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This only matters if your definition of efficient is along the axis of carring more books or minimizing space uptake. If your efficiency is based on the pleasur

This only matters if your definition of efficient is along the axis of carring more books or minimizing space uptake. If your efficiency is based on the pleasure of holding pages, the visual aesthetic of multiple books, the maximum amount of time to go without a charge, collecting signed editions, etc. then eBooks are completely garbage.

shantly 7y ago
They’re also superior in most ways as interfaces to works with more features than “main body text”, and to which you intend to refer again very often. Pop fic and pop non-fic, then, for ebooks. Excellent for those. Paper or both for most everything else.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Aye. I've been reading on a long line of Sony Readers since 2005, and currently use a PRS-350 that I'm preserving as long as I can (I never liked Kindles). It's only a replacement for a stack of novels or other such books I intend to read cover to cover, probably once and once only. I've read over a thousand books on it, got a couple of dozen stacked up in there at any one time ready to go. My paper book library has increased every year; novels I want to own on paper (sometimes more than one copy), books received as gifts, technical books, art books, picture books, language books, reference books, mathematical text books, graphic novels (and indeed, some things that clearly are "comics"), a significant number of books that simply aren't available in electronic form (and I probably wouldn't want in electronic form anyway - if I'm buying a book from the 1800s I want the physical artifact!), more and more. At the moment, the only benefit I see to the Sony Reader is that it's very lightweight and compact for a stack of 12 novels. That is a very serious benefit and it's a real lifesaver for travelling, but inside the house I'm paper all the way. The only problem I have with them is that I'm genuinely running out of space to put them. Every bookshelf is two (or even three deep) with books, and I've lost one desk entirely to books piled three to four feet deep. There is a real chance that I might end up finally giving up on renting purely to buy a house in which I can turn a couple of rooms into decent book storage.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Yeah, I've been forcing myself to make Hard Choices about my largish collection of books, and novels from the last 80-100 years are the easiest ones to ditch in favor of ebooks. Even short story collections, it's kinda nice to have those in dead-tree format for convenience, but ordinary (not, like, Infinite Jest), somewhat recent novels? Hard to justify keeping them around.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Yes, but again, these rely on different definitions of efficiency. I definitely don't consider multi-method interfacing to be useful to me at all in the books I read. I would much rather physically write notes if I want to commit something to reference or memory, since my brain has O(1) lookup where I wrote where something else is, but an O(n) lookup when I get to the note-bucket of my reference pools. Much easier to scan over a single page or a sticky note on the physical book surface than however long would be my library's notes as a totality.

shantly 7y ago

They’re also superior in most ways as interfaces to works with more features than “main body text”, and to which you intend to refer again very often. Pop fic and pop non-fic, then, for ebooks. Excellent for those. Paper or both for most everything else.

EliRivers 7y ago
Aye. I've been reading on a long line of Sony Readers since 2005, and currently use a PRS-350 that I'm preserving as long as I can (I never liked Kindles). It's only a replacement for a stack of novels or other such books I intend to read cover to cover, probably once and once only. I've read over a thousand books on it, got a couple of dozen stacked up in there at any one time ready to go. My paper book library has increased every year; novels I want to own on paper (sometimes more than one copy), books received as gifts, technical books, art books, picture books, language books, reference books, mathematical text books, graphic novels (and indeed, some things that clearly are "comics"), a significant number of books that simply aren't available in electronic form (and I probably wouldn't want in electronic form anyway - if I'm buying a book from the 1800s I want the physical artifact!), more and more. At the moment, the only benefit I see to the Sony Reader is that it's very lightweight and compact for a stack of 12 novels. That is a very serious benefit and it's a real lifesaver for travelling, but inside the house I'm paper all the way. The only problem I have with them is that I'm genuinely running out of space to put them. Every bookshelf is two (or even three deep) with books, and I've lost one desk entirely to books piled three to four feet deep. There is a real chance that I might end up finally giving up on renting purely to buy a house in which I can turn a couple of rooms into decent book storage.
- shantly 7y ago
  Yeah, I've been forcing myself to make Hard Choices about my largish collection of books, and novels from the last 80-100 years are the easiest ones to ditch in favor of ebooks. Even short story collections, it's kinda nice to have those in dead-tree format for convenience, but ordinary (not, like, Infinite Jest), somewhat recent novels? Hard to justify keeping them around.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
Yes, but again, these rely on different definitions of efficiency. I definitely don't consider multi-method interfacing to be useful to me at all in the books I read. I would much rather physically write notes if I want to commit something to reference or memory, since my brain has O(1) lookup where I wrote where something else is, but an O(n) lookup when I get to the note-bucket of my reference pools. Much easier to scan over a single page or a sticky note on the physical book surface than however long would be my library's notes as a totality.