brent I still love killing trees
You'll never know how cool ebooks are until you try one. Of course, whether there's front matter or back matter there depends on the publisher, but I've never seen an ebook that was missing anything in that regard. And yes, of course there's a cover photo. Those are what you see in the image of my original post, above.
My usual way of reading Nook ebooks is a 10" Android tablet. I have two of those. I believe my collection at Barnes and Noble is up to several thousand books now (many I've read, some I still plan to read), and at any given time I have I have the most recent couple hundred or so that I've read or am currently reading stored on my current tablet. Ebooks take up no room on my bookshelves. I gave all of those books away to friends or to Goodwill years ago.
A good many of the books I've read cost me nothing. Some came from the Gutenberg Press, and are of historical value. Others are the first volumes of series from excellent indie authors who make one volume available for free as a sample. Many times I've found favorite authors that way. In one case, I'm eagerly waiting for the 18th book in a favorite series of mysteries to be released. I've paid for the previous 17.
And I'd never be able to afford to read all the books I have if I had to pay $25 or $30 for each of them. Ebooks are very inexpensive to produce, and their costs reflect that. That 18th book I'm waiting on will cost me $4.95, and of course zero for shipping. I recently bought the first volume in that series as a paperback in an effort to get my wife interested in it (she's a Luddite, like you) and it cost me $14.95 plus shipping.
The ebooks, being so portable (1s and 0s don't weigh much) are easy to take with me when I go somewhere I need to wait. I recently had to sit in our dentist's waiting room while my wife had an appointment to get a filling. I finished two chapters in my current book before she was ready to go home. And I think I've mentioned that my answer to insomnia is to read a chapter or two when I go to bed. I set the tablet to a warm background color and turn the brightness way down so it doesn't keep me awake, and it works great - with no sleeping pills needed. After 20 minutes or so, I'm usually ready to put the tablet and my reading glasses down, turn over, and fall asleep in a minute or two. No clumsy book to deal with, and I don't need a light on in order to see what I'm reading, so I don't keep my wife awake.
Not only does an ebook reader keep track of the page you're on when you turn it off, so it knows where to start the next time, but I have two of these generic tablets, one upstairs by the bed and one downstairs near a comfortable chair. They're both connected to the same wi-fi network. When I start to read one of them, it tells me if it's found a later page in the same book on another reader at a different location on the network, and asks whether I'd like to change to that page or to stay where I am on that tablet. No more trips up the stairs to fetch the book I'm currently reading if I'm not ready for bed at the moment, or remembering to take it upstairs with me if I am.
There are probably another 20 or so perfectly good reasons to read ebooks, if I thought about it for a while, but if I haven't convinced you to give them a try, that's your problem, not mine. The tablets I use came from Walmart, cost very little, and have worked quite well for years. The Nook reader software is free, and last I saw, they have 60,000 or so free ebooks of all genres. Many are the first volumes in a series from best-selling authors. And of course, there are other sources, such as are freely available from Foliate if you'd like to give ebooks a try without any initial investment at all.
