Turning a page at reading

After almost 2 years of internal fight between my love for book and my love for technology, the scale finally turned on the other side and I decided that it’s time to turn a page in my reading habits: I bought an ebook reader!

I know that some of you might think of me as another book hater, who doesn’t appreciate the smell of old paper and the great feeling at the sound of turning pages, but there are good reasons behind such a choice. Ebooks are the future and here’s my case:

  • Ebooks are much more environmentally friendly than normal books. Humans used paper for thousands of years to transfer ideas between each other and between generations, but this is now facilitated in a global scale through the use of technology and more specifically the internet. We became smart enough to construct devices to display this information on the touch of our palms, so it is time to stop sucking the Earth of its resources. Ebook readers use less paper, and even though they still need raw materials to be made, they only need these materials only once and for all. Plus you save all the CO2 for transferring the book at your place, and you save space at your appartment.

  • What makes the book is not its physical entity but the content. I do adore the smell of books, but this adoration reaches the levels of idolatry. I want to adore a book because of its meaning and concepts not because of the thickness of the paper. I will go on reading physical books of course. Firstly because you can’t find everything in an ebook format (yet) but also just because sometimes you want to buy a book in an airport on the other side of the world.

Associate Professor on Robotics and Biomechanics
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