Do we really need books?

So, it's that time again. No, not the time where your girlfriend sends you to the store for the dreaded "Feminine Products". It's new RPG book day! A joyous day, when nerds swoop down upon their local hobby shop in their magic flying cars and rainbow-winged unicorns to gather and hopefully walk away with the newest release of their favorite RPG product line. So, you walk into the store, and...
What?
The Mind's Eye Theatre book for Mage: the Awakening isn't here? But where...only being released in .PDF format? [cries]

Well, it looks like you won't be toting THAT one around in your Jansport anytime soon. But is it really such a bad deal? Let's have a look.

For years, there's really only been one way to get new RPG supplements and core books. From the bookstore, right? Well, now you have the option of getting most RPG books in a digital format. DrivethruRPG.com (which is currently down for database maintainance, and could not be accessed to verify any of the following) offers a wide range of publishers from White Wolf to Steve Jackson to FASA to Palladium, as well as an ever-growing collection of indie publishers for the adventurous. The majority of the books were offered in a watermarked .PDF format, with new titles having a slightly reduced cost, and older titles (at least 6 months old, if I remember correctly) at an even lower price. The reduction in cost can be attributed to not having to pay to have the book printed, bound, and shipped. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, let's hit the pros and cons.

PROS:
No heavy books to lug around.
Let's face it. If you've ever run an RPG session, you know how many books are required to do it. If I want to put together a Vampire: the Requiem one-nighter for my group, I'll at LEAST need the World of Darkness book, the Vampire: the Requiem book, and 2-4 applicable sourcebooks. Now, add in paper, pencils, dice, clipboards, Doritos, and Mountain Dew, and I'm quickly running out of space in my handy messenger bag. But with electronic books, I can throw them on my laptop and rock on out without toting a bunch of dead trees.

No losing pages or damage to books.
Well, I know you've tried to take care of that Monster Manual, but it's been a hard couple of years, and that is your player copy, and it's been handed around the table hundreds of times, and it's really starting to get a little ragged. Oh? We're facing a Blackendrathgra? Well, let's see what that little beastie can...uh, dude? You're missing about 20 pages here.
We love our books, and we treat them with dignity and respect, but they aren't gonna last forever. But no matter how many times you flip through your PDF files, the pages never fall out, and you just can't break the spine on that one. Which is okay, cause you don't need to break the spine just so it will sit open on the table. Nifty!

Own more books than you could ever possibly find shelf space for.
If you've got the hard drive space, you're good to go! No more deciding which books need to go to Half-Price books this week to make room for the new arrivals. Now you just have to decide which folder full of dirty, dirty porn to delete.

Instant access to rare or out-of-print titles.
Many of the big-name publishers have tons of out-of-print titles that gamers would love to get their greedy little hands on, but they're just impossible to locate. Well, not anymore! Any title ever produced, provided there is still a paper or electronic copy existing SOMEWHERE, can be offered up for sale as an electronic book! Can't track down a copy of the Adolescent Radioactive Kung-Fu Hamsters RPG? Just order it online, and download it straight away! And, to rip off fellow RPGXer Shawn Struck, some companies could REALLY benefit from this idea, like broke-ass Keven Siembeda's Palladium. Palladium has a VAST collection of out-of-print books, and bringing them back in this format could net them some serious cash, and fast.

CONS:
Piracy.
If it's electronic, you can steal it from somebody. Or share it on your favorite P2P network. Or copy it and distribute it to your fellow gamers. Which sucks, since the guys who were nice enough to go along with this eBooks idea are now losing print sales AND e-sales.

Loss of print sales.
If people are buying electronic books, will they still buy print books? Maybe they could buy the electronic copy as a backup. Like ROMS! Yeah, probably not. But as far as the industry is concerned, this will likely be a tiny bump in the road. There will be a brief period where print versions will sit on a shelf and collect dust, and then, once we've got it all ironed out as to who is still buying books versus who jumped on the eBooks bandwagon, they'll adjust the number of copies printed, and everyone will be happy. Print demand will go down, but it will be replaced (and then some, I would say) by electronic sales.

Possibility of data loss.
If your hard drive crashes, all your pretty eBooks go bye-bye. This is a big concern, since eBooks, though offered at a reduced cost, still ain't gonna be free. Its' not like you're in trouble if your bookshelf "crashes"...just set it back up and spend the next hour re-alphabetizing your collection. Now, this will only really affect those who are too dense to backup their collection, and those people should probably stick to paper anyway, since it will take them forever to figure out they can't "turn pages" on their monitor.

Difficult to use away from home.
Don't have a laptop for that game away from home? That could make things difficult, unless you own one of the neato gadgets I'll get to shortly. Other options include using a buddies laptop/PC, printing the book at Kinkos (which kinda defeats the purpose, neh?), or breaking down and getting that headware installed so you can just view the eBook on your cybereyes.

But I like books.
I like books. I am a big fan of how pretty they look on my bookshelf. I also like having them there, really there in front of me. I like turning pages, flipping back to the index, feeling the silky pages as they slip between my fingers...uh...yeah, books are neato. And it's understood that, while they may not really be collectible, there is a certain sense of completeness to be found when you look at your bookshelf and see them all lined up and ready to take you on a fantastic journey.

So, now that that's out of the way, which way should you go? Personally, I think that the future is now. The pros outweigh the cons. Especially once you see these babies.

First up is the Amazon Kindle. This little bad boy holds over 200 titles (with an SD expansion slot), and has a 2 day battery life if you leave the wireless turned on (which jumps to almost a week with the wireless shut off). You can automatically download and read several major news publications and magazines, as well as over 250 blogs of note, for $1 per blog or RSS feed. It connects wirelessly to the Amazon Kindle Store, allowing you to download new books anytime, using EVDO, the standard for cell phone data transmission, which means no looking for a WiFi hotspot. Sadly, though it can display your non-Kindle store PDFs, JPEGs, and Word documents, they will have to be emailed to Amazon first, and converted to their proprietary format at a cost of $0.10 per file. It also brings a big new player to the market: electronic paper. EPaper displays work much like LCD screens, except they reflect light "just like paper", and are therefore not backlit, reducing eye strain. They are also clearly viewable from almost any angle, giving them a one-up over standard flat screen displays.

On the other side of the table is the Sony Reader. This beautiful little piece of powerful is totally going on my Christmas list. Let's see how it stacks up against the competition. It holds 80 titles, as compared to 200 with the Kindle, but also comes outfitted with an slot for Media Sticks and SD memory cards. The battery clocks in at 7500 estimated page turns with a full charge. It can display newspapers, magazines, and blogs just like the Kindle (only for free!) with the added functionality of being able to play unencrypted MP3's and AAC podcasts. It lacks any sort of wireless connectivity, but connects to your PC to handle downloading new content. It has no proprietary format restrictions (suck it, DRM!), and will display most PDF and RTF documents without the need to convert them. It also features the happy-happy electronic paper screen.

Personally, I'm gonna have to side with the Sony Reader. And that's saying A LOT, cause I haven't been too buddy-buddy with Sony for quite a while now. But it just seems to be a better product design overall. It looks friendlier, and I like the way it's put together. And no DRM. Hahaha.

So, with all this in mind, it's beginning to look like eBooks have a SERIOUS chance of taking off. So, make your choices quickly, folks, or you may get left behind.