Electronic Versus Printed Books and Researching

            The research process involves a great amount of searching, reviewing, and reading through existing literature on any given topic from numerous sources. This process, prior to the development of online research databases such as Proquest, EBSCO, Thompson-Gale, LexisNexis Academic, Emerald, Jstore and many others, was tedious to say the least. Additionally, in case where actual books and texts were used, finding relevant areas in the text that discussed issues related to the topic of the research was difficult and time consuming.

            This has all changed. For one thing, searching online databases by keyword, topic, publication, or even phrase is now a simple matter if you have access to a university library or choose to pay for individual membership in one of these research databases. Also, there are numerous online databases of existing research papers, essays, term papers, theses, dissertations and literature reviews,  that can be downloaded and reworked for your own purposes. Worst case scenario is that you simply utilize these prewritten papers as a starting point for your own individual research project but chances are you can still use the references and much of the content as a guide to make your research effort a little less tedious or, if you choose, just have one custom written for you.

            Another benefit of the digital environment is that there are now databases that are beginning to house many of the popular and even obscure books that are out of copyright in digital format for immediate download. Many of these online databases usually sell and market these texts in a proprietary format that make them difficult to transfer across formats and platforms as well as difficult to research. However, others, such as our own online database of e-texts, e-books, digital books or whatever you want to call them (click on the image below), go through the trouble of formatting these off copyright books as an MS Word document that can read on virtually any technology platform including PCs, Macs, PDAs, smart phones, and other electronic platforms.

            The advantage of these digitized books, such as books as the original Aladdin’s Lamp by John Payne or Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley which Frankenstein is based on, among many, many others, is that these books do not need to be read but can be scanned and searched by keyword, phrase or topic in order to support an academic premise in a term paper or an essay. This is a powerful tool for students and academics that make digital texts and certainly digitized books an important arsenal for their success.