E Books Quotes

I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down. ~ Richard Curtis

Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?
The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I've said about e-reading, but the title of the series, "Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books," reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren't physical - no printing, no shipping. ~ Virginia Postrel

Behind every humorist who delights in knifing hypocrites is a major self-critic. ~ Wendy Aron

When I write, I'm still imagining a kid reading it on paper. I read e-books when I travel, but in general I still prefer holding an old-fashioned book in my hands. There's a special, tactile experience. ~ Rick Riordan

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. ~ Leah Price

Marilynn ... passed out black cases to everyone. I opened mine to find an iPad inside. Several candidates whistled. Despite my agitated state, it impressed me too. Maybe wizard school wasn't going to be as lame as I had thought.
"All of your schedules and assignments will be done on these," Marilynn explained. "The whole school is on these. We've had them for awhile now. ~ Priya Ardis

Writing is the Art, re-writing the craft. ~ O'Brien Browne

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less. ~ Graham Swift

I'm very intrigued by e-books, the topic du jour in the industry today. As a number one bestselling Kindle author, I love the way e-books make an author's backlist accessible to new readers. Of course, price point remains a source of concern. Personally, I don't have any of the answers, but I'm intrigued by the questions. ~ Lisa Gardner

For instance, you can't buy e-books through the Kindle app on your iPhone because Apple takes 30% of app-driven sales - a cut that would hurt Amazon's already razor-thin margin. ~ Anonymous

E-books are preferable to paper; they can be delivered instantly. In many cases, they're cheaper; you can buy them with the press of a button. ~ J.A. Konrath

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write. ~ Colson Whitehead

These kids all just want e-books." When she studied students in Canada and Israel, McNeish discovered something interesting that linked them all: students overwhelmingly prefer paper not out of any sense of nostalgia or a resistance to new technology, but because paper learning materials simply work better. "It's a lot of work to use these e-learning systems. And a lot easier to just learn from a textbook," McNeish said. "These kids are skilled with technology for entertainment, but they are not so skilled at technology for learning. ~ David Sax

HeroicPublicSpeaking.com. It was the power of having each other's backs that made this possible and resulted in a long-term business partnership and friendship. At HeroicPublicSpeaking.com, we offer tons of free tips sheets, guides, e-books, and video training on public speaking and on-camera performance techniques for both professionals and laymen alike. So, if you have a wedding toast, a big presentation, a sales pitch, or just want to improve your ability to communicate, head over there now. ~ Anonymous

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun. ~ J.K. Rowling

Unfortunately for me, most of the books I'd want to reprint were written for savvy publishers like Harlequin and Berkley who have held on to electronic rights. But I do have another option: Publish new e-books myself. ~ Ruth Glick

I don't think they'll ever replace the living and breathing," says Gary. "They said that about e-books," says Kevin. "You can't stop progress. ~ Margaret Atwood

In terms of e-books, though, I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of it yet, but for some reason everybody I know seems to want to engage me on that topic, or convert me. I think there are a lot of people who just want to hear me embrace e-books or finally say, 'OK, I bought an iPad and it's awesome! There are a lot of people who would get a kick out of it, that's for sure. ~ Adrian Tomine

Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and deep green ivy climbed the stones from the ground to it's roof. A large fountain stood in the middle of the courtyard with water falling from several lion's heads. Between the misty air and rolling slope of the earth, the grounds reminded me of a long lost fairy tale. ~ Priya Ardis

For a long time, I was very resistant to the idea of online publication or even e-books or something like that. ~ Adrian Tomine

When you read books on your Kindle, the data about which phrases you highlight, which pages you turn, and whether you read straight through or skip around are all fed back into Amazon's servers and can be used to indicate what books you might like next. When you log in after a day reading Kindle e-books at the beach, Amazon is able to subtly customize its site to appeal to what you've read: If you've spent a lot of time with the latest James Patterson, but only glanced at that new diet guide, you might see more commercial thrillers and fewer health books. ~ Eli Pariser

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air. ~ Graham Swift

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you. ~ John Green

Did you recently turn into a jerk or have you been one since birth? ~ Priya Ardis

