December 12, 2006

Nowadays more and more people read e-books. Digital books are cheaper to release, and they will theoretically save the forests. If they make textbooks into e-books, students do not have to buy these bulky and expensive textbooks and carry them around campus. They could instead just carry small laptops or just access the books from any school computer whenever they needed to.

Surely both printed books and e-books have advantages. Printed books are easy reading and you can read anywhere you want. Also, with a proper book, you can read it anywhere in any position. You can curl up on a sofa and read; you can lie on the bed and read (though not good for your vision sometimes). E-books are cheap, and easily accessible, obtained and backed up. They save room and fit on any electronic tool that supports multiple formats. Searching in the e-book is much easier, if you want to find some topics, etc. E-books can be more fascinating if made multimedia, leaving printed books behind.

However, some will give up looking at digitized text when it comes to a novel. Not only it strains the eye (looking at the computer screen for such a long time will just make you even sleepier), but also the like feel is just not the same. They love the heaviness and even the smell of books (new books in particular), plus the sensation of turning pages, but they are unhappy when seeing the practicality of switching to digital text. That is to say, reading virtual books cannot fully match the enjoyment and feel of reading physical (paper) books. Additionally, e-books are not for those computer illiterates, who cannot fully access and back up the data.