Are paperless e-books also hassle-less?

Jinhyun Kim

As technology develops, many things that we can see in everyday life change the way or shape in purpose of improving accuracy, price, and convenience. One of the examples current college students are experiencing is a paperless textbook, e-books. As in transitional period for e-books which we can see both traditional, hard-copy textbook and e-books around fairly easy, pros and cons of using e-books are suggested along the way.

According to the news article in The Chronicle “This Could Be the Year of E-Textbooks, if Students Accept Them” by Jeffrey R. Young, some of the students in the colleges “participating in a closely watched e-textbook experiment supported by Amazon” suggest the problems in using e-books instead of hard-copy textbook. The problems included difficulty with finding certain section or page and taking notes on e-book readers such as Amazon Kindle.

In contrast, there are many positive aspects on using e-books. Since books are stored in digital file, students don’t have to carry all the heavy textbooks around the campus. E-book readers are only thing they have to take care instead. E-book readers could be various devices. Any laptops, iPhones, Amazon Kindle, and Sony Reader Digital Books are popular ones. E-books can reduce the waste of paper for that would be thrown after new edition of old textbooks. Students don’t have to worry about books getting damaged or lost. Also, e-books cost less than paper textbooks.

Although there are some drawbacks in using e-books instead of hard-copy textbooks, they are not very significant and can be covered with other methods. Since many students are using laptops in college, taking notes on laptop is not very hard task. E-book readers’ developers are always going to try to improve their devices’ interface and other features better for users. After this transitional period of e-books, they will become absolutely fascinating thing in aspect of technology and our lives for college students.