7 ms·

Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

63 points by diego 15y ago

pistacchio 15y ago
i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them. i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own. i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
- cbs 15y ago
  This bothers me too, I have a hard time sacrificing all the properties inherent to a ownership of physical book for the one convenience that the kindle offers. Instead I find myself returning to buying books and only using the kindle for reading longer things copy-and-pasted from my computer.
- swombat 15y ago
  I don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own. I feel exactly the same, and yet I just bought a Kindle and am very much planning to use it for most of my reading. How do I resolve this dilemna? Well, my parents had the same issue, though set up differently. When they fled from Romania after I was born, they had none of the huge library which they had back where they grew up. So what did they do? They bought books. They bought the kinds of books which they wanted to have sitting on shelves in the house where I grew up, so that I could stumble on them and read them. It worked pretty well. Most of the best books can be found for cheap in flea-markets. Building a solid library of top quality classics, from Gogol, Dostoievsky, Dumas and Dickens, to Hesse, Mann, Marques and Gary, is not that expensive.
- hyperbovine 15y ago
  I am extremely annoyed that there is no way to buy and sell used electronic books. It brings me right back to those stupid debates we had in the 90s with RIAA about whether I'm buying a license or an object when I purchase a CD. Then as now, I feel a lot less bad about pirating content when the publishers impose artificial restrictions on what I can and cannot do with things I the stuff I own.
- estevez 15y ago
  I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me. Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).
- troymc 15y ago
  Here's an idea: Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas. The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.
  - estevez 15y ago
    >National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve. I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.
- gte910h 15y ago
  Children do what their parents do not what they own. If you read, your kids will read if you give them encouragement to do so.
maukdaddy 15y ago
When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter or read a couple of pages on the phone. Maybe you should spend these few minutes in quiet contemplation? You can learn a lot by exploring your mind during quiet times and not constantly binging on information.
- diego 15y ago
  For that I go outdoors. Restaurants in San Francisco are not precisely quiet :)
- blurbytree 15y ago
  There's tons of other time for that, when you can't read etc. eg when you're driving.
FreeKill 15y ago
I completely agree with the OP, at first I thought I would miss having a physical book in my hands, but to be honest I don't really miss it at all. There are so many advantages to eBook reading such as light weight (compared to some hard covers), increased font size, etc. I now find myself thinking of buying a hardcover book as more of a painful inconvenience rather than a benefit.
- oneiroscopist 15y ago
  same here.
- hyperbovine 15y ago
  Me three. Avoided buying a Kindle for years because I was unnerved by the idea of my book running out of batteries. In the three months since I acquired one my reading time has probably increased fivefold. The Kindle is a terrible device in so many ways--frumpy UI, 1980s-ish refresh rate, poor resolution compared to printed material--and yet still manages to be enjoyable to use. Makes me excited about the future of reading devices.
  - crander 15y ago
    I bought the first kindle and took it on a month long trip to Africa and re-read the Baroque Cycle on it. I jave a a few new Kindles since. I love most the platform aspect of Kindle and I rarely buy novels or computer tech books in any other form. However I grew up traveling to Powells books and living with physical books. I find that a good physical book has something that the digital version lacks. The physical form is a symbol for my memories of a book. I can simply pick it up and thoughts, themes and so forth come back to me. A quick flip through pulls out my memories. For deep study I still find that writing in ad underlining a book increases my understanding dramatically. For awhile I composed notes at the computer while I read but this was time consuming and akward. Digital books are disruptive. As Carr once wrote though, the disruption doesn't mean something isn't lost... often much is. We need to find the right ways to bring as much as that along with us from the physical world into the digital as we can. Perhaps I am too old already, but I am sure I will be one of the last with physical books as well as a continual user of the digital.
estevez 15y ago
Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?
- lpolovets 15y ago
  To play devil's advocate, should the format matter? It seems like the content is the most important thing. People say, "don't just a book by its cover." Shouldn't that apply to a book's format as well?
  - estevez 15y ago
    My reaction to your question might be telling: 1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic; 2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle"; 3. I wait 3 seconds; 4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over. Perhaps not fundamentally different from looking it up in the index, but it certainly feels so.
