3 ms·

> > I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies. > even at the cost of trees, environment, We grow trees to make paper. That's how

by cyphar 10y ago

> > I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies. > even at the cost of trees, environment, We grow trees to make paper. That's how the paper industry works. Nobody complains about us devastating "virgin potato fields" because we use potatoes to make chips. But the logic is precisely the same. There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry (as well as tree planting efforts). So if we stopped using paper cold-turkey, we would remove the financial incentive for companies to plant more trees. > I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience. For me the real issue is the licensing. I think that it is intolerable that a company can claim that you don't own ebooks. It's a slap in the face to traditional freedoms of readers and is incredibly chilling. Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously. Not to mention that their product line is literally named after fire-related terms (perhaps subconsciously implying the purpose of the products is virtual book burning)! You couldn't make this stuff up. Companies that sell PDFs which are licensed under free licenses are much better, but the other issues you mentioned still mean I probably won't buy ebooks for a while. I prefer physical pages.

marvindanig 10y ago
> For me the real issue is the licensing. Sure. Wanting to own physical books to avoid issues of broken licensing model or issues of service centralization isn't the same thing as wanting physical books because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts. The latter is simply untrue, only a means to hijack industry standards, sell propaganda, and profit from it. IMHO, electronic books can easily have a great reading experience (much, much better) if only books/manuscripts related software was let in the open for people to innovate upon. Or made a part of the web, a first class citizen, with decentralization, accessibility etc. I pretty much agree with you that existing options have a lot of deliberate problems but do not think that the solution to all of those is in physical books. I'd rather push for books and web being coalesced into a single unified resource that is both accessible and open. My friend & I even started a community/foundation that we plan to build on some of these ideas: https://bubbl.in/about https://bubbl.in/about > Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously. I hadn't heard about this before! And what's even worse is that Amazon was allowed to acquire the .book TLD and with that own a very very large piece of "public property" for peanuts. I guess there was very little reportage by media on this. But then such is life lately. > There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry… That's an interesting thread to go after. My tryst with physical books was almost a decade ago, and the industry I knew locally then was quite different from what you describe here. If the world gives up on ebooks like the talk of the town is lately, I'm pretty sure there will be an "impact" that would no longer hide under the design of industry.
- cyphar 10y ago
  > because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts. I'll be honest, I prefer physical books. The smell, the feel of turning real pages, the fact that I can write all over them, the fact you don't need to charge them. These are things that you can't emulate with an ebook. Are they subjective? Yes. Are there things that are easier with ebooks? Hell yes. However, I feel that I learn things better when I read from a book than when I read from a screen. I'm not sure why (and I've heard there's been studies on this) but maybe it's got to do with how I grew up learning -- lots of book reading in weird positions on my couch (I like lying upside down with my head on the floor if I'm really into a book).

by cyphar 10y ago

marvindanig 10y ago

> For me the real issue is the licensing. Sure. Wanting to own physical books to avoid issues of broken licensing model or issues of service centralization isn't the same thing as wanting physical books because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts. The latter is simply untrue, only a means to hijack industry standards, sell propaganda, and profit from it. IMHO, electronic books can easily have a great reading experience (much, much better) if only books/manuscripts related software was let in the open for people to innovate upon. Or made a part of the web, a first class citizen, with decentralization, accessibility etc. I pretty much agree with you that existing options have a lot of deliberate problems but do not think that the solution to all of those is in physical books. I'd rather push for books and web being coalesced into a single unified resource that is both accessible and open. My friend & I even started a community/foundation that we plan to build on some of these ideas: https://bubbl.in/about https://bubbl.in/about > Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously. I hadn't heard about this before! And what's even worse is that Amazon was allowed to acquire the .book TLD and with that own a very very large piece of "public property" for peanuts. I guess there was very little reportage by media on this. But then such is life lately. > There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry… That's an interesting thread to go after. My tryst with physical books was almost a decade ago, and the industry I knew locally then was quite different from what you describe here. If the world gives up on ebooks like the talk of the town is lately, I'm pretty sure there will be an "impact" that would no longer hide under the design of industry.

cyphar 10y ago
> because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts. I'll be honest, I prefer physical books. The smell, the feel of turning real pages, the fact that I can write all over them, the fact you don't need to charge them. These are things that you can't emulate with an ebook. Are they subjective? Yes. Are there things that are easier with ebooks? Hell yes. However, I feel that I learn things better when I read from a book than when I read from a screen. I'm not sure why (and I've heard there's been studies on this) but maybe it's got to do with how I grew up learning -- lots of book reading in weird positions on my couch (I like lying upside down with my head on the floor if I'm really into a book).