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Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they a

Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives. Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.

sincerely 9y ago
books can last decades. an ipad absolutely won’t.
- schoen 9y ago
  I have a printed book that's the same age as the U.S. constitution (now 231 years) and another printed book that's a few decades older (293 years), both of which are still completely legible. "Decades" feels like a big understatement to me. :-) We mostly think of paper as a poor archival medium because of a few decades, mainly at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, when high-acid wood pulp paper was very widely used. (Newspapers are also sometimes printed on cheap acidic newsprint.) Acidic paper can become brittle within 20 years or so, or in any case much less than a century, although this also depends on many other factors. But both before and after this period, many books were printed on acid-free paper, and these are likely to survive for centuries, even with occasional use. The observations about paper's longevity in, for instance, Nicholson Baker's polemical Double Fold, tallies well with my experience as the son of a bookdealer. My father routinely sells books that are over a century old to people who fully expect to read them. And I remember visiting an antiquarian book fair where a first folio Shakespeare was for sale for millions of dollars. It was still possible to turn the pages with no damage and all the printing was completely legible, even though the book was already 380 years old or so. Books on low-acid paper are really a very durable technology when treated with respect.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    I've digitized a bunch of 16th century books so I (and everyone else, they're out of copyright) can read them on a tablet or whatever. Added a search function, too. I am suggesting that claiming that one thing is best for everything and everyone is not true.
  - eecc 9y ago
    Assuming the file format is documented, also bits remain completely legible throughout time. Perhaps we haven’t yet worked on a redundantly encoded, self documenting file format but eventually we will. At that point in time - assuming all relevant content won’t be copyrighted to death for 1000 years, that’s a big one - we will be able to simultaneously have unfettered access to any content
    - eitland 9y ago
      Disks exist in two states: - broken - about to break Even poor quality books are mostly readable after decades. I don't know for certain a single example of any of my disks that have survived since 1990ies although I could hope.
      - eecc 9y ago
        Also books exist in few states, of which only one is useful: well preserved, wet, burnt, torn apart. That’s how entropy works folks! One advantage of books is that the information density is lower so the loss of one specimen isn’t that significant, unless it’s unique
        eitland 9y ago
        This isn't entirely correct. A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it. Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.
        9y ago
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Undergraduates mostly have textbooks which change every couple of years. Also, electronic books that don't have DRM don't die when the device does. I was physics/math and was lucky that my textbooks didn't change that rapidly, but still, it's a bit odd to claim that paper is the obvious choice for everyone based on widely varying circumstances.
- coldtea 9y ago
  ebooks can migrate from ipad to ipad (or any other system) without any damage to their contents. books can't.
  - goshx 9y ago
    And you can create backups of them And you can search through the content And you can carry thousands or millions of them in a single device And you can add a new one to your collection without having to physically go anywhere to buy And you can draw and make marks without damaging the content forever And you can create bookmarks in multiple ebooks and have them all available at the same location, also with search functionallity And the device you use to read can be lighter than an actual book, at least it will always have the same weight regardless of how many ebooks you carry There is probably more.
    - goshx 9y ago
      I’m really curiuous to know what is apparently wrong with my comment. Any downvoter care to comment?
hiq 9y ago
As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? I assume your family doesn't use their tablets with candycrush-like apps unlike some of my acquaintances. Which apps do they use to make it worth it? I tend to assume that the burden of the proof of value is on the new tool, otherwise we just keep changing and nothing gets ever battle-tested. Paper, pen and other boring educational tools have drawbacks and benefits that are well-known; what about tablets?
- greglindahl 9y ago
  I was expressing a personal anecdote, which I said (up one) that I knew was a minority opinion. I wasn't saying that I was expressing a universal truth. Sorry that I wasn't obvious.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)? A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book. Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search them, remember its position on each, it has its own light (adjustable to match ambient levels or go beyond them), increase the font size (ever though about those with no perfect eyesight? Sucks to be them with paper books huh?), even spoken to the reader through TTS. Not to mention that the price of ebooks is much cheaper than paper books to boot (and that one can even pirate the latter, if they are so inclined). Or that there are also 100,000s of FREE ebooks (classics, and such) but seldom (if ever, except for charity or so) free paper books.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    I meant, "a tablet". A table offers different kinds of functionality...
    - goshx 9y ago
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Wow, this subthread is getting out of hand... My assertion is in context of education. If you're going to use a tablet as an electronic version of paper books, then paper books are better, because: - they're much faster to skim through and search through - print has better resolution than screen - you can actually make notes on them - I mean free-form notes, made in an efficient way - you can pull out multiple books and compare them - they're much nicer on your eyes Note again, I'm talking about education. That's different from recreational reading of fiction, and more akin to reading technical books - you need the ability to skim, skip, quickly move around and cross-reference stuff separated from each other by many pages. Now tablets could be better if electronic textbooks actually exploited the medium they're using - the way Bret Victor has been talking about for ages now. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ or http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/ http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt... (just got on HN frontpage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530). However, I'm yet to see that happening in the wild. Ultimately, my point isn't that tablets are bad. Hell, I'm happy user of such devices, and they definitely help me read on the go (they beat Kindle for technical books, due to color and better workflow with PDFs). My point is that tablets get dumped on schools and are used to view textbooks, which is something at which they're worse than regular textbooks. Both teachers and publishers have little clue on how to use these devices to their full potential, and there doesn't even seem to be a movement to help them get that clue.
- enitihas 9y ago
  How on earth are paper books faster to search through?
  - fsloth 9y ago
    Not OP but I can second this. When I have a really hard topic I need to understand that requires rapid context switching to check on details nothing beats a book. Highlighters and post it book marks make it much faster to browse through than PDF on my IPad.

