Book or e-book? Where do you stand? > Reviews (8)

Today we’re plagued with technology, are we not? It doesn’t even take a particularly observant person to notice. You can’t turn on your television or read a magazine without being told how the iPad is going to revolutionise everything or how the Amazon Kindle is going to deeply enhance your reading experience. I understand that some people may think that the claims of these devices offering an improvement to our daily lives is a bunch of ruckus (or other, increasingly more vulgar words), but I’m here to explain why I think that eBooks are the future.

The Pros of an eBook

Let’s go through the direct, in-your-face, pros of using an eBook as opposed to a normal book.

• You can store many books on a device which is in some cases smaller than just one
• Some devices, such as the iPad, contain other facilities as well as eBooks, ensuring that you’re never without something to do.
• eBook Readers aren’t too expensive to buy, and nor are the eBooks.
• eBooks are better for the environment

Those are just some of the positive points for using an eBook Reader, and while they may not appear to be _that___ great at first, I’m going to explain to you why these things allow eBooks to run triumphant over the paper-y goodness that once stored our stories.

Storage

An eBook reader is a small, slab like device. It is likely no bigger than a slate in depth, and width and height are slightly bigger than a normal book, but not entirely massive. Of course, you may be wondering what benefit that would have to you. I’ll tell you – the benefit that eBook Readers, and by extension eBooks has is that they are easy to carry about.

Think about it, are you a fast reader? Do you find yourself needing to bring multiple books to your sunny foreign holiday to ensure that you have something to read while you’re there, but worrying about how heavy they are and if you’ll go over the maximum baggage weight for the plane? Yeah, the eBook annihilates those problems. Every book that is added, and that can be a lot – as the internal storage space on a reader is generally big enough for hundreds of eBooks, doesn’t require any more space, or even take any more precious kilograms of weight from you and your baggage, that you could be using for better, more useful things.

Features

You don’t have to buy a ‘straight’ eBook reader like the Amazon Kindle – you could buy an iPad or iPod Touch and use their downloadable eBook applications, which both have online stores and the ability to download new eBooks onto the device using a piece of software for your computer (for example, ‘calibri’).

The use of such devices allows you to also listen to music, watch a movie or perhaps have a little bit of gaming to spruce up your holiday, if that’s what floats your boat. What’s better, these devices don’t even need to be needlessly expensive. Heck, you don’t always even need another device – many smartphones come with or offer apps on their respective app stores that allow you to read eBooks on your phone – which you’ll likely have with you anyway.

Also, most ‘specific’ eBook readers, particularly devices like the Amazon Kindle, can have 3G and Wireless Network support, to allow you to download books onto the device wherever you may be in the world, and with minimal time wasted.

Expense

eBook devices don’t necessarily have to be pricy. A lot of people already have devices that could potentially read eBooks on their person at pretty much all times, from phones to iPods to Kindles. For some devices, you may not even know that it can read eBooks without looking a bit deeper into it. However, even with the device, how much do the books cost?

Well – the book ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, which gained an instant cult following last year is our book of testing choice. The paper-back edition on Amazon is £3.99, and the hardcover only available used for over £10. The Kindle version of the book, however, is available for £3.59. Not a massive saving in terms of straight up cash, but a saving in terms of convenience, time and the petrol you potentially save not driving to the store in the first place makes eBooks a high-value decision.

The Environment

We’ve all heard about Global Warming and how the environment is crumbling below us, and how the world is falling apart as we know it before all our polar ice caps have melted and we’re all soon to be drowning in the suns radiation, be it from Al Gore or your best mate John. So why not help the environment, because you’re certainly not helping by using conventional books. The hardware inside your eBook reader is far, far away from causing as much environmental damage as the deforestation that occurs in rainforests to help us get the paper we need to print on.

Surely the contribution to the environment is better than actually holding a physical copy of the book? If you’re a heavy book reader, maybe you’d even help the environment more than those people out there who drive Prius’ 24/7.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, what do I think is better? Personally, I believe that eBooks are going to lead the way into the future. They’re more environmentally sound, you can have multiple without using up excess space, the eBooks are generally cheaper than physical books and you can even use your devices for other things (such as phones, tablets, multimedia devices) in some cases.

In my opinion, there is no longer any reason whatsoever to be buying a physical book, other than the fact that you may like the feel of it in your palms – but in my opinion, eBooks are the inevitable future.