subject: Bringing The Literary World Into The 21st Century [print this page] In keeping with global trends across all media sectors, technology has given the book world something of a proverbial kick to the posterior in terms of bringing it up to date with rise in digitised media. This gentle shove in the direction of the 21st century has manifested itself in form of ebook readers. Like everything else digital, the usage of these devices has now exploded and they have a number of excellent features which in some ways make them far superior to books.
Much research has been done into the effects staring at screens for a long periods of time have on us and all the results showed that it has various negative effects and so the onus, for developers, was on creating a screen which not only replicated the look and feel of reading a hard copy of a book, but was also readable for hours on end. There are plenty of people who love nothing more than to spend hour upon hour pouring over their favourite novels, therefore they needed to be able to do so in comfort.
A considerable amount of time went into the development process, creating a screen which had a high enough resolution to replicate the experience of reading a novel in page format. In conjunction with this, the screen had to be lit in a way which made it readable without causes strain on the eyes. Having achieved this, the next challenge was to deal with memory and this is one of the most attractive factors to owning an ebook reader. The devices are only small, but can contain thousands upon thousands of books. This is a revelation for many avid readers as it enables them to carry their entire library with them at all times - an extremely attractive proposition when going away for any period of time.
The user now needs to only take one slim and compact item with them (saving them large amounts of luggage space) and ensures that they will never have to worry about running out of reading material. Finally, on many of the devices currently on the market today the battery life is in excess of one month following a single charge, which ensures the user will very rarely have to consider battery life. It all comes together to make owning an ebook reader a very attractive proposition. What's more, the fact they can be picked up relatively cheaply means they are more attractive than ever.
