The Benefits of Ebooks

To me, the most important aspect of an ebook is its portability. Up until recently, I did a lot of travelling. When I wasn't travelling between countries, I was making long bus trips to commute to and from work. I had a lot of time that needed killing. Now, I'm an avid reader; I usually have anything up to four books on the go at any one time, hopping between them as the mood takes me. On an hour's trip to work, one can conceivably carry a paperback about with you, and this was often the case. On international long haul flights, however, you soon run out of reading material. You could pack the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, War and Peace, anything, and you'd be guaranteed that by the time you'd gotten through to security to the departures lounge, you'd be reduced to reading the instructions on your tube of toothpaste.
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This is why, about six years back, I acquired a couple of things which changed my life enormously. The first was the purchase of a Psion Series 7 sub-notebook on eBay. If you've never seen these, imagine a tiny, tiny laptop, about the size of a hardback book. There's no hard drive, just flash memory, which has two major advantages over laptops when travelling. Firstly, there's no bootup/shutdown time, it's instantly turned on, instantly off if you need to do something else. Secondly, they're far less of a power hog: My laptop proper runs for ninety minutes, two hours maximum when not attached to an outlet. The Psion will run on batteries for anything up to eight hours, and takes about twenty minutes to recharge. When you're on the move, this again is invaluable. Given the average long eNovel weighs in at anything up to 1Mb in size, and I have a (very) inexpensive 1Gb flash card installed into it, this also means I can carry something like the preposterous amount of anything up to 1,000 books with you, and still have room in your hand luggage for sandwiches. Of course, I don't carry anything like that amount on there. There's maybe 500 books on it at the moment, maximum...

The second invaluable piece of kit was one I inherited, a Palm Zire 21 palmtop. It's not nearly as advanced as the Psion; no backlit colour screen, and it only holds around 8Mb of information. On the plus side, it's about the size of a packet of cigarettes, and fits in your shirt pocket quite unnoticeably. The Zire is much handier for those shorter trips on buses, and given the pdb format of ebook that Palm supports is generally a lot smaller than the HTML or plaintext format I tend to use on the Psion, means it can easily hold over half a dozen full length novels.

I still think you can't beat the feel of an actual book in your hands, and don't think you ever will. But I also think while that's pleasantly aesthetic, the important part of a book are the words within it. If you travel as much as I did, Ebooks win out by far.