Have rumors of the demise of the hardbound book been greatly exaggerated? Some scholars, especially linguists, say so. Google Books is being criticized by a growing number of sources for providing inaccurate metadata -- the informational tags that tell searchers what they can hope to find in a given source. If you are making decisions about what to do with books saved in a self storage unit based on the possibility of finding texts online using Google Books, you may want to think again -- and hold onto stored books a little longer. [More]

It turns out that people really do love to read. Not only do people love to read, but they want to read what they want to read when they want to read it -- and that means that digital book, or ebooks, which can be downloaded instantly from the Internet, are taking off even faster than anyone could have predicted as recently as six months ago. Now Amazon.com has announced that Kindle books are selling much faster than ordinary hardcover bound books. (Kindle books are books that can be read by the Amazon Kindle ebook reader, the Amazon Kindle 2, Apple’s iPhone or iPad, Blackberry and Android devices, and PC and Macintosh computers.) The statistics do not include free ebooks offered by Amazon, of which there are more than a million.

Between the ebooks offered by Amazon and other booksellers, and the ebooks available through Google Books, the world of book publishing is about to go through a dramatic change. If you are currently choosing between getting rid of hardcover books that are in good condition, or putting them in a self storage unit, this may be the time to consider preserving those bound books -- a few years from now, they may indeed have become collectors’ items. Paperback books are still outselling ebooks, for the moment -- but the day is coming when paperbacks may be collectors’ items too. [More]