Take a deep breath, book lovers. It ain’t over yet for hardbacks.

However, there are many good things about the news that Kindle’s e-book sales are growing rapidly—while still being a smaller portion of publishers’ businesses than the hot headlines suggest.

Reading is a healthy habit. There is a strong association between education and health status.

Today, any young advanced reader can pick up a Kindle and find a wider selection of age-appropriate books than may be available in the school library. An older one can increase the type size of The New York Times. Travelers cling to a library which weighs ounces. There is much to celebrate about this invention.

When I was in graduate school in journalism, we had to take a course in typography. Were we able to sit around discussing the beauty of different typefaces, that would have been fun. There was a little of that. Mainly, we had this box, called a California job case. (Don’t know why it was called that. Didn’t care then. Don’t now.) In tiny sections, there were single letters. For instance, one box had all “a” letters. Another had all “A” letters. One classmate knocked his over. He spent the rest of the semester putting his back together while we hand-set type.

We had to do reading problems. If the finished manuscript is 325 pages in Garamond….what was the original manuscript’s word count?” Something like that. These were professional cousins of the math ones we had as kids. If one train is going x miles an hour and the other y miles an hour, at what point do they pass each other? Do we really need to spend time on this? No.Not unless we own the railroad tracks or want to teach math.

Today, people can make their type bigger, smaller or make type talk to them on their Kindles.

Nothing, however, will replace a hard-backed book which has become important to you, with many underlined passages, notes to yourself and stars by key sentences so you cannot fail to find them fast. Many of these are books about diagnoses, patients’ own stories and doctors’ books about a specific topic. If it is a book you use to see yourself through a medical crisis, the underlining is as important to you as the book at times.

In the meantime, note that a term familiar inside health care is creeping out into the public world. “Health literacy.” Fancy name. What it really means is straight-forward. Can this patient learn enough about the problem of the day to make an informed decision about treatment?

Therefore, any and all formats for health and medical information, from trustworthy sources, of course,make it easier to become health literate.

That is important because there is so much more patient information available. More is being asked of patients at decision-making time, too.

Read as you like. Kindle. Hardback. Internet. Just be careful to check your sources to be sure that they are reliable.

PC World

“Amazon says its Kindle e-book sales are three times larger than they were last year, and it sells 43 percent more Kindle e-books than hardcover books on average. It’s pretty clear that people are adopting Kindle Books, and e-books in general, at a faster rate than any other book format. But Amazon’s announcement also leaves me wondering just how important e-books are right now. Are hardcover books the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” foretelling the demise of the paper book? I’m not so sure.”

…”It’s easy to get carried away with this news and believe that e-books are absolutely killing the hardcover book market. But that’s simply not the case. Amazon’s e-book sales numbers only tell part of the story. E-book growth is strong, but physical book sales are still growing – albeit at a slower pace.”

Source: PC World, July 20, 2010