Recently, I’ve noticed myself reading E-books as opposed to real books since they offer many advantages.
Advantages of E-books
- Searchable
Quickly go to a section or find a certain word/phrase instead of flipping through tons of pages. - Downloadable
You get instant access to an E-book once you download it, no need to drive to the store or wait for it to be delivered. - No physical size
You can just as easily hold millions of E-books on your handheld as you would a single real book. - Long term cost-savings
An E-book reading device (smartphone, pda, E-book reader, laptop) is an investment. They aren’t exactly cheap but E-books themselves are in general cheaper (sometimes free) compared to real books so the cost savings will add up over time.
Advantages of real books
- Tangibility
There’s just something about having a real book in your hand and physically flipping through the pages. I can’t explain it but it makes for a different experience. - Resale value
It’s possible to resell books for a large fraction of their original price whereas E-books usually don’t allow for resale (legally) or have virtually zero resale value. - Short term cost-savings
You won’t need an expensive gadget to read your books. - Showoff factor
Having a bookshelf full of big books lets you showoff to visitors exactly how educated and cultured you are.
- Easier on the eyes
Looking at a back lit LCD screen for a prolonged period of time can cause eyestrain. A real book offers an “unlimited” contrast with natural lighting (but then again, you can’t read a real book in the dark).
Armed with my trusty smartphone, I find myself reading (mostly computer books) whenever I have a short break. With hundreds of books at my disposal, I can easily switch from a Ruby book to a Sherlock Holmes novel on a whim. However, for academic textbooks and technical references, I still prefer having a hard copy to refer to.
Where to get E-books?
There are tons of free (legal) E-books out there if you know where to look. You can easily find a free E-book about almost every topic. Many of these aren’t written by professional writers and offer nothing more than a shallow coverage of a particular topic but nonetheless, you’ll be learning something! Sites like Gutenberg are a great resource for free E-books but be wary of free E-book sites that offer a lot of “spam” books promoting affiliate products though.
So which format do you prefer? E-books or real books (… or Wikipedia)? Anyone out there read E-books consistently over real books?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Entries (RSS)
i really not sure about these e-books, i really maybe an old fashioned but i prefer normal books
Ebooks have been great! Sometimes, I just find ebooks having more valuable information than books because authors have to bear all the printing capitals before creating books… And that really discouraged a lot of potential writers out there!
I like the idea of ebooks and the readers are getting better but it still hurts my eyes to read a full length novel on my computer.
I go for Tangibility every time, I have “aquired” a large number of E-Books and havent read any of them properly, I tend to buy used books off Ebay or Amazon… big savings and often books are pretty well brand new….
I’ve tried few kinds of e-books but ended up with audio books and my mp3 player, that’s much more handy and efficient.
I believe the amount of books available in audio will beat e-books for a long time… until my mp3 player learns to project book text on a sheet of paper
Cheers,
I-Never-Sleep
I look forward to buying a reader, and hopefully one day everyone will at least have the option to buy digital. I think it will eventually lower the price of first print novels; materials and distribution will be so much easier.
There’s one thing I forgot to mention! E-Books are environmentally friendly!
Win E-Books!!!
Oh that’s really cheap method… even zero cost for the delivery fee!
You have a picture of a E-book reader that uses e-paper and you don’t say a thing about it.
E-paper should look like normal paper, thus you don’t have problem of eyestrain.
Something very important about normal book is the WC effect. Everyone seems ashamed to speak about that, but 99% of people read books/magazine while “sitting” on the bathroom. You can’t do that with a pc. At least if you don’t want to look weird.
[...] Conclusion There is a huge market out there for ebooks… With so many applications to help to read the books, and the need to read quality information, ebooks has made it clear that it is so much more cheaper to be published. See what Jon Lee has to say about ebooks and books. [...]
I am curious, what app do you use to read e-books on your smartphone? I have a motorola Q, but when I looked, I didn’t find a good text viewer that worked well with Gutenbergs texts..
Anyone else have one to recommend?
I’ve brought my laptop with me to the washroom a couple of times I’m embarassed to say….
For plain text files I use Internet Explorer. It’s a pain to navigate to a certain chapter so I tend not to close it once I have it open.
It really helped a lot since the newer version of PocketIE includes a page up/page down buttons.
As for PDFs, there aren’t many good choices for Smartphones unfortunately — most of the good programs out there are for PocketPC. What I prefer to do is just to copy the pdf into a plain text file and read that instead (sans pictures).