djacobs 15y ago
I refuse to buy a Kindle. TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service) Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.) Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.) Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over-engineered. It's legacy. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a database for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards. Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another. [0]: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
- anatoly 15y ago
  I own a Kindle and buy books through Amazon, but strip DRM off them immediately after buying.
  - swombat 15y ago
    Here's how to do it: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-books-and-others/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from... (I haven't tried this method, but it seems extremely straightforward)
    - anatoly 15y ago
      The method offered at the post urges you to install the desktop Kindle software, and de-DRMs files from its storage. That hasn't always worked in the last year, as Amazon tried to obfuscate the key storage in the desktop versions, and there's been a kind of race between Amazon and the authors of the de-DRMing tools. I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.
davidf18 15y ago
Novels and light non-fiction is easy to read on the Kindle but for non-fiction with lots of ideas that are new I often have to buy the hard copy as well and underline and notate. Still I like the Kindle version because I travel a lot.
- crander 15y ago
  As a hybrid user who reads many books in both physical and digital forms, I have found that my preference for Kindle is directly related to how much I have traveled in the last month or two.
- gdw2 15y ago
  I've been reading a non-fiction on my phone. I like how easy it is to highlight/annotate, though I haven't yet tried to go back and review my highlights...
- rogermugs 15y ago
  i would agree, but the new kindle touch makes notations super easy... and more importantly, finding those notations even easier.
waffle_ss 15y ago
I got a Kindle about a month ago but have since returned it. It seems to be an excellent device for reading any book that should be read serially (e.g. novels), but any type of book that requires "random access" (e.g. reference/technical) doesn't work well due to the small screen, inability to jump to page X (which makes it difficult to use an index since you can't easily jump to it from anywhere), and poor search functionality. Even if these features were implemented better, it would probably still be annoying as Kindles are sluggish, low-power devices (which is probably a boon for the serial-reading use case as it encourages you to just flip pages and not get sidetracked, as well as providing amazing battery life). Then again, maybe I'm just missing something as my coworker seems fine using his Kindle for this purpose.
- kmiyer 15y ago
  That's pretty true. The DX is slightly better (mainly due to its size), but for the kind of reading you describe you ideally want something more ipad-esque (which I suspect is why med schools decided to go with ipads instead of kindles)
- vital101 15y ago
  I have a Kindle, but any technical books I read are physical. It's much easier to thumb through information quickly with a physical book when you aren't quite sure what you're looking for.
- zem 15y ago
  my general rule of thumb these days is to buy fiction on the kindle and nonfiction in paper.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  I agree. Between the refresh rate of the e-ink screen and the general speed of the Kindle, I could never imagine using it as a programming reference or some such. Though, I've yet to try it and the ability to search would be great. Some books, even reference books, have pitiable indicies.
  - 15y ago
jaysonelliot 15y ago
Anything that gets more people reading more books is a positive in my opinion, but I'm still disturbed by the idea that ebooks are acceptable alternatives to physical books overall. If the future is one of ebooks and real books coexisting, I'm all for it. But if the more likely scenario plays out, where publishers use the higher profit margins and control that come from cutting out the printers and stores, and books die as physical objects, then I can't begin to express the sadness and loss I feel. The joy that comes from holding a book in my hands that I know was read and held by my grandfather years ago is irreplaceable. So is the beauty of a well-designed book, from the paper choices to the typography to the feel of the spine in my hand. And of course, the conversations that flow from seeing the title of a book someone's reading, or browsing their bookshelves at home. The very lack of technology in a book preserves their integrity against the strong temptations of adding sounds, animations, interactivity, advertising, even video. It's easy to imagine a world in the not so distant future where the idea of reading just words alone is sneered at as primitive and boring. Is there anyone that can offer any optimism?
- runjake 15y ago
  I'm sorry you're being downvoted. Thanks for this. As a person with books dating back to the 1800s, wise words to ponder.
- johnnyn 15y ago
  IMO, the only way for physical books to exists alongside ebooks is by bundling the ebook with the physical book, similar to movies. It baffles me why publishers haven't already done this, but then again...publishers aren't the brightest people.
