Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Chris Armstrong asks, Gary, you strike me as an avid reader. I read many books, but I have switched to an e-reader, simply because my wife didn’t like books piling up. It’s great, but I do buy books every now and then, just to enjoy the paper, the feel, smell, and classic experience. Do you have a preference of old school paper vs e-books? Why or why not? Love the podcast!

Chris, this is an excellent question and I have a bit of a story behind it.

When I starated traveling full time in 2007, there wasn’t much in the way of e-readers. The first Kindle was technically out in 2007, but the first generation wasn’t great.

I would read a lot while traveling because you have a lot of spare time on your hands, but there was a problem. Books are heavy and english language books can be extremely expensive in non-English speaking countries.

I also hated to throw my books away or even leave them at a hotel, so I usually carried them around for far too long and eventually shipped them back home…..which was also expensive.

I eventually broke down and purchased a Kindle and it was truly game changing for travel. It was lightweight and I had the world’s biggest English language bookstore in my pocket.

Just to show how good it was for traveling, in 2014 I was in Cape Town, South Africa to board a ship that would take me to the island of Saint Helena. The ship took five days to get there, and five days to get back, with 8 days on the islands, which didn’t really have internet access at the time.

I was on the ship and it was starting to pull out of port when I realized I had nothing to read on my Kindle. I ran up to the top deck of the ship, got a 3G signal, and downloaded the entire Game of Thrones series in just a few minutes.

More than enough reading to keep me busy for three weeks.

Since I’ve stopped traveling full-time, I will still buy ebooks, but what bothers me is the fact that you don’t really own an ebook. Amazon and other book providers can and have removed access for books that people have “purchased.”Moreover, e-book prices have risen dramatically for some books, and they now cost almost as much as a print book.I’ve begun buying print books again. Ideally, I’d like to be able to buy an all-access book where you can get a print version, a digital version, and an audio version, but the publishing industry still seems stuck in the 20th century.