Introduction
The last century has been one in which the human race has made many revolutions in each and every field of life. The field of knowledge which has changed lives drastically is that of Science and Technology. It is due to the boons of Technological revolution that we see advancements being made in the field of mobile phone technology and internet etc. During the last decade, many gadgets similar to mobile phones have surfaced. We are going to discuss one such gadget namely The Kindle, in the lines below. We’ll try to cover different aspects of it and try to explore that “Is kindle worth it?”
What is kindle?
Acquiring knowledge has been one of the basic instincts of human beings. There are many ways to acquire knowledge. However, one of the oldest methods is through reading books. For the past few centuries, the newspaper has become a source of information and knowledge as well. Although the world has digitized, newspapers and books have not become extinct rather transformed into electronic format.
Amazon, originally a book-selling store that sold hard copies of the books, identified the growing demand of e-books and introduced a gadget related to e-books namely Kindle.
Kindle is a light-weight portable device which the owner may carry anywhere in the world. The first version of Amazon contained a 6 inch screen. Its display type was of Grayscale E Ink to give the readers a feeling of newspapers/books. The features of Kindle kept improving afterwards.
Kindle has an exclusive store where the authors may publish their content directly. Not only this, but the readers may download the books they want to read directly from the Kindle store.
The question : Is Kindle worth it?
Whenever any product is launched, internet users take the different online forums by storm and start sharing their experiences as well reviews about the product. These discussions and threads may keep going on from several months to years. When the Kindle was launched, people asked on the online forums the burning question “Is kindle worth it?”. The question is quite a hot one even today. To answer this question, we’ll have to look upon the pros and cons of The Kindle.
Some of the Pros and Cons of The Kindle are listed below :
Pros (of The Kindle)
Portability
The main benefit of The Kindle is that it offers a portable medium of information to the readers.
Newspapers usually come in very large paper sizes in hard form. Folding and carrying them along with you might be a headache.
Same for the Books that would weigh many pounds in the hard copy. The Kindle offers a chance to access the books and newspapers etc. through one dedicated gadget.
Better accessibility
The Kindle can access the Kindle store through the internet. Some people might argue that this is not an advantage at all but I would rather say the opposite. Why? Because having a dedicated book store is an advantage if one is an avid reader of books as it saves you quite a lot of data since there are no applications running in the background that consume large amount of data.
Comfort
The Kindle displays the text in Grayscale E Ink style which is the optimum display for the reader. Furthermore, the brightness of the display as well as the font size can be customized within the certain constraints. This is a feature that is not available with hard copies of the reading resources. Besides, most e-books reading media don’t offer this facility as well. So this is quite a big advantage in my opinion.
Cons (of the Kindle)
Ergonomic aspect
The main disadvantage of The Kindle is associated with the ergonomic aspect of it. Prolonged use of this gadget on a daily basis may cause eye strain as well as an impact on the vision. Also, using it in certain postures for prolonged time periods regularly, may cause the strain in the backbone or the neck.
Dependence on technology
Although the concept of an access to ebooks and newspapers etc. through electronic platforms sounds fascinating it has a drawback that one is left dependent upon the technology. If your gadget (The Kindle, in this case) goes out of order, you lose your access to your resources. So, this is kind of a disadvantage as compared to physical/hard copies of the information resources.
Economic aspect
The economic aspects of this device restrict its affordability. Not only the initial purchase price of the gadget might be quite high for some buyers but the resources i.e. the books, journals and the newspapers may come at a high cost because the prices of the bestsellers may increase on The Kindle Store as per their demand.
Conclusion
Keeping the above arguments in view, we can say that The Kindle is more of a luxury than necessity and the answer to the question “Is Kindle worth it?” is subjective for each individual and the pros and cons listed above.