sincerely 9y ago

books can last decades. an ipad absolutely won’t.

schoen 9y ago
I have a printed book that's the same age as the U.S. constitution (now 231 years) and another printed book that's a few decades older (293 years), both of which are still completely legible. "Decades" feels like a big understatement to me. :-) We mostly think of paper as a poor archival medium because of a few decades, mainly at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, when high-acid wood pulp paper was very widely used. (Newspapers are also sometimes printed on cheap acidic newsprint.) Acidic paper can become brittle within 20 years or so, or in any case much less than a century, although this also depends on many other factors. But both before and after this period, many books were printed on acid-free paper, and these are likely to survive for centuries, even with occasional use. The observations about paper's longevity in, for instance, Nicholson Baker's polemical Double Fold, tallies well with my experience as the son of a bookdealer. My father routinely sells books that are over a century old to people who fully expect to read them. And I remember visiting an antiquarian book fair where a first folio Shakespeare was for sale for millions of dollars. It was still possible to turn the pages with no damage and all the printing was completely legible, even though the book was already 380 years old or so. Books on low-acid paper are really a very durable technology when treated with respect.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  I've digitized a bunch of 16th century books so I (and everyone else, they're out of copyright) can read them on a tablet or whatever. Added a search function, too. I am suggesting that claiming that one thing is best for everything and everyone is not true.
- eecc 9y ago
  Assuming the file format is documented, also bits remain completely legible throughout time. Perhaps we haven’t yet worked on a redundantly encoded, self documenting file format but eventually we will. At that point in time - assuming all relevant content won’t be copyrighted to death for 1000 years, that’s a big one - we will be able to simultaneously have unfettered access to any content
  - eitland 9y ago
    Disks exist in two states: - broken - about to break Even poor quality books are mostly readable after decades. I don't know for certain a single example of any of my disks that have survived since 1990ies although I could hope.
    - eecc 9y ago
      Also books exist in few states, of which only one is useful: well preserved, wet, burnt, torn apart. That’s how entropy works folks! One advantage of books is that the information density is lower so the loss of one specimen isn’t that significant, unless it’s unique
      - eitland 9y ago
        This isn't entirely correct. A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it. Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.
        9y ago
greglindahl 9y ago
Undergraduates mostly have textbooks which change every couple of years. Also, electronic books that don't have DRM don't die when the device does. I was physics/math and was lucky that my textbooks didn't change that rapidly, but still, it's a bit odd to claim that paper is the obvious choice for everyone based on widely varying circumstances.
coldtea 9y ago
ebooks can migrate from ipad to ipad (or any other system) without any damage to their contents. books can't.
- goshx 9y ago
  And you can create backups of them And you can search through the content And you can carry thousands or millions of them in a single device And you can add a new one to your collection without having to physically go anywhere to buy And you can draw and make marks without damaging the content forever And you can create bookmarks in multiple ebooks and have them all available at the same location, also with search functionallity And the device you use to read can be lighter than an actual book, at least it will always have the same weight regardless of how many ebooks you carry There is probably more.
  - goshx 9y ago
    I’m really curiuous to know what is apparently wrong with my comment. Any downvoter care to comment?

hiq 9y ago

As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? I assume your family doesn't use their tablets with candycrush-like apps unlike some of my acquaintances. Which apps do they use to make it worth it? I tend to assume that the burden of the proof of value is on the new tool, otherwise we just keep changing and nothing gets ever battle-tested. Paper, pen and other boring educational tools have drawbacks and benefits that are well-known; what about tablets?

greglindahl 9y ago
I was expressing a personal anecdote, which I said (up one) that I knew was a minority opinion. I wasn't saying that I was expressing a universal truth. Sorry that I wasn't obvious.
coldtea 9y ago
>As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)? A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book. Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search them, remember its position on each, it has its own light (adjustable to match ambient levels or go beyond them), increase the font size (ever though about those with no perfect eyesight? Sucks to be them with paper books huh?), even spoken to the reader through TTS. Not to mention that the price of ebooks is much cheaper than paper books to boot (and that one can even pirate the latter, if they are so inclined). Or that there are also 100,000s of FREE ebooks (classics, and such) but seldom (if ever, except for charity or so) free paper books.
- coldtea 9y ago
  I meant, "a tablet". A table offers different kinds of functionality...
  - goshx 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Wow, this subthread is getting out of hand... My assertion is in context of education. If you're going to use a tablet as an electronic version of paper books, then paper books are better, because: - they're much faster to skim through and search through - print has better resolution than screen - you can actually make notes on them - I mean free-form notes, made in an efficient way - you can pull out multiple books and compare them - they're much nicer on your eyes Note again, I'm talking about education. That's different from recreational reading of fiction, and more akin to reading technical books - you need the ability to skim, skip, quickly move around and cross-reference stuff separated from each other by many pages. Now tablets could be better if electronic textbooks actually exploited the medium they're using - the way Bret Victor has been talking about for ages now. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ or http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/ http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt... (just got on HN frontpage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530). However, I'm yet to see that happening in the wild. Ultimately, my point isn't that tablets are bad. Hell, I'm happy user of such devices, and they definitely help me read on the go (they beat Kindle for technical books, due to color and better workflow with PDFs). My point is that tablets get dumped on schools and are used to view textbooks, which is something at which they're worse than regular textbooks. Both teachers and publishers have little clue on how to use these devices to their full potential, and there doesn't even seem to be a movement to help them get that clue.

enitihas 9y ago
How on earth are paper books faster to search through?
- fsloth 9y ago
  Not OP but I can second this. When I have a really hard topic I need to understand that requires rapid context switching to check on details nothing beats a book. Highlighters and post it book marks make it much faster to browse through than PDF on my IPad.