I love my Kindles. I have, last time I checked, about 1900 titles on my Kindle.
They are small and light. Many of my favorite authors write long books, 800+ pages. I never waited for these books to come out in paperback. But a thousand page hardback book is physically awkward, especially at the pool or beach. And that big stack of vacation books takes up room in the suitcase.
My close up eyesight isn’t good and most print books have type that is too small for me to read easily. With my Kindle, I can make any book a large type book, and if I’m reading late at night and my eyes are tired, I can make the type even larger.
I can buy pretty much any book I want at any time I want. If I see someone on the train reading a book that looks interesting, I can pull up a description on the spot and buy it immediately if I’m still interested. If I’m on vacation and someone recommends a book, I can buy it on the spot.
Discretion. No one can see what I’m reading. I can actually read a book with title that contains the word “sex” on public transportation without getting obnoxious comments from men.
That said, there are a few downsides.
I haven’t had a lot of technical difficulties with my Kindles, but they do wear out. They get to a point where they don’t hold a charge for long. The charger point gets finicky and I have to wiggle the cord to get a connection. This is usually when I buy a new one. I’ve also been aware of how much it would suck if it was lost or damaged while I’m on vacation - that why I always pack a spare - usually one of the old ones that’s difficult to charge. I’ve never had to use the spare, though.
I will occasionally want to read an older book that isn’t available on Kindle. To be fair, those books almost always out of print as well, but I can always find a used print copy.
I can’t show off my collection of Kindle titles. This is probably the biggest downside for me. I always felt my bookshelf was an expression of my personality and I paid a lot of attention to what books I placed front and center. I do miss showing off my book collection.
I don’t know about other genre fiction but it has long been a tradition with science fiction for writers to autograph their books if you bring them one – or several. The attitude is, "You bought my stuff, of course I’ll sign it.
One con panel some years ago there was a discussion on how to carry on that tradition with e-books. I suggested that a Sharpie will work – once.
I read a lot of obscure stuff, and if I can’t find a copy on abebooks, it’s probably not out there. It’s almost never (close enough to never that I was tempted to not qualify it) available as an e-book.
I’ve been a librarian for over 30 years, and have been working in elementary schools for over half that time. Ebooks were a hard sell for a while. Kids still preferred print books. Covid, and distance learning, changed that a bit. Still, when we came back to the building with a ton of new books the couple hundred kids in the school checked out a thousand print books the first month. They are using the ebooks; they like to pull them up on a Smart Board and read like they’re looking at a giant tablet. Ms. P was a librarian for 20 years and has switched almost exclusively to audiobooks. I think print books will be around for a while, but I don’t have any big attachment to them. As someone who loved looking through reference books as a kid, the Interwebz are a dream come true. I’m fortunate to have the training to separate the BS from the useful info, and kids are getting better at it (at least the ones who have had me for a librarian have).
There’s a huge difference between scanning a book to make a digital copy and making that copy available to the public. Google scanned millions of still in copyright books when it went through the academic libraries. The full contents are not available on Google Books, but sometimes individual pages are. That’s sometimes enough to find a reference without the full chapter. Each year more of those books will become fully available.
The flip side of this is that vast numbers of popular and genre fiction were not added to academic libraries. I collect vintage paperbacks and except for the top tier of star authors, a large percentage cannot be found in digital form, only through the used market, and that includes the hardback original editions. The irony is that many of these would be in the public domain, since they were issued by small publishers who didn’t last long enough to renew copyrights, but some of the authors (or estates) could have and no one will do the research. (And there are sufficient holes in the Library of Congress’s records that even research there might not be completely successful.)
I don’t know if this is comparable, but I have older books that would not be worth putting effort into digitizing because the contents are too dated. Many, many on specialized topics fall into this gulf.
Some of the biggest online libraries are located in the former Soviet Union, India, and other locations to take advantage of copyright laws, but some are not, like the Internet Archive which is headquartered in San Francisco and Ibiblio at Chapel Hill.
