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Why I like books: - I prefer reading on paper - Not having to think about charging and battery life (book light excluded) - Used books can often be had cheap

Why I like books: - I prefer reading on paper - Not having to think about charging and battery life (book light excluded) - Used books can often be had cheap or free - No proprietary lock-in bullshit Why I do not like books: - Turning pages is cumbersome - No way to search the text - No way to alter the font size - No way to look something up in a book you read N years ago unless you're home with your bookshelf - Harder to find a comfortable reading position - Books are heavy and take up a lot of space Despite all that, I still mainly read paper books.

billfruit 8y ago
Ebook readers generally last long time, may be even a month or more on a single charge. Many ebooks are in the public domain and can be had free of cost from Gutenberg and other sources, which are free from any kind of lock-in or DRM. Especially for English, eReaders have opened up almost the entirety of the corpus of authors like Trollope, Scott, Thackeray, Meredith, Conrad, Henry James, George Eliot, Stevenson, Bennett, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis etc, many of which works are no longer easily obtained as physical copies.
gooseus 8y ago
Mostly agreed, some of my addenda: Physical better: - Persistent subconscious knowledge of where I am in the book (weight in each hand). - Much easier to flip back multiple pages to re-read a section and flip to where you were. - Resilient to collapses of information/power infrastructure. Digital better: - Traveling with many books is impractical - Built-in dictionary and wikipedia search - Resilient to fire and water damage
- shitgoose 8y ago
  Not sure I understand the last point about fire and water damage, but the rest are exactly my thoughts.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    Not the parent, but at least for me my ebook collection is far less likely to be irretrievably lost than my physical library. I keep important data like photos, documents, and books backed up in multiple places, including off-site. So if my house burns down or floods, my physical library will be irretrievably destroyed, while I will still be able to access my digital library.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Pigo 8y ago
That's why I think it comes down to what your using the book for. If it's a resource for something, then digital just makes sense. If it's for blowing your mind with a story about Flagg and the super-flu killing almost everyone on Earth, then it's almost a trophy or monument to your experience. Especially a book like The Stand. To me, it's the difference between the 100k photos I have sitting in the cloud and the photo albums my mother has sitting on her shelf, which she knows by heart. Or having access to pretty much ALL the music on the play store, or holding a new album by Jack White and seeing the artwork off a screen. Maybe it's just a luxury now to have physical items, or maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, I don't know.

billfruit 8y ago

Ebook readers generally last long time, may be even a month or more on a single charge. Many ebooks are in the public domain and can be had free of cost from Gutenberg and other sources, which are free from any kind of lock-in or DRM. Especially for English, eReaders have opened up almost the entirety of the corpus of authors like Trollope, Scott, Thackeray, Meredith, Conrad, Henry James, George Eliot, Stevenson, Bennett, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis etc, many of which works are no longer easily obtained as physical copies.

gooseus 8y ago

Mostly agreed, some of my addenda: Physical better: - Persistent subconscious knowledge of where I am in the book (weight in each hand). - Much easier to flip back multiple pages to re-read a section and flip to where you were. - Resilient to collapses of information/power infrastructure. Digital better: - Traveling with many books is impractical - Built-in dictionary and wikipedia search - Resilient to fire and water damage

shitgoose 8y ago
Not sure I understand the last point about fire and water damage, but the rest are exactly my thoughts.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  Not the parent, but at least for me my ebook collection is far less likely to be irretrievably lost than my physical library. I keep important data like photos, documents, and books backed up in multiple places, including off-site. So if my house burns down or floods, my physical library will be irretrievably destroyed, while I will still be able to access my digital library.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Pigo 8y ago

That's why I think it comes down to what your using the book for. If it's a resource for something, then digital just makes sense. If it's for blowing your mind with a story about Flagg and the super-flu killing almost everyone on Earth, then it's almost a trophy or monument to your experience. Especially a book like The Stand. To me, it's the difference between the 100k photos I have sitting in the cloud and the photo albums my mother has sitting on her shelf, which she knows by heart. Or having access to pretty much ALL the music on the play store, or holding a new album by Jack White and seeing the artwork off a screen. Maybe it's just a luxury now to have physical items, or maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, I don't know.