Books are the best friend of a man who wants to improve himself. There are books on a range of subjects - from how primitive life forms survive on the planet to how complex life forms obtain their nutrition, why life exists underwater and the possibility of life in some distant planet on a yet unnamed galaxy, from how to bring stability to a relationship to how to walk out of one, from how to keep an aquarium to how to cook the best sea urchin dishes -the list is quite endless. To a man who is of too few words, there are books on improving the vocabulary. For any shortcoming that you would like to turn into a strength, there exists a book that would help the transformation. There are different kinds of people who write the books too - expert nutritionists write on foods one must consume for a suitable diet, fitness gurus break down complex workouts and your favorite body-model would write on how he or she keeps their body that way.
But books present us with difficulties too. That large tome you bought, the encyclopedia of roses, filled with pictures of pretty flowers, indicating origin of the individual variety, salubrious conditions in which to maintain them, manures to use for getting the award winning flowers and close-up pictures of every individual variety - is so heavy that you bought it, thumbed through every page of the book, albeit lazily, for a couple of times and then left it on your mantel piece to gather dust and possibly, fungus. Or imagine you were going through a coffee-table book, chomping through a sandwich and splosh! that is a bit of ketchup on your book. That book you used to browse through with interest when you were a toddler - now has yellowed pages. Your farher's books from his childhood - are falling apart. The journals your granddad maintained - they are almost dust. The book you forgot to take from your garden when it started to rain - is soggy after the rain and does not feel the same ever after. Or that book you slept over as you were reading it late at night, weary as you were - is dog-eared beyond redemption. Consider the books you bought and stored in your house - they use up a good deal of precious shelf space. When you get new books, you end up wanting to find creative ways to accommodate them in the limited quarters you have for yourself.
What does all that mean? It takes a lot to maintain a book. And the effort you put in to taking care of books could be put to better use - seriously. To dust your library would take a good deal of your lifetime if you were an avid collector of books. Even if you weren't one, you would end up spending considerate invaluable lifetime on keeping them in order. You need to keep them safe from possible spills, fungi, insects and accidents, among other things. On the same line do you need to preserve your newspapers and magazines, though these find a way to be recycled.
All this does not cover up the fact that books are made out of precious trees that go into making the paper that comes out as a book. Take a look at the amount of green cover that we lost in the recent couple of centuries owing to the human need for lumber, food, living space and - books. Though we have been exploiting the forests through the generations, it does not make sense that we take over the space that our remaining co-inhabitants of the planet are using for residence to our selfish demands for farmland, penthouses and books. Not to mention that the loss in forest habitation has resulted in the loss or near extinction of several species and intrusion of forest dwellers into our settlements. It is even possible that some small animal or endemic plant species went unnoticed and was never put through the procedures of taxonomy since it went extinct before the experts reached the place.
How do we overcome the labors of safekeeping our books? How do we conserve our forests and the creatures within? How do we ensure we get the pleasure out of reading books without books? After all, we definitely do need books, but they do require a great deal for making and keeping.
Greet the eBook. Or rather, the eBook reader.
It may sound simple, to the tune of stupidity, but the solution to this awful problem of books is as simple as that. Get an eBook reader!
If only the solutions to many of the world's biggest problems were as simple as that.
So, you are reading your book and splosh! A large dollop of sauce drips onto your eBook reader. All you have to do is wipe it clean and voila! It's as good as nothing happened - unless the memory of it weighs heavily on you. Or, think about that huge volume with the entire collection of Agatha Christie's mystery books. How big a space do you reckon the thousands of pages will occupy? Not the entire space you got on your shelf - oh no. It will only be in that one device you will ever need for all your books, ever. Not to mention that you could store all your favorite encyclopedias on that one space - and still not worry about losing room to rows of bookshelves lined with dusty, musty volumes of books that will fall apart some day.
Imagine that you are reading in the park and suddenly, the sky decides it needs to make the earth wet. You will most certainly not forget to pick your eBook reader as you scramble for your stuff and move to the nearest shelter. Even better, you may have a waterproof sleeve for the eBook reader in which you will keep it safe and use it to shield your head from the rain water.
Or on a windy day, when you are walking, reading out of your eBook reader, you need not worry about the gusts blowing the pages away or track of the last spot on the book that you were at.
On your bed, you try to read things through drooping eyes and you end up sleeping, shifting positions and the reader moves from near your face down your chest and somehow, to your feet. When you wake up, you don't have to worry about sadly dog-eared books - your book is right the way it was when you got it, but your reader may be depleted of charge - and that, is easily fixed.
You can leave tabs on the places where you left reading the last time you read the book, highlight passages of interest without physically marking on the books, make notes on pages as you require for your reviews at a later time, and if you have trouble reading the tiny print, you can pinch and zoom to a size that better suits your ophthalmic abilities.
It gets even better - you don't have to step into a shop, browse through rows of shelves, long list books you list, make a short list out of that, and finally, settle on the couple of books you need. All you got to do is visit an online book store (and believe me, many have a fine collection of books on the variety of subjects you would find in a bookstore), select the books you want to buy, make your payments and have them in the cloud. You could pick them from there when you need them. Also, there is no question of final copy, last but damaged copy, not in print, folded page with overprint, missing or damaged pages or other shortcomings that come with a physical book. They are all alike. You can remove the damage analysis phase of your book-picking process at the store.
We always complain our school-going children are burdened under their school bags. If all the years' text books were reduced to a single book sized device (it is smaller than a single book in the higher grades), imagine how light school bags would be. Workbooks and notebooks with one single text book reader in their bags definitely lightens the load on a generation already burdened under the curriculum.
We all love making our personal statements on the books we own - we sign on the first pages, stick some favorite stickers on the books, scribble in fancy ink on select pages we consider lucky(?) - now, all those tasks are reduced to being performed on a single eBook reader or, if you like to keep different sizes for the different things you read (hand books, pocket books, story collections of authors with little time, collections from full-time authors, encyclopedias and world maps), once for each type of eBook reader (a 7" one for smaller books that you carry around, a 10" one for bedtime reading without glasses, maybe a 14" one for poring over coffee table books and encyclopedias and pondering over maps). You could deck your reader with decorations as you like and get colorful sleeves that go with your clothes (maybe your moods too).
Say, you are a family and you like to read a lot. You could have a single account on various book vending portals, get your books on the cloud and all of you can access it from the cloud. It is simple as that! And you can accomplish all that with no difficulty.
You want to read at night but your roommates cannot stand having the lights turned on as you go through your book very late into the night - that is easily fixed since your eBook reader is a self-illuminating device and you would disturb no body going over that.
Do you think this increases power consumption overall and still does not contribute adequately for the benefit of mankind? You could make the difference by giving your two pence for using a renewable source of energy to off set at least a fraction of what you consume.
Today, eBooks are a lot cheaper than a regular book - and that means you spend less for more than on a conventional book. Of course, you get more for what you have that way.
Mankind needs the teeny little bits of humanity to work out the kinks and make an overhaul to get things on track for a better planet. It is possible for our next generations to preserve this planet on which we dwell for at least a couple of generations more (life in outer space - we have not had any updates to that any time, have we?) and if we succeed in showing them a way to move from our destruction of other kinds for the fancies of mankind (which is robbing Peter to pay Paul), perhaps we would have succeeded in letting them know not all hope is lost.
A small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind.
