“There is no way electronic books will ever replace real books.”

Even those who are perfect, which I am not, eventually face a situation where they have to eat their words. I am eating mine now, and actually not minding it all that much.

Back when electronic books (AKA ebooks, e-books, eBooks, and a few other variations) made their appearance, one had to invest in expensive readers and the ebook selection was lacking, to say the least. Failing to take into account the inevitably rapid progress of technology, I did not see how ebooks would ever become practical enough for the common person to take advantage of them on a regular basis. I was wrong.

Today you can hit a single website (Project Gutenberg) and find 17,000 free ebooks reflecting a collection of public domain works so vast that it boggles the mind. I did a web search on “free ebooks” and got seemingly endless pages of results. Moreover, a wonderful thing for those of us who homeschool, homeschool publishers are entering the ebook world at a rapid pace.

This last fact is exciting because it means a wider variety of quality curriculum and other helps for homeschoolers. Ebooks, while they take every bit as much time and effort to write and prep for printing in ebook format as they do in traditional paper or hardcover formats, do not require the massive outlay of funds and long waiting periods that traditional printing necessitates. This means small presses, companies formed by those who have much to share, but are often still homeschooling and on tight budgets, can bring curriculum and helpful books to press as ebooks long before they might have been able to publish them if they’d had to wait on funding for printing. My own company’s book, See, I Told Me So! (See review) , is an excellent example of this. We were a group of experienced homeschoolers who had a vitally important message to share, but my publishing company, like my family, has been on an extremely tight budget. Thanks to the ebook revolution, the message is available to you now, today, instead of some day in the future when I would have eventually pulled together thousands of dollars to pay for that first print run.

But what does this mean to you, other than the availability of more resources than ever before?

First, it often means less expense. Not only do ebooks cost less to produce than printed books, they can also cost nothing, or almost nothing, to deliver. Shop from a site like the Homeschool eStore and you can make your selection, download your purchase, and be reading in minutes without having to pay shipping and handling charges.

That “reading in minutes” part counts as advantage number two. Considering how, in our fast-paced society, we’ve learned NOT to like waiting for things, the fact that ebooks can be delivered to you almost as fast as you can order them may give them a distinct advantage over books that must make their slow way to you via media mail. If you need a curriculum or resource for tomorrow, thanks to ebooks, you just might have it today.

Third, ebooks take up less space. It is a standing joke among homeschoolers that bookshelves lining an outside wall add to the R-value (insulation) of the house. It’s a fact that we tend to buy and buy and buy when it comes to books. While I would never recommend bypassing those printed book purchases, I will point out that it is rather nice to have more room for the really special printed books when certain others are stored on disks or your computer’s hard drive. In addition, a book stored on a computer hard drive can sometimes prove more accessible than a printed book; there is never any question about where the last person laid it down. They may be easier to snatch up and carry in emergencies too. I learned for myself, when we had to evacuate for hurricane Rita, that books on my hard drive were a whole lot easier to save than regular books; even my antique book collection was left behind, but everything on my computer went with me. And speaking of taking it with you, many of today’s ebooks can be read on PDAs and some of the new cell phones, which makes them quite portable indeed.

One advantage I really appreciate is that, most ebooks being in either plain text or PDF files, you can adjust your display to accommodate the reader’s needs. You can display PDF files on your computer monitor at almost any size, making them more readable for those who have vision problems and for younger children who are still developing as readers. This is a boon to parents who have young advanced readers in their families, as print books can be at a child’s reading level in the sense that the young reader can handle the language, but be in a print that is much too small for the child’s visual development. And, of course, an ebook that is in plain text can be adjusted in your word processor and printed in any font size you desire.

Printing is another ebook bonus. With ebooks, you can print what you need, when you need it. This means you are free to only print specific pages of some books, print multiple pages of others when a child needs repetition, or not print the book at all, if printing is unnecessary. Just remember to check the copyright notice to ensure that your printing habits line up with the rights you purchased when you bought the ebook. You should only use the book in ways that are in agreement with this notice.

If you do invest in ebooks, I suggest having a backup copy to protect yourself from loss due to system failures, computer viruses, etc. Most people choose to keep their backups either on disk or on an external hard drive.

So yes, I now understand that electronic books are every bit as real as those made of paper and, while I still believe that this newer format will never completely replace the one I have known since childhood, ebooks do have a place in my life and in my home.

Here are highlights of a few sources, just to give you an idea of what is available online.

Homeschool Resources

Homeschool eStore

• Shop by Age, Subject, or Publisher
• Download purchases immediately
• Negotiating the site is a breeze, the shopping cart easy to use, and the customer service is excellent. The site is relatively new, but obviously adding new publishers on a regular basis. It offers a Reader Review option that will greatly enrich the site when more people have taken the time to stop and leave reviews.

For Public Domain Books
For a definition of Public Domain…

Project Gutenberg

• 17,000 free ebooks with 2 million books being downloaded every month
• Search by Author, Title, Language, Recently Posted, or use the Advanced Search feature
• New additions made continually
• Multiple languages available (i.e. pulling up one author’s list revealed 11 titles in English, 40 in German, 2 in French and 1 in Finnish)
• Multiple download options for reading offline
• Ability to bookmark if you choose to read online

ManyBooks.net

• Project Gutenberg mirror site
• Contains books specifically formatted for PDA/iPod use

Page by Page Books

• Hundreds of classic, public domain books
• Search by Author or Title
• Read online or download to read offline