英语作业 纸质书和电子书
E-books or paper books
What is the e-book? An e-book is a book in electronic format. It is downloaded to a computer, PC, Mac, laptop, PDA, tablet, smartphone or any other kind of reading device, and isread on the screen. It can have numbered pages, table of contents, pictures and graphics, exactly like a printed book.
E-books present many benefits and advantages. It is very simple and easy to purchase and download e-books through the Internet. After download you don't have to be connected to the Internet in order to read the e-book. You can stay offline. If you wish to have it printed, it is very easy-.Just click on the print button in the e-book, to print it with your home printer. E-books are delivered almost instantaneously. You can purchase, download and start reading them within minutes, without leaving your chair. You don't haveto go to a bookstore to buy them, neither wait for them for days, weeks and sometimes more to arrive in the mail. 2. No trees are required to manufacture paper for the pages of ebooks. When you need certain information, you can get it immediately, by downloading an e-book. Many e-books are sold nowadays with bonuses, which you usually do not get with a printed book. This adds value to your purchase.E-books take up less space.It is very simple and easy to purchase and download an e-book. People living in big modernized cities, in a remote village in a faraway country or on a smallisland, can equally access an e-book. It takes them the same amount of time to purchase and download an e-book, provided they have an Internet connection.It is possible to purchase an e-book 24 hours a day, every day of the year, from the comfort of your own house or office. You can purchase and downloadan e-book, even if you are on a vacation. All you need is a laptop, tablet. Smartphone, or a readingdevice, and wireless Internetconnection.
The e-book has so much edvantage,the parper books have a hard time.Half a decade into the e-book revolution, though, the prognosis for traditional books issuddenly looking brighter. Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency. Thegrowth in e-book sales is slowing markedly. And purchases of e-readers are actuallyshrinking, as consumers opt instead for multipurpose tablets. It may be that e-books,rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately serve a role more like that of audiobooks—a complement to traditional reading, not a substitute.How attached are Americans to oldfashionedbooks? Just look at the resultsof a Pew Research Center surveyreleased last month. The report showedthat the percentage of adults who haveread an e-book rose modestly over thepast year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readerssaid that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months.Only 30% reported reading even a single e-book in the past year.
Books are not going anywhere. Neither is publishing. Since Gutenberg made his epic contribution to the human race, publishinghas secured a place as one of the largest and most profitable industries in history. In that time, publishing has adapted to majortechnological changes, survived economic meltdowns, persisted through political censorship, and made it to the other side ofcatastrophic price wars.
It’s convenience that is drawing peopl e to e-books and that is what will kill
printed books. Or, if notkill them, reduce them to the same minority hobbyist status that vinyl records now occupy.
Printed books will be strange relics from their parents’ generation. They mightappreciate their form but they will approach them as fundamentally less useful. And useful alwayswins in the end.The role of the printed book is still critical, if not for the publishing industry, but for the human race. Our permanent record, whetherthrough artistic expression in fiction, or through knowledge in non-fiction, is kept on printed books, not on electronic signals. Withoutthe printed book, there is no record of our time, place and civilization.