Unless you have been living in a cave, or on a remote and desolate island, it may not have escaped your notice that over the last decade the internet has exploded, not literally of course. You can do your grocery shopping on line, you can buy clothes on line, and you can even read books online. While it’s a great convenience to be able to do so many things on the internet, that you would once have had to leave your house to accomplish, some things don’t translate well to the computer.
Most people read on line to get information. News reports and email are good things to read on line. Now there’s an alternative to reading whole novels and that is by ordering and reading books on line. When you think of on line books, most of us imagine searching on Amazon to find books we like, ordering those books and then receiving them in the mail, and up until recently that was how it worked. Now people are publishing whole books on line for people to read, but it’s still uncertain if this is a trend that will catch on.
There is something to be said for the features of a traditional book. For one thing, reading books on line is nothing like holding a book open and reading in bed before going to sleep. Can it replace curling up on the couch on a rainy day with a novel and a cup of tea? Does it seem likely that a person would lie in bed with their laptop on their chest so that they can read their book online?
One way to get around the awkwardness of online books reading is to download the book and print it out on paper. Even that seems like a misuse of time and energy. You would also have to figure out how to secure the pages so that they don’t get separated or out of order. For those reasons it seems that the most useful books on line would be reference books to consult while doing research. Since the internet is usually a place where one goes to get information, having research books on line would eliminate the hassle of going to the library to find those same books.
The big draw of on line books over regular books is that they are often much cheaper to purchase. There are sites where you can choose between thousands of books and sometimes it will cost less than a dollar to download an entire book. There is still the problem of having to sit at your computer to read it, but, eventually someone will figure that one out and come up with a way around it. Someday there may even be a product that makes reading a book online more convenient by downloading the novel to a small computer screen that is the size and weight of a traditional novel. In fact, to a certain degree, this is already possible using the current PDA’s.
When all is said and done I think the humble book will still live on in its present form for many more years, after all, what will you read be reading the next time there is a power cut?
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