I LOVE books. I love to hold them, flip through them, lend them, and read them during take-off. While reading a book, rare is it that I don’t decide that I need to flip back several chapters to validate a detail that is triggered by a new development. In an eBook, that is very hard.

On the other hand, the bigger the book, the more I enjoy the electronic version. When I reread Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, I did so electronically. Let’s face it, nobody enjoys hauling a 800 page book on an airplane. It is also easier to carry multiple books to cover the eventual moment when I finish my previous book.

Well, today, Amazon made an announcement that solves one of my biggest problems with eBooks. This takes the music digital download and almost extends it to books. Amazon says it best:

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I wrote last month a couple of posts on the problem with eBooks.  Both covered a couple of points, the first focused on the prices and features of eBooks while the second focused on dealing with existing book collections, what I call the Reread Dilemma, and a potential way to convert collections from paper into digital.

Both posts received a healthy amount of comments.  I wanted to address some of those thoughts here, as well as refer to several items out in the ether talking about this very topic.  Not to mention, I got to spend some quality time trying out eBooks.

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As promised, here is my follow-on post to yesterday’s thoughts on eBooks.  In fact, this post covers the issue that vexes me the most.  This is something that I feel needs to be resolved.  If it was resolved today, there would be a large number of happy users.  If it was resolved today, I’d go out and buy eReaders for my family tonight.

The Reread Dilemma

I find that there are two different types of book readers out there.  There are the average/casual reader that will read a book once and rarely pick it up again.  They may read a lot or a little, but they rarely revisit a book.  There are always books that are the exception, but as a rule, this reading group follows this trend.  My wife, an regular reader, falls into this group.

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I expect a fair amount of resistance to my next two posts, but I feel this needs to be written.  I’ve been tracking this space for a while due to personal interest and I keep seeing things that remind me that this is not a mature market.  There is some further maturation needed in the space and I am hoping that we’ll see some of that this year.

One thing to remember is that this post is not about the readers.  That is an entirely different topic.  This is about eBooks which can be read on readers, tablets, and computers.  The method for reading eBooks will evolve and improve but I’m not talking about that here.  This is focused on what we are reading.

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