Books vs eBooks

I have heard the question many times from all sorts of people. All of whom want to know if buying an e-reader is worth the admittedly large initial pay-out. When anyone has asked me, they generally want to know an author’s perspective, but our perspective is just a varied as the views of the general public. We cannot say for definite that one is better than the other because the pros and cons are equally matched.

The eReader does have an initial payout equal to that of at least 10 books, (depending on what one you choose), but there are so many books out there, modern and classic, that are free to download. On kindle for example, there are:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Mike Wells’-Lust, Money, Murder series.
Oscar Wilde’s- The Importance Of Being Ernest.
L.T. Vargus’-Casting Shadows Everywhere.

So the cheaper price of books generally pays for the eReader itself. The space on a book shelf is dramatically decreased as you can hold hundreds of novels on something about the thickness of a children’s picture book. So you only need the one item when you take it on holiday. And how many books have dog ears, coffee ring stains and yellowed pages? They damage easily, the spine breaks and pages fall out or the cover can get torn and the pages wet. The eReader is far more durable than that, and if it damages, you can re-download any books from your eReader account at no extra cost.

 Before anyone accuses me of seeing only one side of the argument, what about books? Proper, hard copy books? Yes they are bulkier, but they’ve got something to hold onto whilst you read; something of substance you can feel in your fingers. If you’ve only got room for a few in your holiday luggage, then you have to be discerning in your reading habits, choosing carefully what you want to read, and therefore allowing you to think carefully about the kinds of books you enjoy. Yes, hard copy books can get damaged, you can dog ear the pages when you’ve lost your book mark; underline certain paragraphs you want to remember and bend the spine back in order to see the pages better. Its remembering when you read through for the second or third time the things you loved about it. And let’s not forget, electrical items break aswell. Ok so the eReader is more durable, but when it breaks, we’ve then got to fork out for a new one. And talking about memory, that’s one of the most important arguments against an eReader, is the smell. The olfactory sense is the most powerful trigger for memory. Reading that favourite old book for the thousandth time is still special, because that odour reawakens the wonderful memories we had in those past pages.

 So what do you think? I’m still undecided, I’ll try one way, then the other and see what I prefer, but that’s just it isn’t it? Preference. If we all like it the same way, we might as well have chips in our heads and download books automatically into our brains. Where’s the fun in that?

Read, follow, comment and enjoy. M x