10 years ago, I purchased my first Digital Camera. It was big and expensive – around 900$, the quality was poor and the storage was up to 2MB… I even purchased another storage card that was up to 20 MB and cost me a similar price as the camera… Back then, People were quite conservative about the new device. Many claimed that it will remain a niche market and will never evolve. Today it is the market standard and the old film cameras became the niche market… This was only 10 years ago!

3 weeks ago, I bought my first sony e-book reader. It looks a bit clumsy and remind me a lot of the camera I purchased 10 years ago… It is no where as sexy as my IPhone… BUT and this a big BUT. I am sure this is the future of books.

My first reading experience was to read a GREAT book about doing BUSINESS IN CHINA,  written by a good friend from Beijing, SAM GOODMAN, a writer of this BLOG that wrote the book when East eats West. Sam sent me his draft book about a year ago, and I am sorry to tell that reading a PDF format on my laptop is not enjoyable at all, so I delayed reading the book. BUT now I had the pleasure to read his book on my new reader and it was an awesome experience! Why you might ask? Well here are my top 6 reasons:

1. ELECTRONIC INK – The fear I had when I purchased this new GADGET was will it be as good as the good old paper book, Since PDF books on computers have the annoying tendency to generate fatigue. This was totally not the case with the reader. Due to the fact that the E-INK is very clear and looks much like a book. You can actually read FASTER than a regular book with no fatigue what so ever.

2. WEIGHT & SIZE- It is by far lighter than 99% of the books and it can hold up to 1,500 books! No more 10KG in books in my next trip to Thailand. It is even easier to read since you don’t feel like you are in a GYM when you are reading the new 1,000+ biography of WARREN BUFFET…

3. FONT SIZE – Assuming the book was written in English you can read it in big fonts (3 different size). This advantage will become even more handy in 10 years when my eyes will need glasses to read from close glance.

4. PRICE – Assuming that you want to PAY for books, you can purchase most books in a discount that is 40-60 percent cheaper than a physical book. If you DON’T want to PAY… Well then the price drops in 100%…

5. GO GREEN – Of course you support the environment when you read E-BOOKS and the trees can stay where they are.

6. ACCESSIBILITY – Anxious to read the new Dan Brown book, and don’t want to wait for the translation, or for AMAZON to ship it in 21 days, just download in less than 60 Seconds, and you can read it immediately.

I am certain that this reader is just a kick start and within 10 years, we will laugh at the fact that we used to read Physical books, just like MP3 and Digital cameras…