For some people, there’s nothing quite like the feel of paper pages turning or the sight of colourful spines lined up on a bookshelf. For hundreds of years, very little has changed about the way books feel and look. Curling up in front of the fire with a good old-fashioned book is still the evening of choice for many. Books are a crucial part of our history and our heritage.
But even books must move with the times. We are entering an era in which all nature of information is available to the masses at the mere touch of a button. Johann Gutenberg may well be turning in his grave, but if books are to have a future in our ever-progressing world then publishers, booksellers and readers must embrace the extraordinary technology that is slowly but surely making its mark on the book industry.
What are E-Readers?
E-Readers are small hand-held devices onto which you can download books in a digital form (E-Books). E-books are available to purchase from special E-Bookshops or online from standard book retailers like Waterstone’s or Amazon. E-Readers can store thousands of books at once, and pages are turned simply by the press of a button.
There are currently a number of different electronic book devices available, including the [E Reader] IREX iLiad Book Edition
Sony eBook Reader Touch Edition (Black) PRS-600
What are the advantages of E-Readers?
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Storage
E-Readers can hold thousands of books at once, saving huge amounts of space in your home and in your holiday suitcase.
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Size and weight
E-Readers are lighter than most paperback books and extraordinarily thin, so can be carried around with great ease. Reading War and Peace on the train is no longer an problem!
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Choice of books
Hundreds of thousands of books are now available to purchace in E-Book format. New titles are now automatically brought out as E-Books when they are published, and the number of backlist titles that are available to download is increasing every day. New books in particular are often cheaper to buy as E-Books than they are in paper format.
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Read in bright sunlight
E-Readers have no glare on their screens, enabling them to be read in bright sunlight. You can also purchase special lighted covers so that you can read them in the dark.
Kindle Lighted Leather Cover, Black (Fits 6
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Special features
E-Readers enable you to listen to books, to annotate the pages, to bookmark pages and to instantly look up the definitions of unfamiliar words.
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Enlarge text size
You can choose from a range of text sizes to display your E-Books – a feature which is especially valuable to readers with poor eyesight.
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Battery life
A single battery charge can last for weeks, as battery power is only used when the display changes.
The future of E-Readers
With Amazon announcing that in the last three months of 2010 it sold more E-Books in the US than paperback books, and with the judges of the 2011 Man Booker prizes being sent E-Readers to help them work their way through the longlist, there is no doubt that E-Readers are the future of bookselling. Publishers are predicting that by 2014, there will be the same number of E-Books as there are printed books. Like them or loathe them, E-Readers are here to stay…