  - LordBodak 15y ago
    This is the missing piece for me. I still want to own the physical book, but I would love the convenience of being able to load a bunch of books on my Kindle and take it on a trip or something. Plus, think of the lock-in that the stores are missing out on. As a Kindle owner, if Amazon offered me bundles, I would probably never buy another book at Barnes & Noble.
kghose 15y ago
Kindle -> fiction/non-fiction text Real books -> books needing many illustrations (e.g. art books) But, I really appreciate the issue of "What do we put on the bookshelves?" my wife and I have bookshelves filling a wall where we have our combined libraries - and that is aesthetically very pleasing for us. What will our children do if they only have electronic format reading material?
caela_ielle 15y ago
I read very specific types of books on my Kindle. Thick classics that are too big to carry around, New York Times bestseller page-turners, interesting books with an intriguing synopsis or something recommended by a friend. Things that I will read once, and maybe twice. Even though the ebook selection is still appalling with my local library, I've found it useful in this. What I don't buy: textbooks, and the favorites I've probably read at least ten times. Those are the books I want to keep in physical form--eReaders don't flip well, and no amount of slick e-ink and shiny devices is going to have the same soothing effect on my nerves as my much-loved copy of The Hobbit. Kindle, et al, at least for me, is dramatically streamlining the way I consume one type of book--the ones that before, I would go to the library, read, and return without a second thought. But not a whole lot else.
manojlds 15y ago
One way my reading habit has changed is that now I read even upto 3 books at the same time ( as in reading them not one after another, but switching between them.)
joelhooks 15y ago
The killer feature for me is the highlighting. I can fully review a book (technical) in minutes. Wife appreciates the shelf space.
Tichy 15y ago
I love ebooks, but I hate the kindle way that ties me to Amazon and makes it hard for me to share my books. Effectively, I no longer own books, I only borrow them from Amazon. Every now and then I get weak anyway and buy a kindle book. But often Amazon tells me I first need to switch my account from Amazon.com to Amazon.de. That is the reminder of what is wrong with it. Why does it matter where I buy my ebook? I want to buy my ebook wherever and whenever I want, and just have a device that can handle all my books. I know it is possible to get other books onto the kindle, but it is very cumbersome (I don't own a kindle, so the email transfer does not work). And they won't sync between devices, either, afaik. I find this very depressing, because it seems unlikely to change in the near future. Everybody wants to own their customer, nobody is going to deliver a reader that is simply a good reader. Not the least because it would also require titanic negotiations with book publishers to make their content available somehow.
- pauljonas 15y ago
  I believe there should be a law, or at least some economic disincentive to motivate Amazon (and other ebook providers) to export/import collections from their proprietary readers onto competitors. Ereaders should not be tied to a given collection -- it is an insane state -- imagine buying a CD or DVD that could only be played in players belonging to a single company or an appliance that would only run on selected utility systems. Why is this considered a natural and beneficial state for books?
WalterBright 15y ago
I've been running my old paper books through a scanner and throwing them away. The resulting pdf's are readable on the Kindle or my computer, or even on my ipod. I've probably done around 500 books by now. There's a looong way to go yet :-) I don't see much point in having physical books anymore other than coffee table books. I like having my library at my fingertips rather than scattered everywhere.
- swah 15y ago
  And by throwing away you mean "donating them", right? :)
rogermugs 15y ago
from comment I made on the website: Here's my thought. I don't read a whole lot of "crap fiction." I typically read the kind of books i want to reference later and would like to lend to people. If I could lend books an unlimited number of times (as i should be able to), I would never buy another hardcover again. As it is, I often end up finding a book I think I'd like to lend out, since I can only lend once ever on kindle, i buy a hardcopy used book (giving nothing to the publisher) for a few dollars used, then download an ebook copy pirated and read it on my kindle.... ticks me off that this is potentially the best thing since sliced bread and I'm fearful the model will be broken for the rest of my life due to these fools. if i could lend books i would buy books like crazy from amazon, everything from amazon, and the publishers would get something. as it is, i buy rights to the book used and then read it how i want. annoying.
restreitinho 15y ago
I think the most positive outcome of Kindle and other digital reading platforms is the ability you suddenly gain to carry a whole library without effort. It's just there. Also, I find the notes functionality to be a lifesaver (I love taking notes of things I read but hate to write on books, so) and overall the reading experience is just very swift.

