Books vs E-reader

I just bought an E-reader and is a great piece of technology, that got me thinking, why there are so many paper books when everything could be electronic? The question came up because I saw all the advantages of an e-reader so I’ll say everything good about this and then my idea for a better future.

I don’t hate books, or think they are obsolete, I love how they look, how they feel, how they smell, the way they crack when you open them for the first time or how they feel after you finish them, the weight of a heavy book or the size of an small one, is great to have a book as a present because you don’t know anything about it most of the time, so you can see if the person knows you or what they think about you just by reading the back cover, so in one sentence books are great.

Some articles say “Some readers have internet, and colour screens and mp3” well to hell with those, I want to read a book, not behave like a 13 year old when is supposed to do his homework, also I bought the cheapest of the cheapest, the Kobo Touch, so here are the benefits of an e-reader.

First you can display the letters as big or small as you see them fit, yes no more adjusting how far the book should be just to read it, you control the size of the letters.

No more different fonts for my eyes (well only when I want it) because you can also control that, so if an editor wanted to look cool and uses a weird font you can change it back.

No more problems whit you languages, sometimes you read a book that has some words that you are not used to it, and if you are like me you run to the dictionary and see what it is, but if you are no vacation, most people don’t carry a dictionary all the time, I don’t, so you have to search the internet, and that means to turn on the computer that it might be in a different place and even turned off, or get an idea of the word by context, that is good but not great. Well e-readers have a build in dictionary and not just one, they have like 8, one for each language, so even if is your second or third language you’ll always know the meaning of each strange word.

This is my E-reader, as you can see I have books in Spanish too, this one was one I lost and now I have it in electronic format, A cookie to the person who can point the photoshop :D

Are you finishing a book? No problem! Again with the trips, but it had happened to any of you that you are reading a book and you are about to finish it but you are going on vacation and think, “I never read in my vacation maybe a couple of minutes in the airplane, I’ll never finish it in this trip” and then there are delays and the airplane movie just don’t do it and before takeoff you have finished and the next book you want to read is in your home or in the suitcase that you register? Well not anymore, because with this little fella you can have 1000 books ready to read, and if you can read 1000 books in the airport you are really fast or living in the airport, anyhow if you put the extra memory on the reader you can have30,000 books ready to roll, and if you can read 30,000 books waiting for your plane I think you already read every single book ever written.

No extra weight, you are carrying less than 200 grams no matter how fat the book you are reading also is the same space as a small notebook.

You can read anywhere, some people like to read under the sun, others in their houses under their favorite lamp, well a reader is just like a book, you can read anywhere you want, no problem at all.

Want to search for a specific part but can’t remember the page, the reader has a finder, also you can mark pages, make little virtual folds in the corners underline phrases and make annotations! Better than a book because if you don’t what any of those you can remove them and there is no harm on the book.

I’m not the kind of guy who wants to show the books that he has read like the heads of the animals I killed, so everybody can see that I read, if I read it that is fine by me, so I don’t care if my bookshelf has a ton of books or just an e-reader.

Some people say that is harder to borrow books whit e-readers well is just like “borrow” music, movies, software, images and almost everything that is on the internet… Arrrr!

There is a ton of e-books for free out there, because I don’t think that Jane Austen keep getting money for her books, so those are free.

Someone said that he didn’t want to take his e-reader to the tub because if it got wet it would stop working. Well dude if you get a book wet it also gets ruined, I don’t take my books to the tub so I’m not going to take my e-reader there.

You are not going to struggle with that hard split on the book, I like to hold my books with one hand but if you are reading something like “The Name Of The Wind” you have to stretch that book because the middle between both sides is always curved so you have to use both hands or move your head a lot, but with an e-reader you just read one page at a time and always perfectly flat.

It tells you how long did it take you to read the book in actual reading time!

That is everything I can think by now but I’m sure there are tons more of benefits.

I’m not saying that books should disappear but what I like to see happen is that everybody had an e-reader and actual paper books became something that you give as a high end present, a really great gift.