With tablets' popularity rising, and more publishers making their books electronically available every day, paperback books have begun to pay the price. Beyond the obvious cool-factor advantage that tablets have, they offer several reasons for us to begin replacing our paper books with them. With the reluctance so many readers have to switch to electronic books, it certainly does seem like a war between the two. If that's the case, paper books just might lose. Let's check out the reasons why.
Students Learn Better
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While studies don't necessarily show a significant difference between the reading speed or comprehension level of texts read by students using tablets vs. paper textbooks, you can still see a large difference in learning thanks to tablets. With educational books, tablet versions can become interactive. Rather than simply reading text to try to comprehend subject material, the student's experience becomes more hands on. You can open diagrams and view 3D models, with the ability to spin them around on your fingertips. You can look at historical timelines and, by the touch of a finger, find any point in time that you want to learn about. It's more than just engaging. In fact, one study showed students who used the interactive, digital version of an Algebra 1 textbook scored 20 percent higher on standardised tests than the students who learned from paper textbooks.....
Easier on the Elderly
According to some researchers, older people can read text more quickly and with less effort when using digital devices compared to printed pages. They would, on average, finish a page 3 or 4 seconds quicker using a tablet computer than printed text. And, their understanding of the text remains the same. Interestingly enough, surveys still suggest a preference among older people towards paper books. It seems that the convenience and ease of use don't outweigh the feelings surrounding traditional books. But, researchers claim this to attitude comes from cultural implications and not a "cognitive phenomenon". And you've got to admit, it's hard to argue with the study results.
You Only Need One Object
This seems to offer the most practical reason for starting to read on tablets and not out of books, especially for those who have huge collections of books. Of all the many tablet pc uses, the ability to access all the text you own on one user-friendly device might be the best. Also, think of the clutter you can avoid by using a tablet computer instead of hundreds of books. Students can greatly benefit from switching to electronic reading. First of all, any university student knows how high the prices of textbooks can get. It doesn't help that so many of them only come in hardcover versions. Using a tablet computer, you can buy the electronic versions of books and often at a lower price. Students also deal with lugging around the huge textbooks on their backs all day, which nobody enjoys. In fact, carrying so many books around everyday can cause harm to your body. In the UK, back pain stands as the second biggest cause of long-term illness. Thousands of children visit the hospital or doctor's office every year from back strain due to book bags.
Save the Trees
It never hurts to make economic decisions that help the environment. And yes, while tablets do take up a good amount of resources (making one tablet requires 33 pounds of minerals, 79 gallons of water, and 100 kilowatt-hours of fossil fuels, which in turn produces 66 pounds of carbon dioxide), the overall resources you can save by choosing to use your tablet instead of buying other products remains staggering. We can think of it in weight. If you downloaded 3,500 ebooks to your tablet, your tablet would weigh an extra billionth of a billionth of a gramme more than it would otherwise. That's about the weight of one molecule of DNA. If you actually had that many books, you'd have about two tons (4,000 lbs.) on your hands. That takes about 140 forest-height trees with trunks 10-inches in diameter.
Saving Money
Like this article stated before, ebooks generally cost less than paper books, especially when compared to hardcover versions. The one drawback to this way of looking at pricing comes with the price of your tablet computer, as they often come expensive. But, smaller and simpler versions of tablets continue to come on the market, and if you plan on using it a lot and buying several ebooks, you'll quickly feel like you got your money's worth. Not only can you find books much cheaper on average, but you can find a lot of free ebooks as well. Its easier to release free ebooks, as no manufacturing costs go into releasing them. You can find literally over 100,000 free ebooks on websites like free-ebooks.net or gutenberg.org. You can make up for your tablet price by downloading a bunch of books for free!
The Market Follows Technology
Regardless of surveys or opinions, sales speak for themselves. In fact, for the past three years in the Britain, printed books have made their decline in sales. There's been a 13 percent decrease from the past year in sales. The total consumer market in the UK had declined by 8 since last year. Publishers go for the options that will boost the most sales, and their's a lot of money to be made in the electronic book market. Although we may never see a complete disappearance of paperback books altogether, they're certainly on the decline. You can't discount them completely; we saw similar situations in the world of theatre. When movies came out, theatre managed to stay alive. And when television became popular, movies and theater remained lucrative businesses. Regardless, the older versions seem to take a backseat, and paperback books won't be any exception. Ebooks can inevitably only improve at this point. Developers and designers still sit in the early stages of discovering the power and possibilities of ebooks, and tablets as a whole. They've already proven themselves as important and desirable to society. Regardless of whether they've "won the war" with paperback books, they're definitely here to stay. If you're an avid reader, make sure to check out ebooks and what the electronic reading world has to offer.
