E-Books or Physical Books?

It’s a question every student and bookworm faces as they start the school year or pack for a long vacation. The amazingly light, 100-books-in-one, E-book / tablet or the delicious-smelling, tactile in-my-hands physical book. Hopefully this article can help you decide.

The physical book has several things going for it beyond the nostalgic feeling and the rustle of paper. Here are three:

• It won’t electrocute you if you drop it in the bath
• Won’t run out of batteries.
• You can use it during takeoff and landing.

A physical textbook is also easier to bookmark and write sticky notes in, and, for many people, it feels better in their hands than a tablet. Often, physical copies are just plain easier to find as well. And, while books are often very expensive new, there is a huge market for second-hand books and many well established library systems all over the country to help lower the costs.

Like all things, however, hard copies (and paper) have their drawbacks.

• Easily damaged.
• They can get very heavy, very fast.

Especially for students, where a single person is often packing calculus book after chemistry manual, we frequently find people are carrying significantly more weight on their backs than they really should be. It’s generally advised not to carry more than ten percent of your body weight on a regular basis. For the average adult male, that’s about twenty pounds; for the average female, sixteen pounds. However, with smaller individuals or children, a book bag can become a huge pain in the back two weeks into September.

Books can also slow a person down on vacation. When planning a trip, it can be tempting to bring along two or three (or ten) books, but impossible to find the space for them.

On the go, we feel a solid argument in favour of e-books can be made. And E-books have other perks than just compactibility.

• Access to free public-domain content.
• Multipurpose devices. Don’t know what a word means? Use the internet to look it up.
• A hundred books with no added weight.

Another amazing feature of online reading is that, when purchased on the internet, books can be shared to your desktop, tablet, and smartphone through services like Google Play Books and Apple Books, or less frequently using googledocs and dropbox. This makes the books super accessible no matter where you are. If you find an extra hour you didn’t pack entertainment for, it’s extremely convenient to be able to pick up where you left off with a click of a button.

Searchability is another great tool built into pdfs and online documents and books. Being able to search a text or novel for a specific word or quote is incredibly useful for research or during a discussion. Within seconds, you can know the answer to what you’re looking for and have the rest of the chapter and paragraph for context. While regular books do have glossaries, a table of contents and an index, they really cannot compete in immediate access to specific information. E-books are also often cheaper than physical books when they’re available, and the public domain is filled with free books and just gets larger every day.

E-books do have downsides too though.

• Distractions of multifunction technology.
• Batteries die
• Technology glitches

And, while e-libraries are a great start, it’s hard for them to dent the thousands of years conventional libraries have had to build up their masses of books. Searching for e-books has gotten easier though lately with new services popping up to replace the old. People can now access all kinds of free e-books and manuals using Allbookez or search through audiobooks with Amazon’s audible.

There are thousands of ebooks available at http://www.allbookez.com/ and you can easily search via keywords to find the exact ebooks. For example the keyword movie ticket booking system project report will return all the reports containing data about the ticket booking systems.

In the end, whether the e-book is here forever or is going to be replaced by another new technology in a ten years, we think the good, old, hard-copy book will never be completely replaced. That said, online reading is also here to stay. So, since we live in a privileged time where we have easy access to both, why not take advantage of the benefits of e-books and physical books in the many situations you face each day?

Happy Reading!