[b]I’ve now been reading e-books for more than
2-1/2 years. For the 37 years prior to that, I
read paper books exclusively. For a while now,
I’ve been meaning to compare the two forms of
book in some reasonable and understandable
way, but I was hard pressed to come up with a
format for such a comparison. Then it dawned on
me: use cases!
By day, I am a software developer and creating
use cases is an important part of the
construction and testing process. A use case is
used to describe a real-world use of how the
product in question might be used. So I came up
with a number of use cases for e-books to see
how they compare with traditional books. 10 of
these use cases demonstrate (I think) how e-
books are superior to traditional books. The
remaining use cases demonstrate areas in which
traditional books still have an edge over e-books.
My e-book reader, for the purposes of this
exercise is my iPad 2, using the Kindle App for
iPad. I’m sure I didn’t capture every possible use
case, but these are the ones I seem to deal with
most frequently.
1. Finding a book on the bookshelf
Depending on how many books you have, and how
organized you are, this can be a fairly daunting
task for traditional books. Here is an picture of
me illustrating the use case by searching for a
book on my shelves.
I used to have my books organized alphabetically
by author, and then chronologically within the
author. That fell by the wayside the last time I
moved. While they are arranged alphabetically by
author, they are completely random within a
given author. That may not sound like trouble,
but for someone who has several hundred Isaac
Asimov books, for instance, it can make any one
book tricky to find.
Searching for a book on my virtual bookshelves
within the Kindle App is only slightly easier. I
give the Kindle App the edge because it sorts
the books for me and allows me to change the
sorts on the fly, making it easy to find a book by
title or by author, or by how frequently I last
had it open:
[/b]

14. Loaning a book to a friend
This is probably debatable, but I think loaning a
traditional book to a friend is easier than loaning
an e-book. That is, if you can get over the
emotional impact of loaning a traditional book at
all. What if it comes back damaged (see #12
above). What if they lose it?
In the end, you can just hand them the book and
be done with it. (You hand them your reading
copy of course, not the one you think of as part
of your collection.) It is a bit tricker to hand
over your iPad.
Some publishers allow for the loaning of books.
I’ve “loaned” a book to a friend one time using
that feature and it seemed to work okay. But it
wasn’t as easy as just handing them a physical
copy.
..

15. When the world ends later this year, and
there is no electricity, traditional books will
flourish
Because, you know, e-books will be dead.
There you have it, my 15 use cases. I’m sure
there are many more on both sides, but I’ve
listed the ones that affect me the most. What
are some of the use cases I’ve forgotten?
. www.jamierubin.net/2012/01/19/15-use-cases-comparing-e-books-to-traditional-books-an-illustrated-list/ oya start sharing your own judgement