4 ms·

Honestly, the opposite is true for me. Ebooks download immediately and take up zero space, you can carry them all with you in one device. Way better than physic

Honestly, the opposite is true for me. Ebooks download immediately and take up zero space, you can carry them all with you in one device. Way better than physical books as far as I'm concerned. Also, in terms of the sheer entertainment to cost ratio books are incredibly good value at current pricing.

shantly 7y ago
I think the divide here's largely along the lines of what people read. E-readers are king for light fiction or airport nonfic, for instance, but pretty awful for heavy nonfiction reading (think: textbooks), with everything else falling somewhere in between—poetry: somewhat bad on ereaders but maybe tolerable, depending on what it is; good, older literature, depends on how much you want/need footnotes or to refer to other parts of the book, and how inclined you are to annotate; books of any kind used for actual research, you probably want several open at once and a bunch more with tons of bookmarks in them that you can have open to a certain spot (you remember which one with spatial memory and maybe bookmark color) in a few seconds, which gets dicey with e-readers, even if you have more than one; and so on. Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens.
- sib 7y ago
  "Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens." True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.

shantly 7y ago

I think the divide here's largely along the lines of what people read. E-readers are king for light fiction or airport nonfic, for instance, but pretty awful for heavy nonfiction reading (think: textbooks), with everything else falling somewhere in between—poetry: somewhat bad on ereaders but maybe tolerable, depending on what it is; good, older literature, depends on how much you want/need footnotes or to refer to other parts of the book, and how inclined you are to annotate; books of any kind used for actual research, you probably want several open at once and a bunch more with tons of bookmarks in them that you can have open to a certain spot (you remember which one with spatial memory and maybe bookmark color) in a few seconds, which gets dicey with e-readers, even if you have more than one; and so on. Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens.

sib 7y ago
"Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens." True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.