Well....looks like this is gonna be another one of my product bashing, hard edged reviews. Well, on a second thought, its not !!

If you were very well acquainted with me, you’d probably be knowing that two of my most favourite indulgences is Books and My computer. So in that manner, I am pretty qualified to be talking about this war !! I have read a hell of a lot of books in school and am still reading. The amount of knowledge in this world never really ends, does it ?

I only came to know about the concept of an e-book two or three years ago. It does seem quite a decent proposition considering that you can get almost any book for Free on the internet. Also, the books are freely available and very easy to find. The amount of space occupied by these e-books is laughably small. You could probably fit 40 to 50 e-books on one measly floppy disk (its a totally different thing altogether that none of these floppy disks are really worth an inkling of trust !!). But the bottom line really is that one thing that e-books are, is extremely convenient. As another recent development, you can use these e-books on palm tops, thus making them portable.

Seems so great doesn’t it ??? You also have the most exciting, most joy-giving word in the world associated with it...FREE. So....whats the problem ?

Bub, if you read the title of the review, you’d probably know what I am talking about. Most of the e-books available on the net are in the .pdf format (readable using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader). The biggest prob with this is that the text in PDF looks excruciatingly dull and somewhat smudged. You really have to strain your eyes like hell to read them properly. Also, theres an annoying tendency to forget what line you were on, when you reach the end of the line. After reading a PDF for 15 minutes, I start feeling dizzy almost. OK OK, probably you’d think I am exaggerating a lil bit, but you are always free to try it for yourself. One good thing though is that you can use an option called ’Sharpen Text’ in the Acrobat reader. Not that it makes one hell of a difference. Its just a nano-improvement, I would say. the best thing you could do, is to use the sharpen text option and read with a much higher zoom in. That is only gonna make a lil difference. Here again, the verdict is that, even though you may be excited as hell to get that book you were looking for, all these years, chances are that you’d probably wind up within the first few chapters or so. And chances also are, that you’d never read that book again, E or paper !!

So, is there a solution ?? The self-proclaimed net-guru says...PROBABLY. The option is e-books in TEXT format. Yeah, the same old ancient .txt format. YOu can use notepad to view the file. Its also easier to do things like editing a lil bit, copying etc. Also, the text files are as small(or smaller) as the PDF files. Of course, you cannot have the cover pages and formatting like the PDF, but it hardly matters (to me, at least). Also, you don’t exactly know how big the book would be. Then again, the txt format allows only one font throughout, so it gets pretty boring, I guess. So....reading from a text file might just be as boring as reading a PDF. You’d still be F***ing up your eyes.

In the very end, the only verdict that any sane man can make is that e-books really are not worth the effort. You’ll hardly ever read a whole e-book of decent size. Its just too distressing !! The paper books always ruled, and for me, they always will. Probably there’s be a change someday, but so clearly, that day hasn’t arrived yet. And, definitely, e-books are not the Manna. sent by the almighty himself.

As always, I’d really appreciate a few/LOTS of comments !!
[;-)]