I'm a conflicted man: I use a Kindle e-reader (and love it), but I also love physical books and will never totally give them up. As I think through my conflict, I found this interesting list from Eric Mckiddie of "10 Benefits of Ebooks that Will Surprise You":
1. Less buyer’s remorse. Ebooks
can capitalize on our immediate gratification impulse (not that it’s a
good impulse, but if you followed it, might as well make the best of
it). How many of us have purchased a physical book on impulse from
Amazon and waited several days for it to be shipped, only for it to sit
on the shelf because the excitement wore off while we waited for it to
arrive? Immediate delivery means – hopefully – less unread books that
you purchased on a whim.
2. The Evernote connection. It’s
easy to import your Kindle highlights into Evernote, making them easily
and speedily searchable. This is a huge time saver when it comes to
sermon prep.
Michael Hyatt shows you how.
3. Shareability. The
impact of a book grows exponentially with the shareability of ebooks.
With the reader’s ability to tweet a quote from the Kindle app, the
author increases the number of people he or she can impact, not to
mention sales.
4. Your physical books are searchable…for free. You
can read and search many books for free at Google Books. This gives you
all the benefits of owning a physical book, and many of the best
benefits (e.g., ubiquity and searchability) of digital books.
5. Increased student engagement with God’s word. Last
week, when I thought I caught one of my junior highers texting during
the sermon, I discovered that she was actually typing a note into her
ESV Bible iPhone app. Awesome.
