There’s been lots of discussion only recently about ebooks and the new Kindle in particular, covering all the downsides of the Kindle and it’s competitors in the ebook market.

All the downsides of ebooks are real and valid:

• You lose the look, smell and feel of the books we grew up with
• You can’t resell or give away your books once you’re finished with them
• Library borrowing is awkward at best, impossible on the Kindle
• You own your own books, noone can take it away unlike Amazon did with George Orwell’s 1984
• You can take a book in the bath or the rain, worst case, you damage one book
• Regular paperback books are generally cheaper than ebooks – this is true, and very silly

And I’m sure there’s dozens of others that are equally valid, but they don’t outweigh one single huge upside of ebooks for me:

• Space is expensive!

I’ve recently given boxes and boxes of books to charity, after I moved house and had nowhere to put my old books. At first, I kept them in the perfect storage space – my parents house, but that’s not really a long-term solution is it? A Kindle will store over 3000 books, and if you somehow fill it, then you can delete some of books from the device and re-download them in the future, Amazon retain your purchase list and let you retrieve the files whenever you want.

Of course there’s other nice things about the Kindle, the 3G web access in 100 countries is a fantastic feature for people who like to travel while keeping in touch with people, text searching of books to find a quote you’re hunting for, the flexibility of being able to access 500,000 or more books on demand, but fundamentally it’s the space.

So if someone else tells you the Kindle is too expensive and ebooks cost too much, ask them how much it would cost to build a library extension to my house so I can keep 3000 books in it 🙂