There are many eBook readers and ebooks that have come out in the last few years.
It's become very popular to have a collection of electronic books.
While there are many advantages to this type of technology, there are also some downsides to consider.
First of all, you do not have any control.
When you own the physical book you have control over it.
With an electronic book, that control is still in the hands of the company that you purchased the book from.
Part of really owning something is having some sense of control over the product which you don't.
There is no resale value in an electronic book.
You can decide to get rid of it and sell it like you would a physical book.
You can't donate it to a library either when you no longer want it.
The electronic side takes away that from you.
You can't take the book and loan it to a friend when you are done with it.
It's locked inside the machine that it's in.
You could loan out the device, but that means you can't have any of your library at the time.
With physical books, it's easy to pass around books and share them.
At times these types of materials have been pulled from the market place.
This means that at any time the publisher or company could for one reason or another pull a book off your device.
This isn't the type of ownership that some want to have when someone else has more power over the work than you as the owner.
At times there are server errors and connection errors that can lock people out of downloading the books they own.
This happens many times with electronic media due to DRM issues or downtime.
You are tied to a specific device for those book you purchase.
These could eventually get old if the company decides to stop selling ebooks and readers making it hard to actually go back and read your collection at a later date.