Week 9: Narrowing it down to e-books

I really like how in this week's blog question, Prof. Galey mentions that often only the professor gets to hear about the various ideas students have for a paper. This is completely true; often, students do discuss their potential topic ideas with one another, however we tend to only hear the ideas of our friends in the class, which sometimes is only a selected few and in some cases, we may not know anyone and therefore hear no ideas.

This week, I started looking into possible topics for the paper. I am a big believer in writing a paper on a topic that is of interest to me, not only because I will be able to learn something new but also because I believe that the best results come out from doing work you are passionate about. That being said, the way I narrowed my scope for a topic is by asking myself the question: what week in the syllabus contains the readings I have been most interested in? Based on this answer, I would decide which topic in the syllabus I would want to explore further.

My favourite week thus far has been week 7 and week 8 - both weeks which pertain to e-books, therefore I am narrowing the scope of my paper to e-books. Potential ideas surrounding this topic are:

• E-books versus physical books: a study of the pros and cons of the two prominent reading formats
• or potentially taking a stance such as E-books are more superior than physical books or vice versa 
• Further developing last week's blog question on content vs. container 
• The rise of the e-book equals the slow death of Chapters Indigo  
• An exploration of the different e-books available in the market 

After spending about an hour searching for newspaper articles and scholarly articles in the UofT Library Catalogue, any of the above topics are plausible as there is an abundance of information available on all of these topics.

Personally, I think I am leaning towards studying the pros and cons of e-books and physical books; the reason I say this is because I am one of those people who is very anti E-book - seriously, I have nothing good to say about them, don't understand how they are more cost effective because some e-books are still pricier than the physical copy, and I actually even returned a Kobo for store credit when my cousins gave me one as a graduation gift. For this reason, I want to study the pros and cons of both digital and paper texts and see if throughout writing this paper, I can be sold on e-books. It would be eye opening for me to explore, study, and discover some pros to e-books.