From a thrifty point of view, electronic books -- especially the free ones -- may have a lot going for them.
The price is right, for one thing; when was the last time you picked up a print copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, for free? You'll find it's available at Project Gutenberg, along with a couple of thousand other classics.
Project Gutenberg is one of the largest free etext sources on the web. With the help of volunteers, Project Gutenberg aims to "digitilize every classic in the public domain." According to their May 2000 newsletter, Project Gutenberg has over 2,550 eTexts in their database that you can download for free, and are aiming to have 3,333 by the end of 2001.
A couple of other points in ebooks' favor: you can store a bushel of them in a fairly small space, and ebooks may also seem to be easier on our natural resources. No paper is being used, and so no trees are cut down.
But ebooks, even the free ones, do have their downside. Unless you're willing to spend a couple of hundred dollars for one of the e-book readers that are available, ebooks just don't have the portability of a printed book. As well, ebooks are available in a variety of formats, requiring users to have some technical knowledge before they can access the material. That can be a little intimidating to fossils such as myself.
At Project Gutenberg, for example, some of the material is in text format, but most are compressed, or ZIP files. In other words, you may need special software to open some of these etexts; free ZIP programs are available on the net.
And ebooks aren't formatted just as TXT or ZIP files, either. Adobe Acrobat Reader is available for free for PDF files, while formats like TXT and RTF can be read by most word processing programs.
Formatting gets even more interesting when buying an ebook. The manufacturers of ebook readers are currently working on a solution, but so far the different brands of ebook readers often require format-specific electronic books.
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