Michael Pastore - 50 Benefits of Ebooks; A Thinking Persons Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution

50 Benefits of Ebooks A Thinking Persons Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution (Where Ebooks are Low-cost or Free). Copyright 2009 by Michael Pastore. All rights reserved.

Technical Editor: Michael S. Hart

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50 Benefits of Ebooks
Zorba Press
ISBN: 978-0-927379-17-5

This book is available in 3 formats:
Paperback, 372 pages, $ 20
Ebook ( EPUB ), for iPhones, iPods, and other devices, $ 2
Ebook ( PDF ), for Desktop computers (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS), $ 2

Edition: 2009 September, 2009v09.18
Word count: 51,000
Printing 010203040506070809101112

For updates and free resources, visit the books companion web site:

www.EpublishersWeekly.net

1. 12 Benefits of Books Made of Paper

2. 52 Benefits of Ebooks

3. Free Ebooks and How to Find Them

4. Where to Buy Ebooks

5. Ebook Formats: A Primer

6. How to Read Ebooks

7. Ten Popular Myths About Ebooks

8. Future Ebook Reading Devices

9. Ebook Reading Devices in 2009

10. Ebooks and Independent Publishing

11. Why the Ex-perts Call Them E-books

12. Size Matters: Ebooks and Bytes

13. How to Publish Without DRM

14. Publishing Ebooks Ten Tremendous Trends in 2009

15. Reflections on Books and Reading

16. Thoreau: Reading

17. Schopenhauer: On Books & Reading

18. Sainte-Beuve: What is a Classic?

19. Ruskin: Of Kings Treasuries

20. Pastore: The Monster Reads! Mary Shelley Warns about Technology and the Loss of the Inner Life

21. 200 Ebooks Worth Reading Twice

22. Epublishing Glossary

23. Key Resources About Ebooks

24. Ebookology: a Subject Guide

25. Top News Stories of 2009

26. Will DEPUB Devour EPUB?

27. Why This Ebook Has No DRM

28. Envoi: The Island of Ebooks

29. Afterword by Michael S. Hart 358

30. Acknowledgments and Credits

31. About the Companion Website

32. Index

Books by Zorba Press

50 Benefits of Ebooks is a lively introduction to the brave new worlds of ebooks and electronic publishing. The book makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, the work focuses on 3 areas: 1) the new, useful and most interesting aspects of the ebook experience; 2) the free (and approaching low-cost) ebooks that might inspire a genuine publishing revolution; and 3) how reading good books (whether made of paper or of bytes) might transform our culture and our personal lives.

This book is being published in paperback, and as an ebook, in the formats PDF and EPUB. The books companion blog and website, (EpublishersWeekly.net) urges readers NOT to buy the pocket-sized 372-page paperback, which costs $ 20. The ebook version costs two dollars, saves trees, and contains all the same content as the paperback except the paper!

50 Benefits of Ebooks is organized into five sections: Benefits of Ebooks and Paper Books; Reading Ebooks; Ebooks for Authors and Publishers; The Value of Reading; and The Education of an Ebooklover.

Ebook newcomers will find the basics here. Scholars and parents, concerned about the dumbing effects of technology, will be gripped by the essay The Monster Reads!. And ebook professionals can debate and debunk my wild predictions for the rosy and thorny future of ebooks, by devouring the essay: Publishing Ebooks Ten Tremendous Trends in 2009 .

This new edition (September 2009) is 25% larger, and contains many updates, new chapters, and an Afterword by Michael S. Hart.

I love paper books, and I hope that they are never completely replaced by their electronic progeny. Nevertheless, every day, ebooks are growing in use, in sales, and in significance. After years of sputtering, the Digital Reading Revolution has at last arrived.

50 Benefits of Ebooks is your friendly and reliable guide. In all your reading, on paper and on screens, I wish you joy.

Michael Pastore

www.EpublishersWeekly.net
10 September 2009
Ithaca, New York

In my mind and on my bookshelf and virtual bookshelf paper books and ebooks live together in perfect harmony. Blogs may be driving newspapers to extinction, but ebooks will never replace paper books.

In a humorous essay, The Battle of the Books, Jonathan Swift pokes fun at the intellectual debate which pitted the classical writers against the moderns. A bee, supporting the old books, praises them for furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Although old things and new things are often antagonists, it is a mistake to think that paper books and ebooks are at war. Ebooks are simply the latest means of communicating and storing information, that began with stone tablets, advanced to papyrus scrolls, and continued with the invention of paper by a retired Chinese eunuch named Cai Lun. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each unique technology, we can help maintain a lasting peace, and optimize the best of both possible worlds.

either numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writing; or, a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the bookbinder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture.

Allgemeines Oeconomishces Lexicon, 1753

I love paper books I have a large library with 10,000 of them. Ebooks will not make paper books extinct. For booklovers, there is more to fear in the cultural shift Americas declining interest in reading than in the technological shift the way we read, which is turning from paper to screens. The perfect solution is so simple: You can own both embodiments of the books you love: an ebook copy, and a paper edition of the same title.