19 Reasons to switch to eBooks/eReaders

Feel free to use this essay to evangelize the wonders of eBooks/eReaders to all your stubborn/doubting friends who think the smell of paper and holding a book is unbeatable.

So I’m tired of evangelizing eBooks/eReaders in person and I guess I’ll do a lot more good by writing this so that you can share it next time you want to convince a friend to live in the year 2013 and stop the mad romanticism about the handicapped physical books, it’s just ludacris reading a book on paper unless it has no digital form.

Here is an ever growing list of why I prefer eBooks to physical books

1. They are cheaper.

2. They are available immediately, no need to order, wait, or move physically to get them.

3. They never get lost.

4. They don’t take any space, or weight, this brings many added benefits to the world:

4.1. You can have a library of thousands of books with you wherever you are, on different devices (since they can be stored in the cloud)

4.2. You will free a lot of shelve space at home/office, which also means less dust being created at home.

4.3. If all students were forced to use eBooks they wouldn’t have to carry such heavy backpacks which can deform their spines.

4.4. If all students used eBooks exclusively, there would be CO2 emission reductions since that’s a lot of weight that doesn’t have to be transported by cars/buses/trains.

5. You can read them on different devices: e-readers, computers, smartphones.

6. You can copy and paste.

7. If you lend them you never have to beg your friend to give the book back, it comes back to you automatically.

8. You can search inside them.

9. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, a dictionary is always there for you, just touch/click the word in question. The learning experience is more efficient and richer.

10. The same book may come in different languages.

11. You can change font types, font sizes, color of the screen, margins, line spacing.

12. You can have lots of bookmarks, you can navigate your bookmarks.

13. You can read with the light turned off.

14. You can read with one hand, turning pages is effortlessly. Awesome when you go out for a walk and you have only one hand available. Perfect for parents pushing strollers while putting babies to sleep.

15. No more wrinkled, stained, or broken pages.

16. You can share your highlights on social networks. Reading becomes social, which encourages others to read more thus making the world a more knowledgeable place.

17. You can open a web browser right from the book if there’s a web reference.

18. There’s no such thing as “out of print”

19. The reader software can learn your reading speed and estimate how much time left you have on the current chapter or the whole book.

Need more reasons?
or you will keep reading books because you like the smell of paper, even though there’s really a lot of stinky books out there.

are you still using cassette tapes, vinyl discs, hell are you still using CDs?

Make the switch, you will enjoy reading like never before.