The physical paper book appreciation thread

In addition to the various reasons others have listed:

I read very quickly. On a printed page I can read large sections of text at a glance. However, I have problems seeing very small text. On an e-reader, if the font is large enough for me to see clearly, there is not enough text on a page for me to read comfortably. Hope that makes sense.

After multiple plane trips last week i gotta give something to paper books: they don’t force you to put them away for landing and take off.

I’m picturing something like this Pictures of Keith Lynch's old apartment

I’ve never seen an e-ink reader that looked anything like a printed page. Unless that page was black ink on a gray background. At least with reading on a computer screen, you can get an actual white background. Not that I would read a whole book on either. Paper for me.

Lancia, regarding your Second example…Yes, yes and me, too!

I’m very interested in turn-of-the-century Britain and America and for some reason (? not a “clothes” person in real life) also the dress styles. (Not an obsession, one interest out of many.) I have a book called A Century of Style by Sandra Barwick. In reading it I found reference to a designer named Lucille Gordon, sister to an author I’d read long ago, Elinor Glyn. I already had a copy of one of her books copyrighted 1914.

This led me to find The “It” Girls by Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher. Fasinating book also. They helped drag, some kicking and screaming, the Victorian world into the 20th century.

A couple years ago I found an article about Worth’s gowns, (earlier era) one of which reminded me of a section in the first book. Folded it up and stuck it in there.

Saw an advertisement for the movie Girl with the Pearl Earring starring Scarlett Johanson. Her pose didn’t look like the painting, it looked like another picture of a girl in the first book, one of the “Beauties.” Folded and saved that one, too. (More references here but you get the idea, I know.)

I’ve done that with several different subject books. It’s kind of amazing how I’ll be reading one book and a lightbulb goes off…stand up and search the shelves, pull down a couple more books…

You can’t do that with one flat screen in your hand.

Books rock.

I think that my reticence over e-readers is around 2 things: format variability and the riffle function.

Books come in all shapes and sizes, each with different functions and use contexts. It seems to me that the e-reader wants to shoehorn this into a single screen size that is too small for works with significant picture content and not quite right in a hard to define way for others.

Books have an absolutely brilliant half-search/half-scan interface for flicking through and setting up non-persistent bookmarks (or fingers as they are also known) as you go back and forth.

At a larger scale, physical bookshelves offer a great search experience with shape, colour and position giving additional memory cues.

I have yet to see an e-reader that gets over these hurdles, but they’ll get there eventually.
From my perspective though, e-books fail because they are over-focussing on books as a pure information medium rather than a clever device for information transfer with some tricks up its dust-jacket. When some e-books are written to take full advantage of the e- side of the equation, something interesting will happen and I may get a reader.

Apple iBooks tells you how many pages remain in the current chapter, which is nice. But neither iBooks nor the Kindle will tell you the name (or even the number) of the current chapter you’re reading. Which is particularly annoying for a large collection of short stories.

I’m reading Game of Thrones with the Kindle app at the moment. The chapters in that are named by character: “Eddard”, “Arya”, and so on, and there are multiple chapters for each character in no particular order. Often I’ve wanted to flip back to the previous chapter for a particular character, in order to check something. With a real book, I would just hold the current page, and flip back till I find the right chapter heading. On the Kindle, I have to bookmark the current page, and fumble through the TOC by trial and error to find the one I want. It’s especially frustrating to know that it would be relatively easy to improve with some minor software changes.

(That said, I was on a plane recently, reading GoT on my phone. A woman across the aisle was reading the paperback. It’s almost comically huge, heavy and nearly cube-shaped, and doesn’t look like it would survive multiple readings. It wouldn’t have fit in my carry-on bag.)

Does the Kindle app have a button to move between chapters? On my Kindle 3, you you can skip from chapter to chapter with the left and right cursor keys. It seems like that would work well with the GoT books, because you could skip through the chapters looking for the character’s name in the title. (With the third book I skipped ahead to read all of the chapters for one particular character, not a recommended way to read the book.)
The length issue does bug me with the Kindle, because the percent read display covers the entire contents of the ebook, not necessarily the novel you are reading. If there is additional content at the end (one kindle book I recently bought had a whole bonus novel attached to it) then you’ll find that your novel ends way before the display reads 100%.

But then mass market paperbacks used to fool me this way, too, because they often include exerpts at the end.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I love the smell of old books - both pulpy paperbacks and musty old histories have smells that I just relish. I also tend to take a lot of notes, especially when reading nonfiction, and it’s easier for me to flip around and find what I need when I’m holding a dead-tree edition in my hands. A good book placed back on the shelf is a friend you can go back to again and again, regardless of changes in tech or availability of electricity.

I have no philosophical objection to e-readers, and have some friends who love them, but I do tend to be a late adopter of gadgets (I’ve only had a cellphone for about four years). Maybe someday I’ll have an e-reader. For now, though, no hurry.

