Well - one web site specializing in selling electronic e-books thinks so. They are launching - you guessed it - the world's first smelly e-book.
In an attempt to win over skeptical college students, CaféScribe.com today announced plans to launch the world's first smelly e-book. CaféScribe.com CEO Bryce Johnson says that beginning in the back-to-school month of September the company will send every e-textbook purchaser a scratch & sniff sticker with a certifiably musty “old book” smell.
“Students who use CaféScribe download our software to read and annotate e-textbooks and other documents on their laptops,” explains Johnson. “By placing these stickers on their computers they can give their e-books the same musty book smell they know and love from used textbooks – without any of the residual DNA you sometimes find stuck to the pages of used textbooks.”
3 in 10 of the surveyed students associated “mustiness” with the books they most loved, although 16% -- possibly those most likely to hit the books early in the day – associated best-loved books with the smell of “freshly-ground coffee.” Other smells mostly failed to bring books to mind, although respondents were more likely to associate pleasant smells (cut grass, freshly baked bread, cookies baking) with books than unpleasant ones (sweat, mildew, grease).
CaféScribe commissioned the survey to understand why consumers continue to prefer paper books to e-books. The poll carries a +/- 4.1 percentage point margin of error and was conducted by Zogby International using an online panel representative of the adult population of the U.S. A total of 591 college students completed the survey between August 15-21. For more detail on the methodology and results, please see Book-Love Poll Data and Methodology.
Of course if you really want to get the most out of your e-books then you should try reading them on a nice slate tablet and doing those annotation in ink with the stylus. I personally prefer digital content to paper based content these days.
That said, I read about this in today's MX - which is a free daily paper handed out to commuters. I can still smell the newsprint :)