You can store many books each containing hundreds of pages in a single thumb drive or memory cards. Then you can connect this flash memory or thumb drive to your laptop, handheld computer or tablet PC and read it at your leisure or even in the plane.

For example assume that you want to bring 400 story books with you on your one month vacation. If we consider one book weighs 250 grams then the 400 books will weigh 100 KG. How difficult it is to carry 100 KGs with you everywhere. Moreover how many boxes you will need to pack these 400 books. How much space they will occupy? Just imagine and see.

Now did you know that you can actually copy the contents of these 400 books into a 256MB thumb drive. The size of the thumb drive is 1 x 2 inches or even smaller in some cases. There is no weight. Now you would have understood why people just love eBooks.

Doctors, Engineers, Lecturers, Researchers who often travel need to carry ‘Reference books’ wherever they go. Just image how useful it will be if they can carry these as eBooks.

At the end of paper books there will be an index. You can use this index to search for some information in the book. But eBooks have the ‘search’ facility. You can search based on keywords and key phrases to find the right information in a eBook.

In paper books you can high light certain text. Highlight pens are used just for this. In paper books you can write your comments and additional thoughts wherever you want. Due to this the paper gets damaged in the long run. And it is very difficult to delete or erase the highlights and written text on paper.

In eBook you can highlight wherever you want. Add and insert where you wish. eBook will not get damaged by doing this. And the best part is that you can remove your changes as and when necessary.

In roads, Airports or railway stations it is difficult to read a big paper book. Due to its weight it becomes difficult to stand steadily and hold the book while reading. eBooks doesn’t have this problem.

To turn to the next page, you just need to press a button in an eBook. If you open more than one window, then you can view a picture in one window and read the related text in the other window. In Contrast, while using a paper book it is very troublesome to turn back to the image page for reference while reading about it on the next page.

But though there are so many advantages of using an eBook you may wonder why the eBook has not been widely used and didn’t take off. Here are the reasons why eBook is not so successful.

1. You need an eBook Reader to read eBooks. This software is quite expensive. Pocket PCs, Handheld computers, Tablet Pcs and Laptops can use these reader software to read eBooks.
2. Not all the books are available in eBook format. However more and more publishers are acknowledging the benefits of eBooks now.
3. It is a bit confusing since there are many different formats.
4. The price of an eBook is more or less the same as the paper book version of the book
5. Copywrite issues are there in eBooks
6. Unlike eBooks, Paper books can be given to your friends and then if you don’t need it can sell it second hand.
7. Some even complain that the usuall paper and ink smell that is common in a paper book is not available in an eBook

These storage devices are used to copy audio, video, images or data files from your hard disk and carry it with your anywhere you go. Here let us discuss all these devices and their features.

External hard disk

The external hard disks come in 20GB, 30GB, 40GB, 60GB, 80GB and 120GB. They are connected to the computer using Firewire or USB. Both AC and DC supported external hard disks are available.

If you have an external hard disk with the inbuilt battery, then if there is power supply the battery will be charging itself and if there is a power failure then the battery will supply the power. So your work will not be interrupted.

Some external hard disks use USB to connect to the computer. The required power will be taken from the USB board itself.

Some external hard disks come with software required to take backups of data.

You can read more about external hard disks from www.adstech.com , www.cmsproducts.com , www.maxtor.com, www.simpletech.com

External hard disks with PC Card (Type B) interface are also available to connect to notebooks. You can read about it at www.toshiba.com

Mobile CD and DVD writers

Instead of just the external hard disks there are many multi function writers with USB and firewire interface.

External CD writers are few. There are many DVD+RW, DVDR and DVDRW DVD writers in the market. Both cable charged DVD writers as well as USB DVD chargeable writers are also available.

You can read about DVD writers at iomega, sony, plextor and addonics websites.

Addonics company’s multi function recorder is a CD writer, DVD reader and MP3 player. You can connect this device to TV projector directly if needed.

Thumb drives

Now the size of the drives have become so small that you can hang it in your neck or key chain. These are called thumb drives.

16MB, 128MB, 2565MB, 1GB, 1.5GB or higher thumb drives are available. All these are with USM interfaces. They will extract power from the USB itself.

Kangaru, Thumbdrive, disk onkey, verbatim, imation are some of the companies that provide thumb drives.

The use of DVD writers is increasing tremendously. If you are thinking of buying a DVD writer, you can read buying tips on DVD writers. Though the DVD disks are same, the DVD burning methods differ. Among these two technologies DVD+R is a more advanced technology. That is why these DVD+R disks are expensive compared to DVD-R. DVD-R is a comparitively older technology.

Now the next issue is your DVD burning software. Some buy DVD burning software without checking whether that DVD burning software supports both DVD+R and DVD-R disks. So though it is a bit more expensive get a software that supports both DVD+R and DVD-R technologies.