The case for ebooks
In many circumstances, reading an ebook is far superior to reading a traditional paper book.

Portability
The wonderful thing about electronic text is that it takes up virtually no room, in both a physical and digital sense. If you have a storage card, you can walk around with at least a dozen books, and probably many more than that. Even if you don't have a storage card, you can still walk around with a fair collection of three to six books (again, depending on book size and available memory).

In many situations it's hard to carry even one book around with you. The storage abilities of most ebooks allow readers to carry a reasonable collection of reading materials and/or reference texts. Because you probably carry your handheld around with you everywhere anyway, the convenience factor increases nearly exponentially.

Features
Because ebooks are digital, not only are they super-portable, but they also open up the possibility for some really useful features. For starters, since most ebooks are in some form of digital text file, you can search the text for words or phrases. This is helpful when you want to find a quote or another specific section of the book. This can cut minutes, if not hours, off of wild goose chases for particular passages.

Additionally, digital formats--assuming copy protection doesn't get in the way--can be duplicated forever without decay or any real expense. We'll dig deeper into the specifics of this issue later in the series, but if your ebook allows it, this duplication ability can make it possible for you to share books with your friends without ever having to actually give up one of your possessions.

This is good for publishers (and hopefully writers as well), who don't have to pay any production costs. This in turn should drive the prices down for the readers. While the digital nature of the ebook in theory raises the effectiveness of ebooks, it also brings up a few ideas that are interesting and worth perusing in this series.

Easy to read
The electronic format offers readers even more benefits over traditional paper books. eBooks can be read in a variety of lighting situations, and due to the backlighted screens that most Palm computers have, you can read an ebook in most low or no light situations, such as on the subway, during nighttime road trips, or in bed when you don't want to disturb your partner.