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel. ~ Ray Bradbury

We will speak for the books."
...
"Like the Lorax?"
"The Lorax speaks for the trees," I remind her.
"Books are made out of paper. Paper is made out of trees."
"What about e-books?"
"We can speak for them too."
"Audiobooks?"
"Audiobooks speak for themselves." She grins. "Get it? ~ Paul Acampora

I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments. ~ Dan Brown

If people knew how powerful books were, they'd all have one in their hand or a tablet loaded full of e-books, just like me! ~ Terry Schott

My name is Arianna Morganna Brittany DuLac
you can imagine why I went by the name Ryan. ~ Priya Ardis

Smash market vs. mass market: Indie authors delve deep into expressive vertical genres. Book stores hold 90-day-credit-return literature. Why wait? In five years, Indie authors will be both. ~ Peter Prasad

I think we did a great job of putting together a program that would have made good e-books available had people been buying e-books in any real numbers. ~ Thomas Perry

Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks. ~ Scott Turow

Life Is Too Short--So Kiss Slowly,
Laugh Insanely, Love Truly,
And Live With Passion. ~ Andy Vogt

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. ~ Paul Theroux

The only bad thing about e-books is that you can't burn them if they're offensive. ~ Titania McGrath

It's always the end of the world," said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. "You could set your watch on it arriving." He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," he said. "Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity." Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011 ~ Russell Grandinetti

Magic is a power, much like madness but so much more like fire. ~ Cynthia Gael

E-books present the greatest opportunity readers have ever had to find each other. It's a chance for stories written for paper to find new life and a chance for new stories to appear, freed from the constraints of paper publishing. ~ Nick Earls

I'm a huge fan of e-books, but the more I buy and download, the more I worry that someone could just take them all away from me. ~ Warren Spector

I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas. ~ Colson Whitehead

He is a great Necromancer, for he asks counsel counsell of the Dead (i.e. books). ~ George Herbert

Please don't encourage or espouse e-piracy...the sharing, swapping, or trading of e-books is outlawed by the DMCA unless authorized by the copyright holder. ~ Fran Lee

Ciabattari is a master of transformation as she gives these stories of loss, woe, crisis and collapse the salutary and sometimes bracing pleasures of plain good fiction.
Kirkus Reviews ~ Jane Ciabattari

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

Loving cats wasn't like loving skiing or comic books or arthouse films: when you walked into a pub, you usually didn't feel the need to tell people about it, either stylistically or verbally. I didn't try to hide the fact that I liked cats, it was just that a lot of the time it was hidden, by custom and by nature."


- Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man, by Tom Cox ~ Tom Cox

I have spent 20
years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and
scream, that takes 30 seconds. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books. ~ Junot Diaz

Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies. ~ Tim Parks

I love it when people want to interpret my books. ~ China Mieville

She wanted to explain everything to him - how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua. ~ Thrity Umrigar

Evil and I are old adversaries. When we compete I hate to lose, Manny Bettencourt from Murder in the Pinelands ~ Larry Moniz

Give up your holy books, and remember the Lord, you fool, and stop oppressing others so badly. ~ Bhagat Kabir

If you want the motivation back, you must feed it Feed it everything. Books, television, movies, paintings, stage plays, real-life experience. Sometimes feeding simply means working, working through nonmotivation, working even when you hate it.
We create art for many reasons - wealth, fame, love, admiration - but I find the one thing that produces the best results is desire. When you want the thing you're creating, the beauty of it will shine through, even if the details aren't all in order. Desire is the fuel of creators, and when we have that, motivation will come in its wake. ~ Francesca Zappia

that we recommended. If you enjoyed Baby Discover Dogs book I am sure that you will really enjoy these as well. ~ Toddler Books

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half. ~ Lorenz Hart

Perhaps I don't express myself very well. But you all demand so much from life--you're never satisfied. In the old days, a poor man was content if he had something to eat and a roof over his head. Nowadays, everything has to be so high-and-mighty. Everything you set your minds on, you have to have, whether you can afford it or not.... And everyone's up to their eyebrows in debt... A fat lot of use it is having schools, books and I don't know what! In the old days we used to be a lot more reasonable. ~ Hedin Bru

A man might spend a lifetime reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity's Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors l ~ Tom Shippey

