Nook or Book?

As technology advances it begins to phase out things that have been around for a long time. This has now spread to books and is becoming more common in libraries and on school campuses. Will this one day phase out textbooks or even whole classrooms?

Kindle app for iPad

Let's focus on the eReaders for now. With these electronic books, you can carry around hundreds, even thousands of books around with you all the time. They are simple and convenient. They also save paper and other resources. Not only are these eReaders convenient, but they are also cheaper. For the price of one paper book, you could easily buy two to three ebooks. There are many advantages to these ebooks but there are also many disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages are that these eReaders use batteries which means they have a limited run time before they have to be plugged in. However, most of the battery lives are about a month. Another disadvantage to this could be if you do not plan on reading very many books. Because if you are not a heavy reader, the inital cost could be higher than just buying a single book.

iBooks on an iPhone

Weighing in both the advantages and disadvantages, however, I believe that an eReader is a good investment and that the advantages outwight the disadvantages, especially if you plan on reading a good number of books.

Paper book

Next, let's focus on eReaders in libraries. I believe they are a good resource to have inside the libraries but I do not think that libraries should exclusively carry eReaders. Paper books are always going to be around and if we try and pretend that they won't be, they will just become harder to find when you inevitably need one. Another downside to having them in libraries is that with these eReaders, unless you have every book on every eReader, it could be harder to try and keep the books in stock in more popular books are on the same eReader.

All facts taken into consideration, I think that eReaders are becoming more and more abundant because they are a good technology. But they will never completely phase out books.