In 2008, I taught an adult Sunday School series on the book "Real Faith for Real Life" by Michael Foss. I bought the book from Amazon, and had the option to buy the e-book version at the same time for just $.99 extra. It was a good thing that I exercised that option, because I ended up giving the print version away to a student in the class, and had to depend on the e-book to prepare my notes.
With Amazon, you don't really "download" the e-book into your computer. Instead, you view it online through your Amazon account. This was one disadvantage --I had to be at my computer and online in order to read the book.
For the first few chapters, I was able to copy and paste lines into my teaching outline. This was great and a real time-saver. However, I soon hit the copyright "wall" and couldn't do this any longer. This meant that I had to flip back and forth between the book and my Word screen in order to make notes. This was NOT fun.
If you are just reading and not trying to make notes, an advantage is that you can highlight sections of the book, write online annotations, and bookmark special areas. To review what you have read later, you can choose to see just these sections.
I have to admit that I an really tempted by the Kindle 2. You can select from 230,000 titles, most costing only $9.99, and have them downloaded anywhere in 60 seconds. You can carry up to 1500 books with you at a weight of about 10 ounces. For someone who had to carry two or three volumes of the LC Catalog around during library school, that alone sounds pretty fantastic. The screen is supposed to provide an improved reading surface, and the battery is supposed to last 25% longer than the initial version of the Kindle. This sounds like a potentially BIG threat to print libraries as we know them.
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