TECH TIP EMBRACE THE E-BOOK

• Digital reading devices are eminently portable—most weigh about 1 pound—and can hold thousands of books. (They’re fantastic for those long flights when you don’t want to pack the entire Hunger Games trilogy.)

• They can handle a range of media, from books to newspapers to magazines.

• They save trees: no shipping costs and a low carbon footprint.

• They let you buy books online from anywhere; you can start reading within minutes.

• They let you shop internationally. Even if you’re in a remote Chinese village, you can easily find plenty of cyberbooks in English.

• You can type notes in an e-book as well as highlight passages and copy and paste sections.

• You can print out pages simply by hooking the device up to your printer.

• Many of the books you can access are free: You can download books from the public library; you can even click to the British Library’s Online Gallery to peruse some of the oldest and rarest books on record.

• Some e-books come with bonus audio, video, or animation features.

• Many digital reading devices even accept audio books and can read to you aloud.

• The backlit screen means that you can read in bed with the light off, without keeping your roommate awake.

• You can adjust the size of the text, making it easier to read.

• Some link directly to a built-in dictionary. Just highlight a word, and it will look it up. Others also will link to reference Web sites like Google or Wikipedia when a wi-fi or 3G connection is available.

• E-books are searchable and even sharable.

• Digital reading devices are expensive.

• Unlike books, they can break if you drop them.

• It’s harder to flip through pages of an e-book than a printed book.

• You’ve never tried reading a textbook on a digital reading device.