Ebooks have reached a tipping point on Amazon

The news that Amazon is selling more electronic books for its Kindle than hardcover books is interesting. Does it signal some sort of tipping point that e-books have passed into the mainstream?

I've found myself reading e-books more and more and am perfectly comfortable with them, although they have their limitations, but I think that is mostly a problem when people try to adapt text from an existing printed form into an electronic one and the result is less than optimal.

The problem remains whether or not selling e-books, or e-any kind of media, is going to be sustainable in the long term. As this essay bluntly states, the internet is a copying machine and once copies are super-abundant, they become worthless. Will that happen to books and other media? People will pay for scarcity, but soon supply is going to outstrip demand.

The other thing I have found with electronic books is that they are even easier to amass than the physical ones which already strain my shelves to the point that they are becoming warped. When you can fit hundreds of electronic books in your pocket, you find that you want to read them all and end up skimming more than you would with "real" books.

Some think that we are becoming accustomed to skimming by reading on the internet. We're more interested in learning new facts than we are in actually absorbing those facts and taking the time to digest them. That has led some to propose a "slow reading" movement. I am all for it, but I wish I could read faster and with sufficient comprehension that I can actually plow through those books, physical and electronic, which are threating to bury me.