It seems there are no boundaries for
humans’ imagination and all the wonders the inventive minds of many people
could create. Today no one could deny we witness some of our dreams we had
about the future (video connections for people everywhere in the world, space
travel, using tiny devices that contain so much music, photos, even movies, or
tons of documents, incredibly fast traveling with incredible vehicles,
automatic devices like vacuum cleaners, ovens, fridges, etc). It seems modern technologies
could make our life easier and much more interesting and intriguing. Of course,
some of the useful devices of today in some cases could make our existence more
complex and even dangerous, but here and now I won’t discuss these horrible possibilities.
As the goal of this note/post is the many advantages, or the few disadvantages,
of one of the amazing gadgets of our modern world, I would even like to use a
lot of emoticons to show my sincere awe of what these good devices are capable
of J. Some of my friends, or many other avid
readers who still hesitate whether to buy and use these modern books, would be
glad to know my thoughts and humble experience and would find them really useful,
I guess.
I bet any other user of e-readers would
confirm my opinion that to carry a whole library in one’s pocket in one of
these small, rectangular objects (they usually weigh about 170 – 200 g, and
even the simplest of them with little memory and no socket for additional
memory card could save more than 1000 books) is one of the wonders of the
modern world. A wonder so significant as smart cell phones, laptops, or smart,
3 D TV sets. All the users of these wonderful devices would agree that reading
by them is the same as reading written words on paper. The e-ink on their
screens doesn’t tire our eyes more than reading the common paperbacks and
hard-cover books, not at all like LCD, plasma screens or the old, CRTs. One of the few disadvantages of
e-readers is that they need charging from time to time, but as they use the
charge of their batteries only when we “turn” the pages, users don’t need to do
that too often (they say that if we read half an hour a day, we should recharge
our e-reader once a month). It’s not good too that these useful gadgets are
afraid of water, yet common paper books are too…;). I haven’t seen or read
about e-readers which could be read under the shower or in the sea, but probably
they are invented already or they plan to produce them in the near future…
Some of the better devices that could
offer us the satisfaction of reading more than 1000 books could even read and
play audio and video files, so a user could combine reading a book with looking
at many photos, illustrations or even a movie based on the book, or listening
to a good song from that movie’s soundtrack. As strange as it may sound,
e-readers could be very useful for writers too, using them a writer could edit
his/her manuscripts everywhere, typing a lot of notes between the lines of
his/her works. I guess I’m not the only one who uses his reading devices for
editing and writing too J? Furthermore, this useful feature of e-readers could
be used by anyone to add important notes to any page, paragraph and line in a
book a user would like.
Have you experienced the frustrating event
when you involuntarily closed your paper book and forgot to put any mark to
know what you read and what not yet (or when some friends, or enemies, of yours
threw your mark away just to watch your reactions afterwards)? Well, this could
never happen with your e-reader. The smart gadget remembers very well the page
you read last in any book you downloaded on it. And if you change its settings so
that it could be switched on only after typing a password, which only you know,
then no one would be able to mess with your books ;).
Finally, I would like to point out there
are a lot of different e-readers on the market, and it seems they are not
produced just to satisfy the whims of producers. You should choose your gadget
for reading depending on what you would read on it, or from where you would
download and buy books. There are some good tips about that one could find in
Internet. Like: if you mostly read manuals and study-books with a lot of
diagrams, schemes, illustrations, you’ll need an e-reader with a bigger screen
– 9 – 9,7 “; otherwise a device with 6-7 ” screen would be sufficient; if you
plan to buy and download books from Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, etc, you’ll
have to choose a reading gadget that supports their e-books’ formats (though
there are a lot of good converter-programs for all the different files (Calibre
for example), you could do converting even online: http://ebook.online-convert.com; etc.
Actually, I must admit I’m not the
ultimate expert, my e-reader is one of the simplest models of Kindle (though
it’s a new model) and I received it as a b-day present just a few months ago. Therefore,
I guess many other users would add a lot of other useful tips too…
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