THE LIBRARY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS “Since April 1, 2011, Amazon sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, including books without Kindle versions and excluding free e-books.”, (Miller and Bosman, 2011). This statistical data shows that the demand for e-books are on the rise and that they have begun to outsell paperback books. There are plenty of reasons for this success but two major factors are greater flexibility and accessibility over paper-based texts (Jamali, Nicholas and Rowlands, 2009) as well as being eco-friendly. However, there seem to be some cons to e-books, particularly the strain on the eyes of the reader (Jamali, Nicholas and Rowlands, 2009) and limited availability of e-books (Corbeil and Valdes-Cobeil, 2007). In this essay, the advantages and disadvantages of e-books will be discussed. …show more content…
It is easier for the publishers to make copies and distribute them (Rowlands et al, 2007) at a lower cost as no printing and delivery is involved in the process. This enables the publishers to sell the e-books at a lower price compared to that of print books, at the same time maintain their profit. According to Cavanaugh (2002) the file size of a pure text e-book is 1.04 megabytes, which means that a device with a storage of 32-gigabytes would be able to hold upwards of thirty thousand electronic books. This could be on a dedicated e-book reader or even on your mobile phone which you could put in your pocket. It is truly a library in the palm of your hand. Readers who have trouble with typical book-sized font can even enlarge the font size to make it more pleasurable on their