e-Books!!

This is the e-Age!! Everything becomes really 'cool' once you add an 'e' in front of it. Perhaps the thing that became coolest with an 'e' is mail. Most of the classical writers would have become jobless in today's e-world. Kalidasa won't have written Meghdutam - that long poem about how the desolate and love lorn Yaksha sends his love messages to his beloved with the help of the clouds!! I wish Yaksha and his lover had blackberries!! When did you last receive a personal letter from anyone? Even my parents have gmail accounts and keep in touch with me and my brother through e-mails. There's no question about the revolution in personal communication brought by e-mail. The most benefitted are off course are the lovelorn Yakshas of now-a-days. They can get to know the pulse of their lovers and the further prospect before they can do anything more stupid, all through e-mails. It saves time and also embarassment. I won't have been in touch with so many of my class-mates otheriwse, had I not had the e-mails. For sure I won't have bothered ever to write letters to many of them or even call them up given the fact that even when we're in the same class we'd talked only a few words over years!!
There are so many other cool 'e' things - like mp3 e-songs, youtube e-vidoes, e-news, e-bay, e-banking, even e-puja. There's one more 'e' thing that has become quite popular now-a-days - that's the e-book. Name any book and there's a high probability that you'd get a pirated copy of the same uoloaded somewhere in the web. Now the question is do you really like to read a book on your laptop? Is there anything like reading your favorite book on an idle weekend afternoon, lying upside down on a cozy bed and falling asleep? One of the most exotic things that I still remember from my childhood days is the winter afternoons in the week-ends, lying on a mat under the big mango tree in my aunty's backyard with my dad, listening to the stories that he used to read out to me from some children books. An e-book read out from a laptop would totally spoil the ambience of such exotica!! Apart from the sentimental thing, there's also a practical usability issue with e-books. I'm used to fold the corner of the page of book, I'm currently reading, as a bookmark. Such a simple thing is really very complicated in e-books, despite so many options for e-bookmark!!
But lately I myself have started browsing through e-books, mainly for my favorite books, which I've read so many number of times and still would love to read many more times but are not available readily all the times!! A few days back I came across "Love Story" by Erich Segal in a site and I couldn't stop going through almost the entire book, specially the portions related to the events in and around Harvard University, again during office hours, keeping aside all work!! That was indeed a very good experience.