Dear Friends,

It’s Ed writing for Don again this week. He was on his way back to Vermont from Sturgis, but apparently his progress east was slowed by his life goal of stopping at every Waffle House from here to South Dakota.

I’m excited to say that progress on our store in Manchester, NH is going well. The store is swarming with construction workers, hammers are swinging and dust hangs in the air. Soon we’ll be announcing our Grand Opening date. We’re making this one a blockbuster, with a full week of exciting themed events, seminars, lots of giveaways and freebies, and discounts and special offers all around. I used to live in New Hampshire, though not in Manchester. It’s the 7th largest city in New England, rapidly growing, and is highly rated for both living and doing business. I didn’t realize how great Manchester is until we started thinking of opening a new store there.

I want to say thank you to everyone who wrote in with your thoughts concerning ebooks vs print books. What I learned from your feedback is that it’s not really a versus situation at all. While most people (not all) prefer real, printed books, they also say they’re happy to use ebooks in certain situations. Personally, even though at this point I’m a committed ebook reader, I love printed books for aesthetic reasons, because they don’t require electricity, and because they are easy to pass on and share. And last week I forgot to mention a minor limitation of reading ebooks and magazines: if you’re on an airplane, you’re not supposed to turn your reader on during the period while the plane is waiting and taxiing on the runway. I usually travel with one paper magazine or newspaper for that occasion.

Since this issue sparked so much commentary, we decided to base our very first
TopTen.plst on it. We’re covering “Our Top Ten Favorite iOS eReaders” below. We won’t typically print the TopTen.plist in Kibbles, but this is a special occasion. TopTen.plist is a weekly list of the top ten items related to our favorite subjects.