Advantages and Disadvantages of E-books and Paper Books

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Advantages of E-books Versus Paper Books

With advances in digital technology, there is increasing popularity of reading electronic books over traditional paper books. For example, ebooks now outsell traditional ones on Amazon. Although paper books still have tremendous values and have own market niche, as evident from the number of books placed on shelves at various retailers, e-books will be the trend of text publishing going forward. There are many glaring advantages that e-books have over traditional paper books, as e-books are more convenient to carry, have greater update capacity, have greater storage capacity, more accessible and environmental friendly. This paper will therefore elaborate on the advantages of e-books and provide a comparative analysis of e-books versus traditional books.

Similar to any type of argument, there will always be advantages and disadvantages for each of paper book and e-book. Therefore prior to outlining the advantages of ebook, and discussing how those advantages outweigh its disadvantages for the purpose of objectivity this essay will first describe the advantages of the traditional hardcopy books, which had formed some of the counterarguments, and subsequently address these issues one by one and comparatively highlight the advantages of ebooks .

Paper books will always have its special, irreplaceable place for certain readers, and therefore will always have its own market with its followers. The experience is always special. There are the unique qualities of paper, the feeling of weight of the paper book. Paper provides an intimacy of interaction that no other medium can provide. Moreover for some people, reading paper book had become one of the indispensable components of their...

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... be interactive, as it can contain audio, video, animations all of which can enhance the reading experience (Gardiner and Musto, 2010). Increased interactiveness of the reading material will enhance the understanding of the contents being read, and hence the learning of the material (Gardiner and Musto, 2010)

To conclude, there are many distinguished advantages that e-books have over traditional paper books, as e-books are lightweight, portable and hence convenient to carry, have greater update capacity, have greater storage capacity, easily accessible through online downloading as well as being environmental friendly (with saving trees). With ongoing technological development of ebooks, there have since been many added functionality for ebooks (rotational screen, hyperlink, split screen) with even many more functionality to be developed in the near future.

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