Roll on, ebooks

The news is kind of old now, but I'll repeat it anyway: ebooks are outselling print books. This surprises me not at all, but it does make me think a little bit about the psychological shift that it implies.

See, for years, I've loved the cheesy romance novels, even back to the bodice ripper days, oh yeah. I even have novels with Fabio on the cover. And I always, always felt ashamed reading those things out in public. This might have been related to the fact that I was a literature student and therefore was expected to spend my free time enjoying War and Peace and Other Things of That Nature. But I never did, and I always endured the scorn of my peers.

How liberating it is, however, to whip out my BlackBerry or iPad in a post office line or on a bus and indulge to my heart's content and never hear the slightest disparaging sniff from people who ought to be minding their own business anyway.

There's another paradigm shift that accompanies the changeover from print books to ebooks: length. Word count is no longer dictated by paper prices or shelf space. An ebook can be as long, or as short, as it needs to be. Savanna Kougar

noted this inher RWBB post discussing the popularity of ebook novellas and short stories. As she pointed out, the ebook format certainly aids readers who are just looking for a short-term distraction, but I think it also means that books that need 120k words can get them without deforesting a small county.

I like this flexibility. I like the anonymity and personalization. I like the trend.

But I still have a secret desire to hold a printed book of mine in my hot little hands someday.