Can’t argue with that, plus as mentioned above, with e-books there are search features and ease of looking up an unfamiliar word you don’t get with paper, not to mention that if I’m reading while eating – a common habit of mine – I don’t have to hold the pages open with a utensil balanced across them. However, especially with an old friend, there’s something about sitting in my comfy chair at home with The Dog at my feet reading a a book with the light coming from the lamp beside me – I’d have the fireplace lit if I had one. When I got LOTR for my Kindle I didn’t give away the paper copies I have.
Sigh–that again makes me miss my PRS-350. They have the Oxford Dictionary of English and the Oxford American Dictionary built-in. Not to mention French/English, English/French, Spanish/English, English/Spanish, German/English, English/German, Italian/English, English/Italian, Dutch/English, and English/Dutch translation dictionaries. Double-tap on any word and it pulls up whichever dictionary you choose.
No one will be impressed by someone holding an Ebook reader. My Nook sitting on an empty shelf in not impressive. Carrying the hardbound book “Living With A Large Penis” with the title there for everyone to see will start conversations.
There’s so much to love about the Kindle, and I do love it. I probably read it more than I read traditional books. But even when I do purchase an e-book from Amazon rather than borrowing from my local library, I don’t feel like I “own” it. I’m just licensing a bunch of ones and zeroes that are casting a shadow of a book.
I will never have a wonderful conversation with somebody because they’re in my home and have seen a particular e-book on my shelf. I’ll never show up at a friend’s place with a beloved e-book and say “I want to lend this to you. If you have the inclination, read it and let me know what you think.”
I’ll never pull an e-book off my shelf and have it open in my hands to a particular story or essay or chapter that I’ve read over and over again to the point that the binding itself remembers the location.
I’ll never give a book of stories to a newborn with a note on the inside cover that, I hope, will one day give them a reason to smile - like I do when I read the inscription my grandmother wrote me on the day I was born.
I’ll never go to the Friends of the Library sale and find a battered copy of an e-book, filled with marginalia and thoughts from a previous owner. And I’ll never be able to buy that e-book for 25 cents, holding onto it until an opportunity presents itself to give it away at just the right time to just the right person.
E-books are wonderful, but they aren’t books.
Exactly. I have no idea how many ebooks I have. They aren’t real. It’s like asking how many Straight Dope pages I have.
Disagree completely. I rarely read anything except e-books anymore. I don’t know why I would, physical books are a pain in the ass.
It is totally unsurprising to me that some people ardently prefer physical books to ebooks, and that other people ardently prefer ebooks to physical books; and I don’t expect either format to go away any time soon.
If physical books are hurting your posterior, you’re carrying them wrong. :dubious:
E-readers bother my eyes, and since my job already requires a great deal of screen time, I prefer physical books for pretty much all the reasons others have already listed…no power required, looking up passages, marking and writing in the book, referring to maps and illustrations while reading, etc…
Plus, I greatly enjoy vintage books. Everything about old books is a treat for the senses. I have a couple of old books in which my Grandmother wrote her own notes/thoughts in the margins, and I treasure them. Maybe my children and grandchildren will get a kick one day out of something I wrote in one of mine.
Or at least I like to think so!
This is a bad analogy when considering eBooks.
All those technical standards changes required an upgrade because they were actual changes in functionality. Increased video resolution and audio channels and subtitle support and so on. And there will be more to come until whatever video/audio/sensory standard arrives that’s indistinguishable from normal sensation.
But books aren’t like that. Only a tiny tiny fraction of books can’t be completely represented by current eBook standards, because almost all books are just text with a little bit of layout. There’s no reason to think that eBook file formats will change meaningfully in the future, or that current eBooks won’t be trivially modifiable to newer standards.
Right: Once you no longer have something you can roll up and carry under your arm, you don’t have anything at all.
Aren’t those magazines?
Speaking for myself, I don’t mind eBooks, I like my Kindle Paperwhite, but when an eBook is more expensive than having a physical book shipped to my house, I guess I don’t understand the advantage.
With other forms of digital media the convenience and cost-savings are passed on to me, the customer. Not so much with eBooks.
I blame Amazon.
(Because it’s their fault.)
I like physical books because I don’t like reading from screens for extended periods of time. Even with eye-saver mode turned on, I had to take a break after reading the first page of this thread. To add to that, a good brick-and-mortar book store will have staff notes/reviews of many books (at least, the good ones), not to mention someone I can talk to about what I might like.
No, it’s not. The publishers set the rates and they set the e-books higher because they have warehouses full of physical copies they need to sell.
I think you’d be surprised just how much is available to read on the Kindle. I read no genre books at all except for the occasional mystery, and I have very eclectic tastes in books. Most of my reading is non-fiction about extreme adventure (mountain climbing, technical diving, caving, etc.); financial history, especially financial fraud; and addiction. I also read a wide variety of fiction from all eras. About two or three times a year I might be interested in a book that is not available for the Kindle, but it’s still a very unusual occurrence.
Clearly if your interests are in books that are not available for e-readers, then they won’t work for you, but for me the Kindle has been 100% positive. Because reading has always been so important to me, initially I was one of those people who thought I could never switch to e-books. But then I was given a Kindle as a gift, and I have never looked back.
For all of those people who are talking about eye fatigue from screens - are you reading on a standard backlit screen or on an e-ink reader like a Kindle? There is no comparison between the two. E-ink really is the same as a paper book – it does not cause the eyestrain you get with a typical computer or phone screen.
Fun thread.
We’ve downsized our physical library a lot in the past decade. Truly, I’d love to have a mansion library, with sliding mahogany ladders and such, but I don’t think that’s in the cards this lifetime. Many of the books we had were on their 2nd or third purchase due to rereading. I’m still a sucker for thrift stores and library book sales, but we’ve really pared down.
These days, the physical books we buy are generally: for the small folk in our family, art books, cookbooks esp. vintage (though I have many more in e-book form), OOP things or volumes that have fancy illustrations. We have about 3k ebooks, and have probably just dropped down below that in physical books. I really don’t need to hang onto those old Piers Anthony books, even if I might get consumption and want to reread Split Infinity. I do, however, miss all the random volumes of fantasy/SF anthologies I lost during one of my umpteen moves. I liked having those kind of things clotting my shelves, and I’ll never be sure I can access all those stories again.
We really need to look into the local library ebook thing. It’s just too easy to push “buy” on a random $8 book at 11 pm when you can’t sleep…somehow easier than when doing it physically.
In short, I do love physical books, but I’m trying to be less hoardery than I used to be, and so we keep the purchase of most physical books for when it makes sense to.
Edit: Also, my eyes are aging super-fast, so changing text size vs digging out reading glasses…? That’s a no-brainer.
I would think you’re more likely to suffer eye-strain from screens than you would physical books.
I like my dead trees, thank you. I also have a bunch of big, coffee table books with glossy pages (and yes, I read them!), and they just wouldn’t be the same with e-books.
Plus I rarely buy books – most of the time I check them out of the library. They have e-books, but most of them are physical. And maybe it’s a fetish but yeah, I like the feel. So sue me.
(I would like to know if it’s possible to download e-reader software onto a laptop? Because there are some books that are only available digitally, but I don’t want to have to go out and buy an e-reader just for that alone)
I can’t put my Kindle on a book shelf. Well, I CAN, but it just doesn’t look as impressive.
So many people on this thread are taking for granted that screen=backlit LED/OLED. But electronic ink based displays are not the same thing–there is no eye-strain involved.