Print books vs. digital eBooks I'd like to discuss a number of the best places to get eBooks for your Palm handheld, but we haven't yet discussed the advantage eBooks have over print books. While eBooks haven't been widely accepted yet, they continue to provide readers with a number of advantages over more traditional paper volumes.
The case for eBooksIn many circumstances, reading an eBook is far superior to reading a traditional paper book.
PortabilityThe wonderful thing about electronic text is that it takes up virtually no room, in both a physical and digital sense. If you have a storage card, you can walk around with at least a dozen books, and probably many more than that. Even if you don't have a storage card, you can still walk around with a fair collection of three to six books (again, depending on book size and available memory).
In many situations it's hard to carry even one book around with you. The storage abilities of most eBooks allow readers to carry a reasonable collection of reading materials and/or reference texts. Because you probably carry your handheld around with you everywhere anyway, the convenience factor increases nearly exponentially.
FeaturesBecause eBooks are digital, not only are they super-portable, but they also open up the possibility for some really useful features. For starters, since most eBooks are in some form of digital text file, you can search the text for words or phrases. This is helpful when you want to find a quote or another specific section of the book. This can cut minutes, if not hours, off of wild goose chases for particular passages.
Additionally, digital formats--assuming copy protection doesn't get in the way--can be duplicated forever without decay or any real expense. We'll dig deeper into the specifics of this issue later in the series, but if your eBook allows it, this duplication ability can make it possible for you to share books with your friends without ever having to actually give up one of your possessions.
This is good for publishers (and hopefully writers as well), who don't have to pay any production costs. This in turn should drive the prices down for the readers. While the digital nature of the eBook in theory raises the effectiveness of eBooks, it also brings up a few ideas that are interesting and worth perusing in this series.
Easy to readThe electronic format offers readers even more benefits over traditional paper books. eBooks can be read in a variety of lighting situations, and due to the backlighted screens that most Palm computers have, you can read an eBook in most low or no light situations, such as on the subway, during nighttime road trips, or in bed when you don't want to disturb your partner.
DurabilityThe readability of an eBook won't degrade over time. The pages won't crumble because of high acid content, the binding can never break, and there can be no variations in the ink. Despite being criticized for their inconvenience and for being hard to read, eBooks are often more convenient than their paper based counterparts.
Print books long from extinct
Promoters and publishers of traditional books often think that eBooks are in danger of replacing paper books. It's not likely that eBooks will ever be able to completely and totally replace print books, nor should they. Regardless of future developments in e-reading technology, the book market will have plenty of room for paper books for quite some time. However, the print book market will change and shift as a result of the eBook.
In the present, and for a large chunk of the foreseeable future, paper books will continue to provide the primary source for textual information, and traditional books will continue to be a commonplace in our culture. It seems that eBooks and print books are able to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses quite well.
Print books will remain as collector's items. The coffee table book won't be replaced for quite some time, and given that there's still a rather large market for hardback and paperback books, there's no danger of them disappearing anytime soon. Not only are print books holding their own against eBooks in market share, but they also have several features that eBooks are not able to match.
For starters, everyone is used to paper books. They know how to use them, how to mark their place, how to annotate them, how to organize them, and where to get them. With eBooks, this isn't always the case. People don't know that they can go to bookstores and buy popular eBook titles for reasonable prices.
The long road ahead for eBooksMost people are relatively clueless how to deal with, manipulate, and manage a digital file, and while this isn't really a problem among Palm OS users, they aren't the only people who read books. The attachment to paper books isn't without reason: paper has a higher quality than the digital screens we have available today. White or off-white paper printed with black ink displays a precision and quality that is unobtainable in any kind of eBook reader. Even the highest-grade screens have a quality of about half of what books have been offering for hundreds of years.
eBooks are not yet commonplace, and many people are scared of the unknown aspect of eBooks. eBook technology hasn't yet developed to the point where eBooks can truly compete with traditional books, but in time the features and abilities that are available today, plus new features that will surface in the near future, will allow eBooks to, at the very least, become noticed in the general public. I urge Palm readers to try reading an eBook, especially since Palm computer users already have a very good device for reading eBooks on the go. With all the advantages that eBooks offer readers, it's worth the time to check them out.
