When I came to the dope this morning pre-coffee I saw this thread on the Kindle Reader. I was quite Snarky when reading it and I apologize for that. I had not had my coffee yet. Lame excuse I know but I apologize nontheless.
Anyway, this thread was started so as not to hijack that informational thread on the Kindle e-Book-Reader.
I’d like to know if you prefer the sights, smells and sounds of reading a material book over reading one on a screen?
Personally, I’m a voracious bibliophile, I’ve got books in every nook and cranny of the house and a few in storage to boot. I love sitting anywhere in the house, picking up a book and delving in.
Flip the coin and my wife who also loves books, loves the idea of this electronic gizmo. She would find it beneficial on planes - where she finds herself quite often - at work, waiting in lines, whatever…
How about you? Do you prefer the material to the ethereal when it comes to books?
While there is a certain heft and art when it comes to paper books, the reasons I prefer them when reading long-form literature do not have to do with that: rather, for the moment, paper is more convenient and produces less eyestrain, especially considering I like most people spend more time in front of a monitor/screen than reading hardcopy.
ETA reading the link does not disabuse me of this thought: even though a LCD display in theory reduces eyestrain the model shown seems to have too much of a reflective surface to accomplish this.
Don’t care either way, and I find paper books to be hard to hold comfortably. My Nintendo DS is modded to accept homebrew software, and I have an e-book reader for it. I get all the pleasure out of reading the story while having a much more compact and less flippy medium to read it on. I can set the book down on a table and angle the screen to face me while I enjoy a meal; try that with a traditional book and you’ll most likely end up hurting the spine.
I’d much rather flip a page. I’m not big on using electronics while in the bathtub. Especially when the bathtub is full of water. I’m sure with something like a handheld book reader, it would come out worse than me after a dunk, but either way the end scenario is bad.
I like the heft and feel of books, but have no qualms about an e-reader. I’ve sampled one for a short time and found I have no problems reading words on a screen versus on a page.
I’ve perfected the art of holding a paperback with my left hand, which is great on the beach…but can be tiring. For some reason, I can’t get the same balance with my right, so in this case an e-reader would be preferable.
I have thousands of ebooks on my computer at home and I read them from my PDA. I’d love to have something slightly larger, but I’m not going to spend +$300 for it. Make a sub $100 ebook reader and I’m on board.
Words are words. I’d rather have a device that can store hundreds or thousands of books in a small physical space. But, uh, not the Kindle. It looks like they were taking design notes from early-1990s computer peripheral manufacturers when they put that thing together. I have trouble understanding how any sane company would let an eyesore that bad get out the door and onto store shelves in 2007.
If someone makes an e-reader that looks and feels like a book, I might try it. The screen would need to be the same size as a standard page, with the same amount of white space, same size text, and a nice font.
I know not all books are the same, but they’re similar enough that reading an odd-size page or font throws me off. That’s happening now with the new Michael Chabon book – the pages are small and the font is huge, and it feels weird.
Realpaper books are a pain in the ass. They’re bulky, prone to randomly closing/page flipping without physical measures to keep them open, can only fit one per device, delicate, a pain to update, etc.
I far prefer books. If I have to read more than a page or two worth of stuff on a screen I’m likely to skip it entirely. The heft, tangibility, smell (ah, old woodpulp and slight mildew - sweet perfume to me!), portability, aesthetics and permanence of books can’t be beat, IMHO.
Minor pet peeve of mine: I hate science fiction books supposedly set 500 years in the future, where the protagonist, who we are supposed to identify with, goes on and on about how nothing compares with the feel of a real book in your hand, so he gets them specially replicated, and everyone thinks he’s eccentric. It just seems to patently fake.
I prefer paper books (specifically, paperBACK books). But it is handy being able to have a book in electronic form on my pda, which I always have with me anyway. I can carry a paper book if I know I’ll have time to read, but if I’m not expecting a delay, and find myself stuck anyway, well, I just whip out the pda and read (or play games–I have Scrabble and Bejeweled and a few others.)
Although I love reading real, paper books, I have been dreaming about this device since I was six years old (long before there was even such a thing as a laptop or a PDA). What I wanted back then was a magic book that would turn into whatever book I wanted it to be. The Kindle seems to be fairly close to that with the large selection of Amazon books available.
Currently I only read books in paperback, because hardbacks are too heavy for me to carry around. This means that I usually wait up to a year after publication to read a new book. One of the books currently on my list to read once they come out in paperback is already showing up on the Kindle main page.
Finally, my house is stuffed to the rafters with piles and piles of books. While some of them look nice on the shelves, I’ve long since outgrown the shelves with books I keep because I might someday want to re-read or refer to them. The idea of storing all those books in a device or computer is very appealing.
That said, readers are still in the first generation. I’ll give it at least a year to see which formats win out, whether there are significant improvements, and for the price to come down some. But I’ve already got a head start on my 2008 holiday gift list.
I’ve never used an Ebook and I like the feel of a real book with paper pages. However, it seems like the utility of having an ASUS Eee PC 4G ultracompact PC could have fantasitic utility for traveling. On a long journey I sometimes carry 3 or 4 paperbacks and am definitely considering something like said computer. If it were half the weight, a little smaller and had more storage space, I’d definitely give it a go. Hell, I’ll probably buy one anyway just because they’ve hit the price performance point I’ve been looking for (websurfing at $400)!