Read an E-Book Week celebrates benefits
Posted by Jacque on March 4th, 2008
To call attention to Read an E-Book Week (March 2-8), Epublishers Weekly listed 30 benefits of e-books. iLibrarian lists the first 10, and I selected more from the rest of the list.
- Ebooks promote reading.
- Ebooks are good for the environment.
- Ebooks preserve books.
- Ebooks, faster to produce than paper books, allow readers to read books about current issues and events.
- Ebooks are easily updateable.
- Ebooks are searchable.
- Ebooks are portable.
- Ebooks (in the form of digital audio books) free you to do other activities while you are listening.
- Ebooks can be printable.
- Ebooks defy time: they can be delivered almost instantly.
Also,
- Ebooks are cheaper to produce. Thus, small presses can attempt to compete with media giants.
- Ebooks are cheaper to buy (and many are free).
- Ebooks can be annotated without harming the original work.
- Ebooks make reading accessible to persons with disabilities. Text can be re-sized for the visually impaired. Screens can be lit for reading in the dark.
- Ebooks can be hyper-linked, for easier access to additional information. And may allow readers to change the font style, font size, page size, margin size, colors, and more.
- Ebooks may allow the option for the addition of multimedia: still images, moving images, and sound.
