If you had to buy only one ebook…

If you had to buy only one ebook, I would recommend this one: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die. Coming in at just over forty thousand pages, it has the following:

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howards End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady

And it’s not just for Apple ebook readers: there’s a Kindle version too.

Best of all, it costs less than three bucks!

Before the Kindle, there was Napoleon’s travelling library

And what a library! Napoleon had asked for it to be as follows:

The Emperor wishes you to form a traveling library of one thousand volumes in small 12mo and printed in handsome type. It is his Majesty’s intention to have these works printed for his special use, and in order to economize space there is to be no margin to them. They should contain from five hundred to six hundred pages, and be bound in covers as flexible as possible and with spring backs. There should be forty works on religion, forty dramatic works, forty volumes of epic and sixty of other poetry, one hundred novels and sixty volumes of history, the remainder being historical memoirs of every period.

Even with slimmed down books, that is a lot of paper to be carrying around as your conquer Europe and other parts of the world. I’m sure he would have loved the Kindle.

For more details on this library, see: Napoleon’s Kindle: See the Miniaturized Traveling Library He Took on Military Campaigns | Open Culture

On declining ebook sales (two thoughts and some good material to consider)

If you are interested in books and ebooks in particular, you should read this: On the declining ebook reading experience. Two beliefs I have on this topic:

Book sellers have become more competitive. In Canada, Indigo’s prices seem to be much lower and they sell books using low prices stamped prominently on the cover.
He doesn’t say it, but the author hints that Apple should step in and make their own Kindle. I certainly would like to see Apple step up and make their own Kindle. The device and the user experience would be great, I am certain. It would blow the Kindle out of the water and likely make me switch over to becoming a bigger ebook reader.