E-books or paper books…....

I was introduced to e-books during my internship period. People felt I was a bit crazy when I asked for a techie book to buy or read. The general reaction was like, “why don’t you just read it on the net?” But I felt, how I am going to read a book on the computer. I had the opinion that the computer was meant to be used only to do work, not to read books on that.

Being in this profession for almost a year now, I have the same reaction to reading e-books. E-Books are very easy to get, just get onto google.com and bingo the information is at the finger tips. But the pleasure of using a paper and pen to write down information is lost, I miss underlining and writing the short notes or sticking post-it notes with some additional information on that particular topic in the book.

Now with the latest technology at my command, all I need to do just log on and read. I am forced to read sitting at one place.

There are a lot of pros and cons to the e-books and paper books. The main advantages being, I don’t have to lend the e-books and wait for it to be returned back. With an e-book, all I need to do is send the link to the concerned person.

But the pleasure of reading a paper book on the bed or in the garden with a favorite music playing in the back ground is great compared to staring at the comp and trying to grasp as much as possible.

Choosing a book at the book fair or a book store, on a weekend is one way of relaxing for me. The number of Dan Brown’s, Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, and Harry Potter books apart from C programming, Linux Internals, Operating Systems are different when I read them as a e-book or as paper book.

Getting some information while working from the e-book, in my personal opinion is for that moment to finish it, but to do a detailed study, I always prefer the paper book.

Another handicap of e-book is that it either in a txt format or a .PDF, which after some time is very boring to read. Atleast in the paper book, the place of reading and the fact that I can place a book mark or be a bit naughty and fold that page, to dog ear that book :)

Anyways, since both of these forms have their own advantages and disadvantages, the argument still continues……………………