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Reading technical literature (think mathmatics etc.) is painful on a 2 dimensional medium like an e-book reader or computer screen. You'll often go back and for
by chmod775 8y ago
Reading technical literature (think mathmatics etc.) is painful on a 2 dimensional medium like an e-book reader or computer screen. You'll often go back and forth between non-continous pages in your book using your left hand as you're writing stuff down with your right. Can't do that comfortably or fast using a laptop or e-book reader.
Being able to show a lot of dense information on a small area also really helps comprehensibility. Computer screens can't do that while still being comfortably readable and e-book reader screen resolution just isn't there yet.
That's my thoughts on digital books as a student of mathematics. When reading fiction in my spare time, my Kobo Aura HD/H2O can't be beaten by conventional books though.
- glaurung_ 8y agoMath major here. When in school, I almost exclusively used PDFs of my textbooks. My desktop at home had three monitors: a 21x9 ultrawide on the bottom and two 16x9 monitors above. This meant I could have LaTeX, a web browser, and three or four windows with different pages of my book open at once. Well done digital books can quickly be navigated via a sidebar table of contents, or simply using ctrl-f. It all made for a much nicer work flow than sticking different fingers/pencils/etc between pages and constantly switching my attention between a book and a notebook, and a screen. Admittedly this was much trickier on a single laptop screen, but with a few virtual desktops I still preferred it to the analog approach. I think that the real hold on textbook ebooks is the horrendous web based formats that most come in. The above approach would admittedly have been impossible if I were acquiring my textbooks legally.