From the Well-Read Life blog:

Steve Leveen shares some ways that making the transition to electronic books can make us better readers.

Reason #2: Having Better (for You) Books to Choose From. Reading success is greatly enhanced when you’re choosing books not from some airport newsstand while running to your flight, but from the books you’ve been lovingly setting aside for yourself. But when you have the time and inclination to begin a book, you’re not always near that stack of books that you really want to read. With your electronic reader, you can fill it up with those beckoning books—the ones I call your Library of Candidates.

I have to admit that this is a very powerful temptation and motivator for me to overcome my own psychological aversion to the Kindle and other similar devices. It would be very nice to be able to download any old book that struck my fancy, whenever I wanted it. But I still love the tactile quality of holding an actual book.

And then there is this from Defective by Design:

Many people will accept the restrictions that come with the Kindle, but, they should know that their decision won’t only effect just themselves. If enough people accept the DRM on ebooks, there will be no incentive in the future for Amazon, or anybody else to offer non-DRM ebooks. We are threatened by the market establishing a new cultural precedence in which books become bound to our devices, unable to be shared, and unable to be moved over to a new device or competing system. We must reject DRM on ebooks and we must reject the Kindle. Please help us in letting people know that the Kindle it is nothing more than a swindle.

Mark Pilgrim, author of Dive into Python, paints a lucid picture of the Future of Reading through a series of quotations. It starts out with one from the CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos (see image above), from an open letter he wrote to the Author’s Guild in 2002:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

This is juxtaposed next to the Kindle’s Term of Service, which states,

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Something in the back of my mind makes me think that “they” would like to make it illegal for you even to show your Kindle content to another person…

Then Leveen shares another excellent reason to take the e-reader route, portability:

Reason #6: Having Your Library at Hand. Living Library is my name for those books you’ve read, loved and cherish, and enjoy having on your shelf at home. What if you could have this library with you whenever you wished? Now you can, virtually, with such software as Shelfari, Good Reads, and Library Thing. And with the eReaders’ access to the Web, your library and your book are clicks away. “Wait—didn’t I read something like this in my other book…? Oh, yes, I’ll update my review right now.” That’s the kind of rich reading that Mortimer Adler was advocating in his How to Read a Book, 50 years before it has become so very easy to do.

As long as it is indeed your Library, its a good thing. But it is important that we have ebooks that are able to be moved from platform to platform. Books that belong to us, not just a temporary license to read some “digital content” on a particular device.

E-readers can make us better readers, but it is up to us to make the e-readers better. Let’s discuss e-readers in the forum.

One Saturday morning in March, I found myself in a hotel room in Birmingham, Alabama. I had an hour to kill while my wife was at a conference, so I brainstormed one-and-a-half dozen blog post ideas and did a lightning-quick but thorough mind-sweep to create a new projects list from scratch.

I did a lot in that one hour.

It made me consider two things: 1) the limited time I had forced me to work quickly. 2) The different environment forced me to focus.

I’d wager that my output was probably due to the time crunch since I had a lot to do and a short time to do it. I blocked out any distractions there were — especially once I turned off the remodeling show on HGTV. But the unique environment made me consider whether it was a factor in my increased productivity. It was a hotel room — a rather nice one at that, in a historic building in Birmingham — but it was free of familiar distraction I have at home or at work. The only things familiar were the clothes in my suitcase.

So I began to wonder how digital nomads to it — how do they stay productive when the environment constantly changes? I wonder if I’d be distracted by the ever-changing scenery, or if that constant change would force me to be disciplined. Chris Brogan likes working in coffee shops and bookstores. They inspire him.

If you’re a nomad, digital or not (in my case I was working entirely with paper, as I didn’t have a laptop), how do you do it? Does the ever-changing environment distract you? Or does it help you be productive? I’m curious to know.