?

Books are making the leap from paper to pixels faster than anyone — apart from Jobs and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — could have anticipated. E-books are reaching a critical mass of readers. And where there is a critical mass of anyone in an electronic environment, social networking inevitably follows.

After swearing I would never give up physical books and all of the sensations that come with them — the feel and smell of the pages — I finally made the jump to e-books. I bought one of the new 3G Kindles.

It was a matter of safety as much as anything. One of the stacks of books I have piled on the floor of my home office — my shelves are all full and sagging under the weight of my library — toppled and nearly hit me in the head. E-books may not be a perfect substitute for real books, but at least they won't try to kill me.

One Kindle feature I discovered is it allows you to highlight passages of any e-book and then retrieve your highlights with just a few clicks. It's a handy feature, especially for those of us who cringe at the thought of permanently defacing a physical book. But that's not all.

Kindle allows you to share your notes and highlighted passages with friends via Facebook and Twitter. And, as you're reading, it lets you know if a passage has been highlighted by other Kindle users.

For example, I'm currently reading "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like" by Paul Bloom. It has more highlighted passages than any other book on my Kindle. The most popular passage, highlighted by 44 readers so far, begins, "What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think the thing is."

So, as I read, I can see what other readers think is important, which, whether I like it or not, will probably color what I think is important. (Good thing it's possible to turn this feature off.)

E-books are in their infancy. So it's only likely that Kindle, iPad and other e-readers will greatly expand on this rather simple social-networking feature as time goes on.

And it isn't as if reading has always been completely solitary. Weekly book clubs have been around for as long as there has been widespread literacy. But now I find myself in a virtual book club with strangers I don't know and will never meet. We just happen to be reading the same book and, sometimes, highlighting the same passages.

Welcome to the 21st century.