63 points by diego 15y ago

i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them. i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own. i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.

cbs 15y ago
This bothers me too, I have a hard time sacrificing all the properties inherent to a ownership of physical book for the one convenience that the kindle offers. Instead I find myself returning to buying books and only using the kindle for reading longer things copy-and-pasted from my computer.
swombat 15y ago
I don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own. I feel exactly the same, and yet I just bought a Kindle and am very much planning to use it for most of my reading. How do I resolve this dilemna? Well, my parents had the same issue, though set up differently. When they fled from Romania after I was born, they had none of the huge library which they had back where they grew up. So what did they do? They bought books. They bought the kinds of books which they wanted to have sitting on shelves in the house where I grew up, so that I could stumble on them and read them. It worked pretty well. Most of the best books can be found for cheap in flea-markets. Building a solid library of top quality classics, from Gogol, Dostoievsky, Dumas and Dickens, to Hesse, Mann, Marques and Gary, is not that expensive.
hyperbovine 15y ago
I am extremely annoyed that there is no way to buy and sell used electronic books. It brings me right back to those stupid debates we had in the 90s with RIAA about whether I'm buying a license or an object when I purchase a CD. Then as now, I feel a lot less bad about pirating content when the publishers impose artificial restrictions on what I can and cannot do with things I the stuff I own.
estevez 15y ago
I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me. Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).
troymc 15y ago
Here's an idea: Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas. The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.
- estevez 15y ago
  >National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve. I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.
gte910h 15y ago
Children do what their parents do not what they own. If you read, your kids will read if you give them encouragement to do so.

maukdaddy 15y ago

When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter or read a couple of pages on the phone. Maybe you should spend these few minutes in quiet contemplation? You can learn a lot by exploring your mind during quiet times and not constantly binging on information.

diego 15y ago
For that I go outdoors. Restaurants in San Francisco are not precisely quiet :)
blurbytree 15y ago
There's tons of other time for that, when you can't read etc. eg when you're driving.

FreeKill 15y ago

I completely agree with the OP, at first I thought I would miss having a physical book in my hands, but to be honest I don't really miss it at all. There are so many advantages to eBook reading such as light weight (compared to some hard covers), increased font size, etc. I now find myself thinking of buying a hardcover book as more of a painful inconvenience rather than a benefit.

oneiroscopist 15y ago
same here.
hyperbovine 15y ago
Me three. Avoided buying a Kindle for years because I was unnerved by the idea of my book running out of batteries. In the three months since I acquired one my reading time has probably increased fivefold. The Kindle is a terrible device in so many ways--frumpy UI, 1980s-ish refresh rate, poor resolution compared to printed material--and yet still manages to be enjoyable to use. Makes me excited about the future of reading devices.
- crander 15y ago
  I bought the first kindle and took it on a month long trip to Africa and re-read the Baroque Cycle on it. I jave a a few new Kindles since. I love most the platform aspect of Kindle and I rarely buy novels or computer tech books in any other form. However I grew up traveling to Powells books and living with physical books. I find that a good physical book has something that the digital version lacks. The physical form is a symbol for my memories of a book. I can simply pick it up and thoughts, themes and so forth come back to me. A quick flip through pulls out my memories. For deep study I still find that writing in ad underlining a book increases my understanding dramatically. For awhile I composed notes at the computer while I read but this was time consuming and akward. Digital books are disruptive. As Carr once wrote though, the disruption doesn't mean something isn't lost... often much is. We need to find the right ways to bring as much as that along with us from the physical world into the digital as we can. Perhaps I am too old already, but I am sure I will be one of the last with physical books as well as a continual user of the digital.

estevez 15y ago

Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?

lpolovets 15y ago
To play devil's advocate, should the format matter? It seems like the content is the most important thing. People say, "don't just a book by its cover." Shouldn't that apply to a book's format as well?
- estevez 15y ago
  My reaction to your question might be telling: 1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic; 2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle"; 3. I wait 3 seconds; 4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over. Perhaps not fundamentally different from looking it up in the index, but it certainly feels so.

