If you would have come to me twenty years ago and told me that in the not too distant future we would have digital books and nifty little hand-held readers, I would have certainly believed you. After all, I was pretty much a geek and those kinds of things were all over the SF that I read and watched in the movies and on TV.
If you then would have said that I would not own such a device, despite being an author, I might have thought you a bit daft. If you then said that the only people who read digital books were women and they read mostly Romance and Mysteries on such high tech devices, I would have surely thought that you were crazy and I would not have believed it.
I have trouble believing it now. Whatever happened to Geek Cred? Sure, you have that fancy phone, but everyone has those. Ebook readers are the future, today. One would think that the genre that would be a perfect fit for a device from the future would be science fiction. Not so, apparently. It seems that SF/F/H readers are the slowest to adapt the new technology. Who would have thunk?
Of course, the fact that I write science fiction and sell it on such devices has not convinced me, or more properly, the reader in me, to buy one. But that could change. The biggest reason I don’t have an Ebook reader is because I have better and more important things to spend my meager paychecks on. Were I single, I’d have a couple of them, I’m sure. But in this horrible economy, I can’t justify the expense for something that I will only occasionally use. I do have a standing promise with myself that when my Amazon sales are large enough to buy and Ebook reader, I’ll get one. I’m not sure what will happen first, the price drop in the hardware or my sales increasing due to people liking my books. At this rate, the former is a more likely possibility.
I think that’s the reason most of us don’t have one. We have other things we can spend our meager money on.