Jeff Bezos Quotes

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

Electronic books are junk.

I love my Kindle, but there are many books that I need to physically own. I think having the choice makes all the difference. Instant gratification - buying a book digitally and owning it sixty seconds later - really is a revolutionary act.

I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.

(about Kindles) I have one and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!

I will always prefer a hardback book, but I'm drawn to digital because it's so easy to acquire them when I'm having a need-to-read moment.

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

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

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.

Books should cost less and they should be digital.

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

Books don't prattle. Books don't make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It's a very satisfying partnership.

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.