I have always dreamed of having a library :smiley:

have you ever thought about the fact that books get thicker every time we read them? something stays in there and when you read it again you will get that something back too… even if it is a different time or space you are in by that time :slight_smile:

My books are dear to me and no way to replace them with an e-reader…like Lancia I sometimes read different books at once, but in my case in different languages :smiley: I would get very confused with an e-reader I think

and then there are the comics. For them it has to be the real thing. I can’t imagine reading graphic novels on an e-reader :o

Pagination. Kerning. Alignment. Justification. Paper quality. Recto and verso. The elegant font that the author and the publisher chose.

I have a Kobo; it’s rather nice. Like the iPod for music, one is sacrificing quality for convenience. If you want to hear a full orchestra, go to a live concert in a good hall. If it has to be a recording, get a real stereo. If you don’t mind the music sounding the way an object viewed through the wrong end of a telescope looks, get one of those iToys.

Likewise, e-readers are mental distractions for the people who have forgotten how to wait.

Perhaps I am too harsh; I’ve only had this knobbo thing since Fathers’ Day. Maybe it can show poetry with the line endings in the right place instead of making Whitman look like overblown prose. Maybe there is a way to have footnotes. Maybe there is a way to leaf randomly, stopping only to look at a page that catches your interest. Maybe…

I’ve seen the foolish people who have given up their vinyl collections for CDs, and their CDs for computer files. I’m currently trapped with over 10,000 tracks crossloaded onto a new external hard drive that iTunes refuses to recognize as a music library. If that were all I had, I’d be pretty pissed off right now. As it stands, I can wait patiently until I find the move that’s going to take the least amount of manual re-entry, deletion and correction because I have albums and CDs to listen to.

I pity the fools who give away real books…

Not that I’ve ever found, no. I don’t think iBooks does either. The other thing lacking is a way to jump back to where you were. Sometimes there’s a Back button, but not always. I have to remember to add a bookmark first.

How exactly does skipping chapters work on the Kindle device? Does it take you to the first page in each chapter? Is there a button to jump back to your furthest-read place after skipping backwards?

I haven’t made the switch yet either. Perhaps if I try an e-reader, I"ll get hooked. Right now, I figure I spend enough time during the day staring at a computer screen or iPhone screen.

I usually have 3 or more books going at once: a work related book on the financial markets, a novel, and a political or history book. Most of my non work related books are picked up at used bookstores or from an Amazon seller.

So, right now, physical books seem the way to go for me. I love the idea of having a large library, but given the amount of times I move around, I’m not sure I’ll ever accumulate it.

Generally yes, but IME some books don’t have the chapter functionality enabled.

On mine (3rd Gen/“Keyboard”) there is, the “Back” button.

This, and illustrations too.

I have a few Sherlock Holmes stories in Strand magazine bound volumes. I’ve read those same stories in other formats, including cheap paperbacks and e-books. But there’s something about reading them as they were originally typeset and illustrated that makes it a much more exciting and enjoyable experience.

Oh, beautifully said.

I have no interest in reading off a gadget or phone or nook or whatever. I do a lot of reading and editing at work and I much prefer to print stuff off and read the paper version and make edits hard copy.

Plus, I just love books! I have two themed book collections. One of them is heavily geared towards signed/limited specialty editions. Some of these are very nice productions and high quality materials. I love holding them and paging through them and, yes, even reading them. I just love books!

I read exclusively fiction
I have no organization system
I travel a lot
My collection’s a mess. Books in drawers and bags, on the floor, stuffed in the back of my pickup. I’ve learned that if I slightly crush a paperback it will fit in my back pocket, so the pages are crushed and the covers are ripped.

I like paper books because I can abuse them
(and the whole fear that when they stop making money they will just stop supporting the file type and everyone will have to buy the same books a second time on the “new” technology)

My daughter bought me the B&N ebook reader, the nook, about a year and a half ago, and I thought I’d hate it. I’ve learned to love it. I can go to a certain page or chapter, the nook remembers where I stopped reading in each book (so that I can have every single book in my elibrary “bookmarked”) and it recharges very quickly, and holds a charge for a long time. I did have to learn a few new things. However, nowadays I’m very fond of my nook, and very protective of it. I’ve dropped it several times, and the worst that has happened is that the battery case cover came off. I’ve been able to find some older books that I’d given up on. I don’t think that anyone is going to put out another paper edition of Cats in the Belfry, for instance.

Having said that, I do still love paper books. For one thing, I can buy used books, so I’m far more willing to try new authors. I will pay full price for some authors, but I’m usually not willing to pay full price for someone I might or might not like. And not all authors have books in the public library.

I’m delighted to have two options available to me. I’m also astounded that my husband, who has never been much of a reader, now enjoys reading fiction on his tablet. He’s dyslexic and comes from a family that didn’t have a culture of reading for pleasure, and he’s always been a TV watcher. I’ve joked that ours is a mixed marriage, I read and he watches TV. But he’s been buying and reading ebooks on a regular basis, and he totes his tablet around.

electronic displays don’t have the size or resolution for lots of nonfiction learning in sciences and engineering. photos, graphs and diagrams are very detailed. you often need to view these at the same time as the text.