The e-book boom started around 2007. And since then, for 15 years, the battle between paper conservatives and digital liberals has not subsided. In this article we collected the most important advantages of e-books and found out why compact devices are really more convenient.
Comfortable word processing and optimization
There are those who would be glad to read paper books, but their eyesight doesn’t allow them: paper fonts are too small, letters are blurred before eyes, it is difficult to concentrate. To read comfortably you also have to adjust lighting, take a comfortable position. E-readers help to optimize the book for you: increase or decrease the font, adjust the brightness of the screen, adjust the page turning, and many other functions which help the book to adjust to you, not you to the book – opinion Юровский Кирилл.
Readers are especially handy for those who are used to working with text: to leave notes, highlight and save quotes and paragraphs. In a classical variant it would lead to a scribbled book with multicolored stickers and bookmarks or with broken corners of pages. The reader is allowed to work with the text freely: make notes, save tabs or selected text parts, go back to the necessary fragments at any time. For those who often study from books, work with non-fiction editions, textbooks and encyclopedias, the electronic format is more than convenient.
Big little library
The more paper books in your home, the more shelves, racks, and cabinets you have. Sometimes these “sources of knowledge” are so many that you have to allocate a separate room for a library or fill all the walls from floor to ceiling with books. On the one hand, it may even be beautiful, if you have enough space and money for the aesthetic arrangement of the home library. But in harsh realities it is more often piles of folios, endless dust and eaten up space.
One e-book will “hide” your entire library and more. Thousands of books, encyclopedias, and albums will fit into a compact device the size of a couple of palms.
And you can quickly and easily switch between titles using the intuitive navigation on your virtual bookshelf. Wherever you go, you’ll always have the books you want.
E-books are cheaper and more accessible
If you want to read a new book, in paper it must first be found. In the best case – go to the bookstore and spend a couple of hours wandering between the endless sales racks. If you live in a major city, you will have no problem finding it. But in the provinces, new or, on the contrary, old rare editions rarely arrive, and it is difficult or sometimes impossible to find them in physical stores. Then you have to look on the Internet, find the desired book there, pay for shipping, and wait a few days to a few weeks for the postage.
All the “here and now” must be forgotten. Unless you have an e-reader. With it, a new book will be on your device almost instantly. In addition, the purchase of electronic versions are always at least twice cheaper than paper ones.
Ebooks – it is more profitable, faster and easier to buy. And there is no problem, what to do with a book that did not like: resell, give to friends, take to the nearest library? Remove it from your device in a second – that’s it!
Easier to hold, read, flip through
They don’t smell, they don’t rustle. They don’t need fancy bookmarks, they can’t decorate. But readers are much more convenient to use than paper books. Especially when it comes to large and heavy encyclopedias or weighty volumes of fiction of 800-1000 pages. It is inconvenient to hold massive paper books with one hand, closer to the middle they are difficult to flip – with them it is not so pleasant to lie in bed in the evening, because such impressive volumes want to put on the table, shaking your biceps less.
With an e-book there are no such problems. It weighs less than 300 grams and will not get thicker and heavier. There are also no difficulties with flipping – most basic operations can be done with one hand. So the e-book is easy to handle wherever you are and whatever position you are in – lying on your side in bed, standing in a shuttle bus, sitting in an airplane, and so on.
For those who often travel or travel on business trips, e-book – a real salvation, as it saves precious space and weight in the backpack. At the same time, you do not need to give up your favorite reading or necessary educational, work books, even during long trips or being in the middle of the woods.
Care for the ecology
Not always new technologies are more environmentally friendly than usual things. For example, the production of e-books cannot be called completely environmentally friendly. The carbon footprint in the production of e-readers is hundreds of times greater than that of a single paper book. For example, according to Cleantech research by order of Amazon, it was found out that the production of one electronic book releases 168 kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while a usual book – 7.4 kg. At the same time, the Carbone 4 and Hachette centers cite different figures. According to their data, a paper book leaves behind 1.3 kg of CO2, and a 1st generation Sony Reader – 235 kg.
In the first case, it turns out that the production of 23 paper books equals one e-book. But you can load hundreds of times more works into a digital device. So if you really read a lot and often, the use of readers can be safely called more environmentally friendly.
Carbon dioxide alone does not do the trick. Paper books are still easier to recycle than technological devices, and the production of the latter is more toxic. Although Amazon is trying to develop a recycling initiative for its own series of Amazon Kindle e-books – or, more precisely, some parts of the device.
Absolutely any consumption harms the planet in one way or another. But buying up and then throwing away hundreds of paper editions a year is far worse than using a single e-book for years, in which you can delete a virtual work in one click, without wasting the Earth’s priceless resources.
As a kind of compromise, you can save the most valuable books on paper, the kind of works “for the ages” that you really want to have in your own library. And novelties and books “for once” can be read in electronic format. So readers are fed and trees are safe.
