A sign that Hell is freezing over?

The other day I was browsing small publisher websites and thinking, "I maybe need an e-book reader."

What?! No!

I'm still very e-book resistant. I like knowing that, if I've bought a stinker, I can sell it to a used bookstore and hopefully get something better. I like knowing I don't have to remember to recharge batteries, and there are never any worries about equipment breaking. If I spill something on a book, I'll, at most, only lose the book. If I were to somehow damage an e-book reader, I'd lose the ability to read all my e-books until I got a new reader - sure, I could probably read them on my computer, but that'd just suck. Also, I'm not too wild about the idea of my e-books eventually going the way of the files I still have stored on some floppies. And I'd like e-books to either offer nifty features print books can't offer, or I'd like them to be significantly cheaper than print books. And I'd like e-book readers to be much, much cheaper.

And I've had enough e-book converts try to tell me that e-books are way more awesome than print books and will kill off both print books and libraries that I kind of don't want to get an e-book reader just because all of that pisses me off.

So why did I have a moment of weakness? Turns out there's lots of fun-sounding stuff at those small publisher sites, and either the print versions of titles cost three times more than the e-book versions, or certain titles are only available as e-books. Ugh. Still resisting, but I'll have to see if I can scrape together the money for print versions of some of those books.