I personally like printed books. The first and the foremost advantage is comfort. Imagine a cold winter day when you are tempted to complete a book you were reading. Which one will you choose to do? Read an online document, sitting in front of the computer staring at the words on the fluorescent white computer screen? Or would you like to curl into your bed, with a blanket wrapped around you, with the book in one hand and a hot cup of coffee in one hand and read in comfort? I would prefer the latter and I suppose most of you would prefer to do the same.

Another major advantage of paper over online is that it is portable. You have the advantage of reading a printed book anywhere you want, in a car, in a train or flight as you travel, and if want even in the privacy of your toilet. You can tell a bedtime story to your child on comforts of the bed.

Though comfort and portability tops my reasoning here, I also like printed books since I love collecting books. I don?t want a collection stored somewhere in a folder in the computer. I rather have a book that I can see and feel. This does not mean that I do not use the e-books at all. I use them, but only for technical reference. This is my personal feeling and since I want to do justice to the best of both, I would like to list the advantages of both the options here:

Advantages of Print Publishing

Readability: Reading paper is approximately 30% faster than reading from screen. For a given size of text, paper is clearer than online.

Marketing: In the case of publishing works in print, writers have the advantage of targeting an audience as well as making a profit. In magazines, advertisers supply added income bookstores bring in a great deal of money as well.

Reader Capabilities: Printed publications have the advantage of creating a design based document (reference books, novels, or story books) depending on the capabilities the publisher has with regard to fonts, layout, photos, and overall size of the publication. Once a printed publication is in the hands of the reader, the only requirements remain are for readers to be able to see and to read. This is not necessarily so easy with on-line publications. Since they are limited by the technological limitations of the users screen and memory capacity.

Reaching your Audience: One of the significant advantages to print publishing exists in distribution and finally reaching the targeted audience. While printing costs are significantly higher than those involved in publishing on-line because of actual paper and printing costs, the advantage of print publishing is actually placing text in the hands of the audience.

Advantages of Online Publishing

Costs: The costs of online publishing are fairly low in consideration to those of print. It is true that one must have access to a networked computer and a decent amount of usable software. The other costs that may come into play are those associated with online access.

Editing: Editing is a process that happens before distribution of the document. Ideally it should and occur before the new issue goes online. However, at times there can be some typos in print documents that weren’t caught before the publication was sent off to the printer. In online publishing, this is a major advantage as the error(s), if any can be corrected in a matter of minutes. With the printed documents once a mistake is identified (after the printing takes place) have to wait till the next edition to make any change.

Distribution costs: The other positive about low costs for online publishing comes into picture when distribution is considered. The distribution of the document itself is free. There are no printing costs, which are usually print publishers’ biggest expense. This is one of the main reasons why the electronic publishing is growing as a favorite medium for the organizations to put up their documents and training materials for their customers.

Reaching your audience: In cases of on-line publications, one can only direct someone to a site. The chances of them sitting down in front of the computer, looking up the publication, and reading from it can only be motivated by the individual to find the publication or stumble across it while searching the Web. With the accessibility of information on the Web, something like a newspaper’s current events can easily be updated and made readily available to the public at a moments notice.

Cross references: Online cross-reference is much faster. All you have to do is to click on link rather than look up page. This is particularly important for technical documents. Users can get lost in the document structure. Linkrot is one of the major problems faced in web documents. But because editing can be done at any time, it is possible to make any changes once a mistake or a linkrot is found, without any additional cost.