E-books

One Hundred Fifty Seventh Post: E-books

Whatever happened to the idea of e-books becoming commonplace, especially from retail giants like Amazon and Walmart? They had a few advantages over print such as saving the printing and paper. The main thing that was going to make them popular was their portability. You can’t easily carry 20 books with you while you are traveling, but a notebook, handheld, or e-book view could literally hold hundreds of books.

Sure Amazon sells these books, but the price is about the same as a print book. In my opinion, e-books haven’t developed as fast as they could because of the copyright and piracy issue. Usually when you download them you have to activated the book for each device it is put on. (I will have to research this further.) So there may be some problems backing up and moving these files.

I admit I was able to put an e-book on my Palm. I had to activate the book on Adobe’s site, but after setting up an account it is cool to have a complete book on my palm with pictures and being relatively easy to navigate. I still prefer to have a print book because of the ability to flip through the pages and read the pages that interest me the most. This e-book thing is something to look into though.

So you, the reader, must be the judge. Is the electronic book better? It can be downloaded instantly and searched through easily. It is most importantly portable, but it has a file format, printing, and transferring file problems. Or is it better to let the technology develop and have a tradition printed book that has all the indexing, skimming, marking, writing and all of the other benefits of a physical book?