In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg printed a Bible and changed the world forever. He set in motion an industry that remained fundamentally unchanged for 600 years.
Movable type was his great innovation - individual characters arranged in a?frame and used to press ink onto paper. It’s only now, with the advent?of ebooks and digital readers, that we are in a position to?leave print behind.
Dedicated ebook readers such as?Amazon’s Kindle are rapidly falling in price, and so are books that can be read on them.
Supplied as a digital download, they don’t consume the planet’s forests, needn’t be carried to shops by sea, air or road, and are more flexible than their printed equivalents, as you can choose how they are displayed.
But can an electronic book ever replace the printed page in our homes, on the move or even on the beach in summer?
In truth, this new technology has significant problems alongside its many advantages. In this article we will look at the pros and cons, allowing you to choose whether digital or paper books are best for you.
Carry on reading
Jilly Cooper’s latest hardback has 739 pages and Ken Follett’s 864. Penguin’s latest translation of War and Peace runs to more than 1,300 pages. None of these can be easily carried around for any length of time, unless you buy them as ebooks.
Download all three to a Kindle and it still won’t weigh more than 247 grams - roughly the same as a single slim paperback - and there will be room inside for hundreds more books besides.
Amazon also makes Kindle software for iPhone and Android smartphones, as well as Windows and Mac computers and iPad tablets. They all synchronise online, so if you buy a book on one it can be downloaded in seconds onto any other device you own.
Likewise, Apple’s iBooks app is available on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch music player, and if you own more than one your books are synchronised between them.
Digital portability only stretches so far, though, as all the major ebook?services’ platforms are incompatible with one another.
Books bought from iBooks can’t be read on a Kindle, for example, and if you bought an ebook from Waterstones for the Sony Reader you couldn’t read it on the iPad or Kindle. The only real exception is that, at the moment, you can buy a book on the Kindle and read it using the Kindle app on an iPad.
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