eBooks: Are They A Good Thing?

I guess change is inevitable, the best we can do is just prepare for it, and be ready to adapt when the time comes

And that’s what our civilization is doing now, were adapting. We’re learning to become more global, more independent and more cut off at the same time. A tweet, a beep, a text message, does that bring us together, or pull us apart?

Sorry for the rant; this isn’t what the article is about.

Words are important to us all; they inspire us, teach us, invigorate us. They are our friends, our enemies, our whatever we want them to be. Some tell stories, some inform us, and some defend us. It’s something that hasn’t changed over the last hundred of years – words have always been there to tell us something, to speak to us. What has changed is the medium in which we read these words. Not even ten years ago the world of publishing houses were flourishing with thousands of new books being published every year.

Oh, how the internet has changed us.

Now instead of thousands of new books being published yearly, thousands of publishing houses are going out of business. The main reason? Not enough people are buying books anymore; people are still reading, that’s not the problem. The problem is where we want to read our words – where we want to see those characters and learn that information. Our perception and priority has changed – we want convenience and portability.

The answer to our suddenly changed desire?

eBooks. Thousands and thousands of eBooks. Just a quick look on Google Trends, or eBay pulse and you will see how the popularity of these items as risen over the last five years. It’s our own industrial revolution, except this one is much more technological, and lot less specific – this one is happening everywhere.

I do believe, however, that one of the biggest adaptations that is coming over us the way we read. Right now you’re reading this on the computer; ten years ago you would not have been. eBooks and eBook readers are the new medium for reading novels, and this is both a great change, as well as a bad one.

Negatives:

• Do we really need more time spent looking at a screen? The fact is looking at a computer screen all day takes a toll on the eyes, and to have that same stress during leisure time isn’t a good thing.

• Battery life! We have to worry about our books running out of power. Imagine that. At the climax and suddenly it dies. That’s a new problem to have…

• The whole feeling of reading a great story seems slightly tarnished. It’s almost a magical idea. Imagine that first time you ever spent a whole day finishing a novel – you were just so into that you couldn’t put it down. The best part of that is that you could. Nothing was stopping you. It was so… easy. To have to worry about battery life would just ruin the experience.

• No more libraries of all your books. One of the coolest things about books is able to be surrounded by them. I like the idea of being surrounded by countless characters and stories.

Positives:

• An eBook Reader can store thousands upon thousands of books and you can download them online – no more libraries. Plus you can read those old, forgotten classics, something that a lot of people weren’t doing a decade ago. In one way this technological reading is bringing us closer to the literature of the past, bridging the two worlds together. How will they collide? We’ll find out soon, I’m sure.

• Much cheaper. Without a doubt the prices of hard cover books has risen significantly. For people who love reading, but don’t appreciate spending a lot of their money on it, then eBooks is the way to go.

• More convenient. Take thousands of books in your pocket. Do I have to say anymore?

• Hate to say it, but some of these eBooks have been ‘revamped’. Some have more serious editing, some better fonts, all for a better reading experience. Are you starting to feel a little nostalgia yet?

• Less clutter. No more massive libraries with your collection of books. More space.

In the end its personal preference, but fact is fact. The world is changing around us. It is. Really. Look around. You can see it everywhere. Change.

We have to learn to adapt and to change with it. If that means putting all our books into digital form, well, at least there are positives to keep me somewhat happy.

Note: This article wasn’t even meant to go in this direction. I was planning to write article on the top five eBook readers available. Funny how the consciousness works.