E-books Winning the Crowd

Amazon's Kindle DX (source: wordpress.com)

The ways technology is changing the world is tremendous. Everything goes as miniature as they can, as light as feather and faster than lightning. This goes the same with literature and journalism readership. An electronic book is a digital form of publication based on text and image, produced, published and readable on computers or other digital devices; and apart from visual and audio, enhancing elements that are considered include multimedia i.e. film/video/animated graphics (Huffington Post, 2010).

For every action there’s always reaction, and it goes to the rise of e-books as well. Cornwall (2010) reported that publishers and book aficionados have been sternly resisting the prospect of the e-book; nonetheless, there has been a revelation to go digital in order to survive, as it’s predicted that almost half of all books will be sold in digital form in the next ten years. The advent of e-books are casting a shadow on conventional books and winning the tech-savvy crowd since they are about all things miniature, fast and seamless. Just what are the things that make e-books getting more and more popular then?

A few of the benefits of e-books that Sasson (n.d) established are;

1) obtaining e-books are very convenient, less time-consuming, no bookstore visits or waiting for books to arrive in the mailbox, which also means no shipping fees and can be done anywhere, anytime at the comfort of readers, with Internet connection;

2) Environment-friendly i.e. no trees to produce pages of e-books;

3) Space saving i.e. no bookrack or library is required regardless of amount of e-books owned;

4) Portability and no more worrying about heavy bags i.e. books or a whole library stored in a small computers or e-book reader;

5) Internet browsing capability for information seeking;

6) Interactivity of e-books (incorporation of multimedia);

7) Printability of content, some are even free of charge;

Of course there are limits to e-books. According to Cornwall (2010), there are very limited catalogue books offered and most of them are aimed at American audience. The advantages are somewhat more appealing though, and to me, especially, as while I am fond of reading, I do not read enough, simply because books are expensive and I travel at least twice a year thus I need something portable if I do want to read. Nonetheless, some book lovers just couldn’t help but hate the idea of digitalizing books. Quoted from an ardent traditional book buff, “A book is the entire experience, from walking into the bookstore itself, to reading it and passing it onto a friend. A book is an event, but eBooks dilute this event to mere words. They strip out the feeling, the sensation, the experience that surrounds a novel. They make it – soulless – machine like.” (Turton, 2008).

Nevertheless, whatever we do, say or think, the inexorable force that is the Internet is not going to stop its digitalizing capabilities whether we like or not.

References

• Cornwall, D 2010, 'E-books popularity on the rise', The 7.30 Report, ABC Video Transcripts, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2849989.htm>.
• Huffington Post 2010, 'The definition of an eBook', 5 March, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/the-definition-of-an-eboo_n_487834.html>.
• Sasson, R n.d, The advantages and benefits of ebooks, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.successconsciousness.com/ebooks_benefits.htm>.
• Turton, S 2008, Ebooks: A bad idea getting worse, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/07/25/ebooks-a-bad-idea-getting-worse/>.