On Sale Now at

New England Press

How to search for scholarships using the Internet
(and which sites are winners.).

In Memoriam:

Robert Ramos, Journalist, Katapat newspaper, Laguna, Philippines.
Born:        November 24, 1965
Died:        November 20, 2005,  at the public market at Cabuyao, Laguna.

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O.K...so you're thinking to yourself, who should I want to read an e-book? You're already at this computer screen, reading this Web page...right? E-books more closely aproximate the feel of the printed page than a web page such as this. Better formatted. Even down to the justified lines. But there is a lot more to e-books. They:

• Are cheaper than paper books. Even as they become more popular, there will be reasons enough to hold the price down on e-books. They can be produced with little overhead; that should enable the publisher/author to offer their work at a low price and still make a very substantial profit on their work. E-books are considered to be the low-price solution for cash strapped libraries in the future, and that can hold just as true for the average book reader.

• Have adjustable type; a properly made e-book's type can adjusted to as large as you desire, to take care of the individual who needs big type. No paper book can do that for you! Moreover, the brightness and contrast can be vaired to suit your individual preference, depending on what kind of hardware you use for reading an e-book.

• Can contain much more than text. E-books can contain links to other websites. If you're reading the book from your home PC that is hooked up to the Internet, you can follow those links. Aside from containing pictures, E-books can even contain sound! Imagine an e-book, chronicling, say, the history of the Beatles, complete with sound clips of their live concerts and favorite songs. That is now possible with the e-book; it can have all that and more. Or an e-book that deals with a foreign language. What better way to learn the language than to see the word, and then being able to click on a link that then plays back what the word is supposed to sound like, spoken from a native speaker of the language? No paper book could come closer to teaching a foreign language (or English, for that matter) as effectively as an e-book.
  

• Weigh less than regular books. Right now, if you read a typical paperback novel, the weight isn't discernible. I suspect for a lot of books, the wiehgt issue won't be an important point. If you use a Palm handheld for reading e-books, you'll find it's pretty light. The real difference will come about if e-books become the publishing standard for textbooks. Textbooks, especially hardcover texts, are heavy. A college student could keep all their texts with them, at all times, stored on a thumb drive (or what is sometimes called a flash drive.), and kept in the little pocket that blue jeans have. And that is a very substantial weight reduction (So far, it hasn't happened...but we can dream, can't we?!). I predict this will come, one day, as the format is perfected.
  

On the downside, you still have to deal with small screens and questionable resolution when it comes to reading e-books on handheld devices. Soon, those problems will be overcome, so that the portable e-book reader will become both practical and affordable (not to mention being easier on the eyes.). Of course...there are those pesky batteries! There's no reason to believe that tomorrow's handhelds will be solar-powered, just like calculators are today. And perhaps the big one. You have to keep your e-book stored on some sort of medium; perhaps a hard drive or a thumb drive, for the bigger books. Lose the hard drive, or if the thumb drive decides to trash your book while you're transferring files, your e-book is history. The solution is to keep multiple copies of your e-book in various places, so that if one disk dies, you will still have another copy. Nonetheless...it is a problem unique to e-books. The robustness of the medium is key to keeping the e-book safe for many, many years, and there is no getting around it—magnetic media does deteriorate with time. Magnets can destroy an e-book just as quickly as fire will destroy a printed paper book. Care for an e-book is just a little bit different...top