Which is better – an e-book or a regular one? What are the advantages of one over the other?
It doesn’t matter if you have an e-book or a paper book in your hand. It’s a matter of personal preference.
The rapid death of paper books has been considered a fait accompli. Here’s a little more, a little more, and e-books will completely displace the many “bricks”. But “a little” has passed, and the book publishing house is still alive, the shelves of bookstores are not empty, public libraries are not closed. Whether to pay attention to reviews or fuck book review.
What went “wrong”? Why are pages that smell of ink still dear to our hearts?
Let’s imagine a small competition between paper and e-books. Who will win? Will one carrier displace its opponent, or will both remain equal as an alternative to each other?
To understand which is better – a paper or an e-book – let’s first find out the pros and cons of both.
Pros of the e-book:
Compactness.
It provides the ability to store large amounts of information on small media, allowing you to take a few books with you on a trip.
Environmental friendliness.
Paper is used to produce paper books, which means that trees are destroyed. And one small e-book contains an immense number of pages, saving the whole forest from felling.
Lighting.
There is no need for lighting, because the e-book has its backlight.
Ability 1
Ability to make marks in the fields, bookmarks, quickly find the right text areas with a search engine, access dictionaries. In general, an e-book provides more opportunities to interact with text, in which case it will not be spoiled, unlike paper.
Ability 2
Ability to embed media materials (video, audio). This is a good addition to encyclopedias and educational literature.
Ability 3
The ability to change the font and size of letters allows visually impaired people to read without glasses.
It’s easy to recover a lost book – you can download it online or copy it to a friend.
Cons of e-book:
Insecurity. It is worth breaking down – and goodbye, hundreds of books collected in all corners of the Internet, bought on sites, downloaded from friends.
Low quality. Most likely, this disadvantage is temporary and will be eliminated later. Books on the Internet are often not read by anyone. Sometimes you download, look – and this is a scan from a paper source, recognized in FineReader and never edited. Here you are, please, and cubes, hieroglyphs, and illegible text areas.
Inconvenience in reading. It is convenient to carry e-books, but not very easy to read. Or rather, not everyone. There are many people whose eyes get tired even when reading from super-comfortable e-books. But reading from a paper page – do not get tired. In addition, when reading from a glowing screen in the dark, the eyes are very tense due to the contrast created by the difference in illumination of areas visible to operational and peripheral vision.
Impersonality. All books read from electronic media are the same. Because of this, all the information read turns into a continuous unstructured stream.
Pros of a paper book:
Individuality. Every book read is remembered by the cover, page texture, font. That is why they are all different for us, and together they create the whole world.
Information is easier to perceive and read from a paper source. The researchers conducted experiments to compare reading speed and the depth of memorization of information using different media. We will not provide figures, but they have confirmed that paper books have a significant advantage. Why: When reading, the brain tries to make certain clues. When dealing with a paper book, these clues are the color of the cover, the format of the publication, the characteristics of the cover, the appearance of the pages, the smells, the location of the text, the presence of pictures. Thanks to all this, a structure is created in the head that helps find the necessary information in memory. All texts are the same in the electronic version, so the brain has nothing to cling to, except the data itself.
When reading a paper book, we experience emotions more vividly. Again, this is confirmed by experiments. Scientists have studied the physiological reactions of the body, and in particular the activity of the nervous system when reading paper and e-books. In the first case, these reactions were almost twice as high.
The smell of book pages. We will not reject such nice nuances as the smell of book pages, the pleasure of buying a fresh volume in a good cover, looking at the roots on the shelves of the home library…
Encourages children to read. By the way, the home library encourages children to read much more than an e-book. Rows of colorful volumes are interesting, while the use of gadgets is reduced to games and social networks.
Cons of paper book:
Paper books are heavy. Today, many people only have time to read in the subway or train, and you do not always take a heavy volume on the road.
They take up a lot of space, so the number of paper books in the house is limited, while e-books can be collected in the tens of thousands.
Environmental friendliness. We talked about the environmental friendliness of e-books – paper has a disadvantage because its production requires wood.
You need to buy a paper book, and you can easily download an e-book for free.
Irreversible loss. If a friend asks you to read a paper book, it can disappear forever. You can simply copy the e-mail.
Conclusion
For example, it is better to take an electronic one on the road. This is also the best option for those who live in a rented apartment or often move. But at the same time – what could be better than a comfortable reading of a paper volume with a cup of cocoa and a cat by your side? Or wandering between the shelves of a bookstore?
It doesn’t matter if you have an e-book or a paper book in your hand. It’s a matter of personal preference. How much more important is the answer to the question – to read or not to read?
Indeed, no matter what medium you receive information from, in any case, you receive it. But is it so important to read? Scientists have already proved the benefits of reading books.
Yes, well-read people are less likely to be poor, reading books maintains mental health, relieves stress even better than music or walking.
The benefits of reading are an indisputable fact. But what about those who do not like to read? Maybe the problem is a lack of habit and the wrong approach? The secret is that well-read people are instilled with a love of books by their parents in their infancy. Those who do not have such a useful habit will have to accustom themselves.
But let’s go back to the ring, where e-books compete against paper ones. In this case, friendship won. Just as electronic music did not displace instrumental music, just as television did not displace theater, the invention of the electronic book will not kill paper. And it’s gratifying, because that’s how we get richer in the whole universe.
