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The Pros And Cons Of E-Books

By Pankaj Khandelwal:

Right from the fairy tales of Cinderella, through the history of the great people, flowing over those mindboggling formulas and symbols, and ultimately seeking solace in the religious books during our grey years; books have always been closely related to our life. Even with so much of different varieties of book we find, they all have one thing in common. Paper! All of them are printed on paper. But with the technology advancing in every possible sphere we have a ‘geek twin’ for our paperbacks, the e-book.

E-book also known as electronic book needs no introduction. They are replacing their twins at a good pace. Amazon’s Kindle (King of e-book reader), Sony’s Reader, Apple’s iPad and other different devices for eBook reading, are making it easy for the readers to make the call for the electronic format. E-books also have their own sets of pros and cons. The pros are:

Find anything easily: Searching of any text in an ebook is just some clicks away. From the contents to the index to something right in the middle of page, the search with ease feature is what makes e-book more acceptable. Finding our eBook from the collection of thousands of eBooks in a virtual library won’t take more than few seconds from our every busy life. Even though paper books also have contents and index and a physical library has indices to keep the track of the books, but they are not as efficient as their twins.

Soft on the pockets: Economy slowing down and everyone feeling the pinch, eBooks are the safer options due to their pricing factor. Over the internet one can find the eBooks at more economical price or even free of cost within the comfort of your home and not sweating it out in the sun for your favourite novel.

Where ever you go, always with you: Portability has been the one of the most important characteristic of the eBooks. Numerous kinds of eBook readers are available in the market in varying memory size; make it easy for the people to have their own personal library. An eBook reader taking the space nearly same as a single paper book, we can carry our own library and stay in touch with them anytime, instead of a single book.

Eco-friendly: Since the meaning of eBooks translates to electronic books, they help in reducing the usage of paper and hence contribute to felling of lesser number of trees.

A glimpse of other pros: Apart from the above mentioned pros of an eBook, there are lots of many other features provided by it. A text to speech converter feature on eBook reader is very helpful for blind people as printing the books in Braille language turns out to be too costly. Moreover an eBook is not only a collection of text or images, it also contain videos and animations making it more content rich.

Now coming over to the cons, eBooks have some negatives over the paper books though less in quantity. Initially, continuous reading of an eBook used to be very painful for the eyes due to the glaze of the screen, but with time, the eBook readers have evolved and brought in e-ink which makes the reading experience completely realistic. Some even argue about the battery issue of these readers, but the new generation readers are way powerful with their battery backup to give an uninterrupted experience. Still some cons are their which need to be sorted out.

Copyright and Compatibility issues: The most important problem with the eBooks is the copyright issues. Some eBooks are so made that sharing of these books is nearly impossible. Some of them, once downloaded to a certain device can be read in only that device. Moreover with most of the eBook readers supporting a majority of eBook formats, there are some exclusive formats supported by devices of a particular make, making it incompatible on other devices. The ebook reader manufacturers should come to a mutual agreement to sort these issues to provide the consumers with an experience of different kind.

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