On June 20th, 2011- 60 year old John Locke has hit a quota few can actually brag about: selling over one 
million e-books on Kindle. Amanda Hocking (the young self-pub author who I mentioned in this article here) claims she has also sold one million e-books, but not on Kindle yet. With Amazon, Barnes n’ Nobles, and now even private publishers taking the role in the e-book trade, what will be left of the paper world? E-books are now the most convenient format of literacy, available across Kindles, Nooks, I-pads, smart phones, computers and any other device that has a screen and an internet connection! I’m a fan of books (just love the smell of a newly purchased book in my hand), but now I wonder if in this next decade how such printed books will fair against their versatile competitors.
I first came across e-books sometime back in 2006, when I was only thirteen. A man I had known from Boy Scouts (yeah, yeah shut up), carried around a Palm PDA that he would use to carry phone numbers and important stuff like that. He knew my interest in books, so he pulled me aside one day and showed me something called an e-book. Essentially, it looked like a .txt file just displayed across the screen, but it was the start of a revolution we are witnessing now in this day. Of course, learning of this I booted up my dial-up and searched for any sort of e-book area. I can’t remember spotting any huge sites, except maybe E-pub, and the Gutenberg Project (a collection of public domain books, free of charge). Nothing seemed to interest me. Even back then, before the e-book hoarder frenzy, I’d Google Harry Potter e-books and find a thousand listings of pirated scans or crude type ups of the original tale. Now J.K. Rowling is releasing her HP tales via Pottermore. Continue reading
