It’s worth it to pay for e-books.

This is the inescapable conclusion I have reached, based on a couple of weeks now with my Nook.

There is a ton of free stuff out there, but basically, you get what you paid for. As a result, my Nook is now filled with free books I will never read, because of the relative quality of the transference. I would have been better off paying a couple of bucks for a good copy of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

So, instead of reading the freely downloaded correspondence of the eighteenth century economist, David Ricardo, I am reading an inexpensive e-book version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it is a reminder that I will have to buckle down and purchase myself some David Ricardo.

[If Barnes & Noble would care to compensate me for this little plug for both the Nook and for the concept of actually purchasing books, by all means – bribe me!]