It was pretty exciting to use my tablet for textbooks at first, I don't have to carry the weight of the heavy books or worry about forgetting my books at home. But, that was only at first. I have never had a chance to use digital textbooks, so I didn't know its disadvantages, I've only seen the bright side. When I went to my Spanish class(the class I have e-textbooks), I opened my iPad, opened the app, found my book, but what do I see, the book is not downloaded?! I thought that was impossible, I started its downloading process last night, but why is it not finished? (Later I found out that it only downloads when I'm in the app) Oh well, that was not a huge problem, I can still go to the website and use the web version. So I opened my browser, went to the webpage, the book opened up properly, I was pretty happy, at first. After a few pages of scrolling, I can't even describe how horrible the experience of using it was. When I tried to scroll down to the bottom of the page, the whole page scrolls, but only not the book itself. I was very exhausted with it. The second day, I had my book downloaded(with my iPad's screen on for 30 minutes the previous night). I didn't think there will be more problems, but, obviously, I was wrong. The scrolling experience was good, a lot better. Unfortunately, there was another problem, when I "flip" pages, I have to wait 5 seconds for EACH page to load! That wasn't a problem if I know the page number we were going to, I can just jump to that specified page and wait 5 seconds, doesn't seem too long. The real problem was, when I don't know the page number. For example, to find the vocabulary of chapter one, which is not in the menu, and we use it quite often, and I don't know the page number. If I started at page 30, and the vocab is on page 50, without other people tell me the page number, I have to load every page(5 seconds per page) and check if it's the vocab, that will take me at least more than one minute to load the thing. How is that "easier"?!
What I'm stating here is not that ebook is just trash, it saves energy, saves the effort(sometimes), save paper usage and help our planet compare to printed books. But in the eyes of experience of reading or using it, printed books are way better than ebooks. Printed books and ebooks both have advantages and disadvantages, but we can't take both, maybe someday, but now we can't, we will just have to make a choice.
Jiahua(Tiger) Wang
9/24/15
Ugh, ebooks. I agree. I like a book that I can write and flip through. Plus, you never know when your technology might fail. Hopefully, you have found a happy medium! Nice post.
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