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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that books are way undersaturated.

The reason is: paper. Dead tree books weigh a lot and waste space. Therefore owning a library is a cost. Costs to move, costs storage space, costs effort to collate and maintain and protect.

E-books do not have that cost. Having a hundred e-books in your purse is a normal thing. Having a thousand? Well, it might make sorting through your personal equivalent of a branch library a little more fussy, but it won't weigh more or waste space.

People may not have more time, but they can divert time to books, and they can divert re-reading time to new-book reading time.

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Therefore owning a library is a cost.

Owning a library has a higher value than owning a library of ebooks: social, decorative, nostalgic, works without power, easy share, can resell, etc. It more than evens out. But there is Steam effect - people will stockpile ebooks they don't read.

> social, decorative, nostalgic

This is subjective and not monetary value. The only people that care about social, decorative, and nostalgic value of books are also the people who probably wont resell books.

> works without power

finding a place to charge your device is easy and ereaders last months without recharging

> easy to share, resell

Sure but the money you save by reselling a book is probably less than what you save by buying the ebook

Space and weight are real, expensive costs. Owning a library has negative monetary value. Owning a library of ebooks doesn't. It's stored on the internet and you can access it from anywhere.

Basically, if your books aren't furniture and you aren't sharing your books multiple times a month ebooks provide more value.

"Sure but the money you save by reselling a book is probably less than what you save by buying the ebook"

This is what I had hoped for when Kindle came around and Amazon started pushing Ebooks - but unfortunately it just isnt true. The difference between ebook and paperback is currently low enough that if you maintain your paperbacks well - you'll still end up spending less (net) on the book - in quite a few cases. (Heck you can even resell the paperbacks using Amazon ;))

"Sure but the money you save by reselling a book is probably less than what you save by buying the ebook"

Not under the publisher's model.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde

Yet oddly enough Amazon seem to have gotten stingier with the flash memory on a Kindle. 2 GB? Just give me a damn microSD slot so I can bump that up to a level I'm happy with. A few biggish PDFs (e-Textbooks come to mind) will obliterate that space.

Other ereader devices exist.

Kobo devices have microSD cards. You have to unscrew the case to get at it, but still, you'd probably only have to do it once.

True. But the screen on the Paperwhite is really, really nice.

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