Actual statistics to back this up would be good, but I would guess that current public digital access to up-to-date academic material and reference works, as well as various best-selling fiction and other genres, is semi OK if not great, if only because everything like that gets published digitally anyway nowadays. It is those books hidden away for decades in the stacks or in cold storage, your R1’s, that remain frustratingly unavailable. It’s not a problem until it is and then you have to hope you can get a hold of it through some kind of interlibrary loan, or a photocopy of a chapter from an edition at the Library of Congress, or something.
Ah. That name didn’t stick in my head, and it sounded like a category I was unfamiliar with.
Worldcat is the indispensable metafinder for books in every major library in the world, sorted by distance of its appearance in a library by miles from your location.
I find books with virtually no examples all-too-often. I’d guess there are millions such worldwide.
When I was a medical student, two full floors of the university library were devoted to massive quantities of science journals. There were so many some of the lines of bookcases were touching each other. They were on a rail system and to make a passageway you had to turn a crank.
When I last went to the library these were all gone and replaced with tables and study carrels. I presume these obscure journals from obscure places are all digitized or lost.
The R1 is simply a single example out of many in my personal interests, and I’m not even interested in that many genres, so my situation is but a blip in the vast universe of Not digitized, Nor will be. Non-fiction about weaponry, alone, abound with “if you want to learn about this, you need to hunt for an out-of-print physical copy at a high price, period.” There’d be no high prices if there was no market for them.
We don’t even need to go to my professional life, where pioneering field study reports, pivotal research papers etc. from the pre-digital days are only to be found in a handful of universities’ library shelves and in the home bookshelves of a handful of researchers. No digitization in sight, but you still need to get to the original sources to make valid research.
What qualifies as ‘obscure’ is an interesting question in itself. It’s all bubbles, I know, but my “obscure” interests comprise global communities with hundreds or thousands of aficionados, with a hundredfold hangarounds. Doesn’t seem all that obscure to me, but I guess it is, compared to Taylor Swift news etc.
I was reminded today of one of the things I will always get in paper version: graphic novels. I’ve never gotten one that looked good on my Kindle. I have gotten a few in pdf format, but my Kindle doesn’t like those either, and I can’t see trying to read them on either my laptop or desktop.
I had an amazing experience reading Battle Royale on an e-reader, but not such a great experience with Slayers (lots of text on gray backgrounds). Usually I turn on the light and then the reading experience is good. (I have a decent collection of manga.) Since manga are large (Battle Royale was over 800 MB, as it was all the volumes put together!) I only keep a volume or two on my e-reader at a time.
They err on the side of high-resolution, low-compression for manga, but for my needs that is overkill. I unzip them and resize to jpegs with a height of 1280 pixels and compression at 70, which ends up at around 25-50 MB a volume. Battle Royale is 15 volumes, so 800 MB for an omnibus isn’t too far off from that. (I have 33 volumes of manga on my phone right now for a little under a GB. On my Kindle Fire HD, I have a 256 GB MicroSD card, and have probably in the range of 180 GB of manga and comics on it, so around 2,500 manga volumes and volume equivalents.)
What I notice is that everyone who puts out a book still seems to make a big deal about the paper copies, and that a lot of people get them.
My own personal feelings are that I like ebooks for quick reading, but will get a regular book if I want to support someone. I also sometimes buy cheap used ones when the ebook is too expensive, then go download a pirated version. I’m currently colleting those annotated classics, and they would be hard to read on ebooks. They just aren’t the right size for larger books.
I noticed that the magazines on Kindle are handled poorly. They have two options: just plain text that is poorly formatted, and the full pages. There’s no (1) nice looking B&W version, and none made for actual smaller screens. Since they use HTML under the hood, you’d think they’d work like websites.
I have wondered if anyone would ever make a two screened ebook. It always feels like I have less I can read one.
The book is “Cyberbooks”, by Ben Bova - written some time in the early 1980s, with a very 80s cover. It’s about the invention of an e-reader and the mischief and shenanigans that ensue in an attempt to suppress it.