I couldn't admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck 'em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body. ~ Christos Tsiolkas

They were completely alone on the long stretch of country road and there was no one else to share the moment with them. ~ S.A. Tawks

Motivation can come from many means; none of them compares to the self-motivation acquired while reading good books at a young age. ~ Alan Maiccon

But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page? ~ Shannon Hale

I give off rather mixed messages about the law. On the one hand, I can honestly say I don't miss working in a law office. On the other hand I do enjoy watching the law and while the profession may have its problems, I have sold zillions of books out of magnifying them. ~ John Grisham

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all. ~ Voltaire

The glorious freedom of writing is a beautiful thing that must never be stifled by censorship. ~ Stewart Stafford

Be Original. Follow your dreams. The worst possible thing for you to do in life is give up what makes you happy. ~ Love The Stacks Bookstore

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party. ~ Louis L'Amour

I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective. ~ Chelsea Cain

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others. ~ Mary Karr

Whose ideas breathe through me? Am I a thief? Do I dream my own dreams? ~ Suzy Davies

My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

There are storm clouds before the storm, there are the living before the dead. I need a figurehead, a banner bearer who will announce my arrival to the world. ~ Kevin Outlaw

books, the only remedy for countless, undefined afflictions of the soul. ~ Nina George

What we look at determines what we see, and what we see, really see, becomes part of an inner museum of pictures and references, a mental collection that for most of us is not so much curated as acquired in a haphazard way. There is an opportunity with children to show them art and illustration that will furnish their minds with beauty and mystery, symmetry and wonder. The simplest mechanism for this is the selection of picture books that we share with them. ~ Meghan Cox Gurdon

Since I don't come from a privileged background, I couldn't afford to be irresponsible with career decisions. I wrote two books alongside my job and resigned only when I realised I can make a living. ~ Amish Tripathi

When we're strong enough," said Sam, "will you come with me?"
"Where? To Bucko Palace?"
"Yes. To find Ella."
"Course I will," said the Kid, and he put an arm around Sam. "It'll be a new grand adventure of the old school. They'll write books about us. Long books. Nothing's gonna split us up, small fry. We're a team. Like Batman and Robin Hood."
And he sang.
"Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-Batman! ~ Charlie Higson

God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, book were the backwoods path back to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion ... Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them ... In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books. ~ M T Anderson

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. ~ George Orwell

I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books. ~ Laurie R. King

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense. ~ Vine Deloria Jr.

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original. You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving. ~ Alexander Payne

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices. ~ William Lyon Phelps

I wanted to badly to be vulnerable over a burger, beer, and bags of free books we find on some stranger's porch. You wanted badly to be touched some thousand miles away and never found the time to write me back. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Hermione took out a list of subjects and titles she had decided to search while Ron strode off down a row of books and started pulling them off the shelves at random. Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section. ~ J.K. Rowling

Lewis, anything but dull, suffered from an excess of misguided cleverness: he could disparage himself brilliantly in a matter of seconds. He knew literature, art, the theater, history; and his knowledge surpassed what a college normally provides. His knowledge led nowhere, certainly not into the world where he was supposed to earn a living. Lewis had once gone to work in the bookstore of his school because he loved handling books and looked forward to being immersed in them. He was then instructed to keep careful accounts of merchandise that might as well have been canned beans. He soon lost interest in his simple task, failed to master it, and quit after three days. Eight years later, he was still convinced of his practical incompetence. College friends familiar with his tastes would suggest modest ways for him to get started: they knew of jobs as readers in publishing houses, as gofers in theatrical productions, as caretakers at galleries. Lewis rejected them all. While he saw that they might lead to greater things, they sounded both beneath and beyond him--the bookstore again. Other chums who had gone on to graduate school urged their choice on him. Lewis harbored an uneasy scorn for the corporation of scholars, who seemed as unfit for the world as he. He remained desperate, lonely, and spoiled. ~ Harry Mathews

When I wrote the first Betsy book, 'Undead and Unwed,' I had no idea, none, that it would be a career-defining, genre-defining book, the first of over a dozen in the series, the first of over 70 published books, the first on my road to the best-seller list, the first on my road to being published in 15 countries. ~ MaryJanice Davidson