I do not think this is an either/or, all or nothing situation.
I may be older but I certainly use my phone to carry my songs with me and use Tidal at home and have not touched a CD in years.
I used to have a good vinyl album collection but it was stolen and I never replaced it. I no longer have a turntable because reasons but I do wish I still had one and my old record collection. Those albums were special in a way that CDs only barely touch and iTunes never even approaches.
Hanging with friends and piling through the records and their great covers (usually) and liner notes was vastly more gratifying than with CDs and never with MP3s. Indeed, it never happened with CDs. No one does that anymore. Which is sad.
My 2020 Jeep Wrangler has manual transmission and crank windows. It also has USB ports. I put some songs on a thumb drive and play them through the sound system.
That’s what we do. It actually is an improvement over the mp3 discs (with six hours of random music) we used in our older car. Plus the car display gives you the song info, and stops playback when a call comes in.
This is a nice future! I’m not going to put my old 8-track deck in after all.
Yes, and the story is the same if you watch a movie in a theater or on your phone that you hold in your hand. That doesn’t mean that the experience of watching it is exactly the same.
Even before e-books, there were people who preferred reading a book in hardback to one in paperback (or vice versa), or who preferred reading a crisp new book to a raggedy old dog-eared book, even though it was the same story.
These sorts of things matter more to some people than to others, but it’s ridiculous to assert that they don’t, or shouldn’t, matter at all to anybody.
I there is a tendency for nostalgia to be even stonger for things you never experienced. I feel intense nostalgia for some aspects of the 1920s. I have lots of art-deco and art-deco inspired stuff, for example. It’s just cool.
Gen-Xers (and Boomers) have a fairly unique experience where they have experienced the the analog and digital world. Analog is old hat, rather than some cool thing you “discovered”.
Speaking of annoyances in the other direction I find myself very slightly annoyed that my 2016 car with its premium audio system won’t recognize FLAC. I must convert to MP3 or it’s a no go. Not that it matters much for sound quality, really - I mostly use digital files for downloaded bootleg live recording that are inherently not exactly hi-fidelity . It just pisses me off that I have to play around with converting them.
But I am a dinosaur who mostly listens to CDs in my car and continues to maintain a large collection of physical media.
I value them both, too, and while I may fondly remember a novel, I can’t even remember which format I read it on. It’s just words.
People think, in their experience, that CDs sound better when they have green magic marker on them. But I guess we should treat their experiences as equally valid, too?
When I read I book I slightly prefer dead trees because I spend enough time looking at a glowing computer screen, or even worse, a tiny phone screen, that I like to take a break from that.
I’ve never used e-ink on a tablet, so that might be a comparable experience, but reading books on a phone is quite obviously different from paper.
Personally I think it’s absolutely fantastic that I can have ALL my Kindle books at my fingertips no matter where I am. I absolutely love reading on my phone; I can do it anywhere and any time I have a chance to, without having to lug a paper book around with me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a huge improvement.
And really… I always concentrated on the game, not the manuals. The only advantage to the paper stuff was the ability to use it at the same time as I was playing in the game, which has mostly been obviated by stuff like dual monitors and/or in-game tutorials and key listings that you don’t have to get out of the game to look at.
I think you’re in a very tiny minority if don’t find a difference between paper books and ebooks.
I can’t even imagine NOT remembering the format in which I read a book. If it was a paper book, and I think of a passage, I will remember whether it was on the left or right page and roughly what part of the page.
Some of us aren’t really paying too much attention to the actual format or words as such; we can read fast and easily enough that we can get a mental movie going based on the book and our imagination and it’s not really like reading anymore. So generally when I remember part of a book, I remember the mental scene in my head, not the words on the page.
One thing that e-readers have all over paper is the ability to view the text size you like, and in black on white, white on black, or other options depending on the reader.
Sure, as long as they don’t say it’s an objective difference and that they could pass a blind test. Actually, even if they said there was an objective difference, their experience would be valid to them, even if it was based on a delusion.
Personally I almost exclusively read on a kindle now, and I mostly only miss being easily able to leaf back and forth between parts of a book, like a map in a fantasy novel and the chapter I am in. But I have no trouble understanding how some people, who perhaps process tactile and visual input differently from me, would experience reading a paper book and an ebook differently, just as I experience reading differently depending on my mood.
I would experience a book pretty much the same if you cut out all descriptions of appearance, because my version of aphantasia causes me to forget such descriptions almost immediately, but I can still understand how someone who experiences reading with visual “hallucinations” has a completely different opinion.
There’s a problem with newer products based on microprocessors – they are way too feature rich, and you can’t simply ignore the features you don’t want to use, because the product will change state and become unrecognizable, and you can’t figure out how to get it back to the state you know how to use. And the control programs sometimes have bugs, and commit the owner to endless updates.
I’m actually wishing I could buy a digital camera that worked like my favorite camera, the Canon F-1. A shutter speed dial from 8 seconds to 1/2000 seconds, mirror lock up, depth of field preview, and whatever focus and aperture controls were on the lens. I could feel where everything was without looking. There was also an exposure meter, which was very helpful, but you could use the camera without, if you understood lighting well enough. No modes, no menus, no states. And if the battery died, if you could get by without the meter, the camera worked fine.
Digital imaging is way easier and cheaper than film based, but this overhead of complication is very burdensome!
Personally, I think the answer given early on of “fashion” is largely correct. At least, that’s the case for the vinyl junkies and Lomography heads I know - they are part of distinct subcultures that reinforce these things internally. Might even get them laid.
There’s also the anorak aspect - most of them are geeky males - in a different time, they’d be jotting down train numbers, now they obsess over album pressing dates or the minutiae of obscure Soviet cameras.
Yes, they can be cheap drugstore paperbacks whose spines warp after repeated readings, but some physical books can also be treasures.
I’ve collected rare books for some years, and though some are available electronically, there is something about an actual, printed book. Deckle-edged pages in some cases, the thick pages, being able to feel the impression of the press upon the page, the smell of an old book–these are things that no Kindle can reproduce.
. It just pisses me off that I have to play around with converting them.