It’s amazing how far I’ve come along, I recall first hearing about the concept of e-book and e-book readers back when Sony released their first e-book reader in 2006. At that time, and up until a few months ago, I was a total dead-tree format book purist. Man, has that changed. Roll the clock nine years later, now I can’t see myself reading any non electronic book. Originally my excuse of avoiding e-books was to the fact that I mainly read technical books. In the past, on all of my technical books, I tended to write down notes in the actual pages whenever I read an important topic. After reading a few technical books, I realized a much more better and efficient approach that solved this issue was to write my notes in my self-hosted internal wiki. Not only are my notes much better organized, but they’re easier to search.
The cost savings between physical dead-tree books and e-books is almost quite the same in my situation. Previously, I used to buy the vast majority of my books used through Amazon book resellers. Buying books used was and still is considerably way cheaper than buying them new. Now, I buy all of e-books directly from the publishers themselves. Even though e-books are slightly cheaper than physical books, I still think the prices publishers are charging for e-books is fairly steep given that there is practically no manufacture cost. However on the bright side, the publishers I buy books from O’reilly, Pack Publishing, No Starch Press, InformIT (Addison-Wesley Professional, Prentice Hall Professional, Sams Publishing), constantly have really good deals on all of of their e-books. Usually the deals are anywhere from 30%-70% discount.
In terms of my e-book reader, I use a first-gen iPad mini. I’m a big fan of Android, and in fact I prefer it over iOS. But I haven’t found an e-book reading app in Android that is a nice and polish as iBooks in iOS.
In conclusion, I love e-books! It’s so convenient to carry around my entire book library, I’ve even gone as far as re-buying old physical books for a second time as a digital e-book.