Until a few months ago, I was not much interested eBooks or eReaders. I definitely preferred paper books to electronic ones. For example, whenever professors upload articles for the classes in Oncourse, I always print that out and read it in paper version. However, about two months ago, I had an opportunity to change my personal preference for eBooks.
In the middle of the semester, I had to visit Korea because of a family issue. Because I did not finish my courses, I had to continue doing coursework via email and Oncourse while I was in Korea. I had two final papers to write and I needed resources such as books or articles for my references. However, it was not that easy for me to buy books in English in Korea because of its availability and expensive costs. All of a sudden, it came to remembrance that I could buy eBook in Amazon site with much lower prices. So, I directly went to the Amazon site, and I purchased several books that I needed to read to write final papers, which was the Kindle version. Even though, I had no Kindle device, I could open the files with my MacBook, and it was pretty convenient and its costs was much cheaper compared to buying the original paper books in English in Korea. Afterwards, I realized that eBooks are very useful because I can read texts whenever and wherever I want to with only my laptop, smartphones, tablets or eReaders. I do not know for sure if eBooks will completely replace paper books, but I have to admit that eBooks are very good substitute for paper books.
As an owner of a kindle, I have found it nice that i can upload all the documents (especially the hundreds needed for this class) to the kindle and have just my little reader with a pretty good screen available to read these documents wherever I want rather than a laptop, my cell, or a print out. I hadn't really considered the benefits of the e-books for traveling out of the country (as I don't do that) but it makes perfect sense. You would think that the e-versions should be gaining even more in popularity as the natural resources we use get scarcer, the economy gets tighter, and we look for new ways to deliver the necessary content to the audience needing it.
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