E-Books, Are They As Good As They Look?

“Books are a man's best friends."

Evolving from handwritten palm leaf or stone slab manuscripts to the printed hardbacks and paperbacks to the digital ebooks and PDFs, encompassing a plethora of information about an exhaustive range of topics: elementary school books, Einstein's theory of relativity, complex calculus, fiction, non-fiction; all kinds of genres including suspense, mystery, romance, adventure, horror, poetry and sundry; books are a boon to mankind.

Nowadays, technology has made life, in general, and reading, to be specific, way easier than it has ever been before. Hitherto to read, one had to have the means to buy or borrow a book, choose from the aforementioned variety, and read it. Whether it was for recreation or information, reading a book meant that the other tasks in your schedule had to wait while you read, simply because you couldn't take your book with you. Ebooks solved that issue in the blink of an eye.

Storage of hundreds of books in a few gigabytes means a full fledged library in your hand. Not to mention the fact that the maintenance of a single disk or pen drive is more affordable and effortless than a room full of physical books. Or that the millions of trees being cut to make paper breathe a sigh of relief and rejoice when e-books are used.

Even more alluring is the ease in reading a virtual book. Read at your convenience, while multitasking, free of cost (in the case where you are smart enough to know where to find free of cost books online) and without worrying for the deterioration of the condition a book that you left open. No wonder people (bookworms or putting it in a bit sophisticated way, bibliophiles) prefer ebooks over printed ones.

There's always a flip side to the coin, though. Development of technology has offered an easier life on a platter; as a result we have become tech-addicts. In layman's terms, we have become too much dependent on the technology; it has begun hampering our brain's natural thinking process and curbing the innovation of the toddlers who grab a phone to play games and don't bother learning things like the right way to do their hair.

When we hand an e-reader to teenagers, they spend their waking hours on the devices without any care for their poor, tortured eyes until the fateful day their ophthalmologist kindly informs them about their need for spectacles.

The radiations from each and every one of the electronic devices invented as of now are proven to be harmful to the human anatomy by learned scientists. This can't be explained to kids when they watch their elders use one or the other forms of electronic devices all day right in front of them.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The way ebooks have been created to combat the issues concerning physical books, scientists are burning the midnight oil to discover ways to make technology more ecological and make this world a better place.

Till then, fellow bookworms, let's enjoy reading with a balance of virtual and physical books, shall we?