English Club - Foreign Trade University

Mankind knowledge is enlarged every second, while the advent of the Informatic Technology has offered us a new way to storage knowledge: E-books. There is no need to acclaim the essence of reading books to everyone, particularly the youth like us. So there comes a new question: E-books or Paperbooks?

In most cases, Paperbooks = classic. Reading paperbooks has long become a culture that adds traditional value to long-lasting libraries and bookstores. Additionally, one of the most obvious advantages of paperbooks is that we have gotten used to using them since, or even before, we started to read. Hence it became more than a habit; there is a sensation that can only be brought by flipping a page with fingers. In the mean time, not all of us can really read e-books. Some of my friends quickly get eye-strain while using an ebook-reading device, whereas others just simply cannot pay full attention to e-text in an adequate amount of time.

On the other hand, it seems that e-books would be much more convenient to e-book readers. It takes you at least a device—such as a computer or a smartphone, and, definitely, the ability to really read e-books. With the support of internet connection, you can download a tremendous number of books in almost every field, at a very low price comparing to paperbooks, or even for free. Moreover, it saves time and shipping fees because even armchair readers can search for and purchase/download what they want. And if your device is portable, you can carry your whole e-library to everywhere.

Some people who think big can add plus points to both of these book kinds. While e-books are more environment-friendly since woods for paper pulp is scarce, they raise the concern of intellectual property protection. Stealing on the internet has become so easy that readers rather download ebooks for free than buying piratically-printed paperbooks.

Thus, here comes the new debate for the week:

E-books and paperbooks, which do you prefer and why?

:-? in my opinion, it depends on when I want to read book and what is the purpose of reading book??
For example, I would like a paperbook if I read a story, thus I can bring it along and to read til the end of the book without any harm to my eyes!! Especially when I don't have a computer or any device, paperbook is great!! reading paperbook can help us relax but reading ebook i think can not :D It even makes us more tired:D

However, when you reading books which are hundred or even thousand page long..it's really another matter. It's really hard to bring it. Moreover, you can not search any word in that paperbook like in e book. Ebook is convenient to bring with you. it's cheaper than paperbook also :D

but after all, i still prefer paper book:D i love to hear the sound when I turn the pages :D I love to watch it all day :D

Here is what I have found, rather interesting to give though to :))

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and my ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory”, “can be an enormous boon to thinking”. But that boon comes at a price. What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet sky.

Users are not reading online in the traditional sense. Indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, content pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more than today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of thinking- perhaps even a new sense of the self. We are not only what we read, we are how we read. The style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing process, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information”. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

The Net isn’t the alphabet, and it can never replace the printing press. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, and foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as has been argued, is distinguishable, from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content”, we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into “pancake people”- spread wide and thin as we are connected with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Source: Adapted from “Is Google making us stupid?”