Books or eBooks?

Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook – all are competing devices in the industry of e-readers; even the upcoming Apple iPad can display eBooks. While the market for digital books is continually growing, some consider the advantages of paper books impossible for technology to digitally simulate. How can anything replace the crackling of the pages, the smell of the paper, the worn spine of a well-used book, or the pleasure of reading to a young child?

E-readers are convenient for many reasons though. Here are a few pros to buying an e-reader:

• Lightweight – Has your back ever hurt from carrying around a bag full of books? (I think we as college students can all relate to that!) E-readers allow you to carry hundreds of books in one hand.

• Compact – Every one of the books you buy has to be stored somewhere at home. The contents of several bookcases fit within a space as small as a couple of magazines.

• Immediate access to books – An e-reader, at the click of a button, puts the book you want right in your hands in seconds; there’s no time spent driving to a bookstore or waiting for a box to ship.

They seem perfect, right? Not always. Here are a few cons to buying an e-reader:

• Lending/Borrowing – Currently, copyrights and restrictions on many e-readers (most notably the Amazon Kindle) make it illegal to lend or borrow eBooks from your friends.

• Renting – Though some e-readers now offer ways to rent or check out books for a period, not all offer this feature yet.

• Reselling – There’s no way to sell a digital book on eBay when you’re done with it, so whether you read it again or not, you don’t get your money back.

• Money, money, money – Though eBooks are usually cheaper than paper books, you have to have enough money to plunk down on an e-reader in the first place, which typically range from $200 to $500.

All in all, e-readers still lack a few features that books have offered for years; but as the business grows, the products get better. Though they will never be able to completely replace books – especially for sentimental reasons – e-readers are useful and popular devices, and some people predict they are the future. What do you think: books or eBooks? Or is there room for both?

Maximum Ride series

Right now, I’m in the middle of reading the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson. It’s very different from many of the other books I’ve read, on many different points – primarily the topic, the writing style, and the characters. The story is about six kids — ranging from six to fourteen years of age — who are genetically altered; that is, they have avian (bird) DNA grafted on their own human DNA. So basically, they’re part bird. The series is centered around the main character, Maximum Ride (called Max), who is supposed to save the world. She and her “family” of other experiments — Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel — are always on the run from “Erasers” (human-lupine combinations [part wolf]), who are pretty much the bad guys in the series. They want to catch the kids and take them back to the School, which is where the scientists (or “whitecoats”, the other bad guys) experiment on people — or more specifically, kids.

The writing style of Maximum Ride is much like reading a journal, which — from the prologue of book 1 — is what the author intended for it to be. The books are written in first person point-of-view, from Max’s perspective. The dialogue and even narration have a humorous and witty style, throwing in common “teen slang” phrases and words, and the characters tease each other, mimicking real life friends’ and siblings’ dialogue. The biggest reason that TV is so popular (other than the fact that it’s one of the easiest ways to be entertained — click “power”, done) is because it’s usually easy to relate to the characters, even more so than in books and other formats of story-telling. Directors, producers, screen writers — they all work on making the characters seem like real people, through the dialogue, movements, facial expressions, everything. However, books like the Maximum Ride series prove that the modern voice of teenagers and pre-teens (and pretty much any other age group) really can be captured in words. Writing sure is cool, isn’t it?

-Andrea