Remember that clever little stop-motion bookstore video that smugly concludes, “There’s nothing quite like a real book”? On Urban Times, Kosal Kong writes a great piece in response to this closing contention.
Kong covers the history of the e-book and why “[s]ome sectors of the book world find [them] scary.” She does admit that works about or that are art are indeed better in print than electronic form.
However, for the bulk of books, the medium is not the message. Rather, the most important aspect of the book is the text, the content. It’s the ideas and stories contained within the text the reader desires. We read to get a good story, to be entertained and educated. Sometimes, the content of a book can even be more comfortably read on an eReader than in physical form – those 1000+ page epics by your favourite sci-fi writer that you have to have as soon as they come out are actually pretty cumbersome to read in hardback. The new eReaders are easy to use and can be read anywhere a book can (including the bath, if you are careful – you can always seal it into a clear plastic bag as well, if you’re in the habit of dropping your book in the bath).
She also covers the benefits of e-books for students, the disabled, and indeed anyone who would just like to have a book in his or her pocket at all times. We TeleReaders already know all about this, of course, but this is a great article to show anyone who might still be on the fence about e-reading.
hear, hear.