djacobs 15y ago

I refuse to buy a Kindle. TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service) Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.) Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.) Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over-engineered. It's legacy. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a database for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards. Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another. [0]: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

anatoly 15y ago
I own a Kindle and buy books through Amazon, but strip DRM off them immediately after buying.
- swombat 15y ago
  Here's how to do it: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-books-and-others/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from... (I haven't tried this method, but it seems extremely straightforward)
  - anatoly 15y ago
    The method offered at the post urges you to install the desktop Kindle software, and de-DRMs files from its storage. That hasn't always worked in the last year, as Amazon tried to obfuscate the key storage in the desktop versions, and there's been a kind of race between Amazon and the authors of the de-DRMing tools. I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.

davidf18 15y ago

Novels and light non-fiction is easy to read on the Kindle but for non-fiction with lots of ideas that are new I often have to buy the hard copy as well and underline and notate. Still I like the Kindle version because I travel a lot.

crander 15y ago
As a hybrid user who reads many books in both physical and digital forms, I have found that my preference for Kindle is directly related to how much I have traveled in the last month or two.
gdw2 15y ago
I've been reading a non-fiction on my phone. I like how easy it is to highlight/annotate, though I haven't yet tried to go back and review my highlights...
rogermugs 15y ago
i would agree, but the new kindle touch makes notations super easy... and more importantly, finding those notations even easier.

waffle_ss 15y ago

I got a Kindle about a month ago but have since returned it. It seems to be an excellent device for reading any book that should be read serially (e.g. novels), but any type of book that requires "random access" (e.g. reference/technical) doesn't work well due to the small screen, inability to jump to page X (which makes it difficult to use an index since you can't easily jump to it from anywhere), and poor search functionality. Even if these features were implemented better, it would probably still be annoying as Kindles are sluggish, low-power devices (which is probably a boon for the serial-reading use case as it encourages you to just flip pages and not get sidetracked, as well as providing amazing battery life). Then again, maybe I'm just missing something as my coworker seems fine using his Kindle for this purpose.

kmiyer 15y ago
That's pretty true. The DX is slightly better (mainly due to its size), but for the kind of reading you describe you ideally want something more ipad-esque (which I suspect is why med schools decided to go with ipads instead of kindles)
vital101 15y ago
I have a Kindle, but any technical books I read are physical. It's much easier to thumb through information quickly with a physical book when you aren't quite sure what you're looking for.
zem 15y ago
my general rule of thumb these days is to buy fiction on the kindle and nonfiction in paper.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
I agree. Between the refresh rate of the e-ink screen and the general speed of the Kindle, I could never imagine using it as a programming reference or some such. Though, I've yet to try it and the ability to search would be great. Some books, even reference books, have pitiable indicies.
- 15y ago

jaysonelliot 15y ago

Anything that gets more people reading more books is a positive in my opinion, but I'm still disturbed by the idea that ebooks are acceptable alternatives to physical books overall. If the future is one of ebooks and real books coexisting, I'm all for it. But if the more likely scenario plays out, where publishers use the higher profit margins and control that come from cutting out the printers and stores, and books die as physical objects, then I can't begin to express the sadness and loss I feel. The joy that comes from holding a book in my hands that I know was read and held by my grandfather years ago is irreplaceable. So is the beauty of a well-designed book, from the paper choices to the typography to the feel of the spine in my hand. And of course, the conversations that flow from seeing the title of a book someone's reading, or browsing their bookshelves at home. The very lack of technology in a book preserves their integrity against the strong temptations of adding sounds, animations, interactivity, advertising, even video. It's easy to imagine a world in the not so distant future where the idea of reading just words alone is sneered at as primitive and boring. Is there anyone that can offer any optimism?

runjake 15y ago
I'm sorry you're being downvoted. Thanks for this. As a person with books dating back to the 1800s, wise words to ponder.
johnnyn 15y ago
IMO, the only way for physical books to exists alongside ebooks is by bundling the ebook with the physical book, similar to movies. It baffles me why publishers haven't already done this, but then again...publishers aren't the brightest people.
- LordBodak 15y ago
  This is the missing piece for me. I still want to own the physical book, but I would love the convenience of being able to load a bunch of books on my Kindle and take it on a trip or something. Plus, think of the lock-in that the stores are missing out on. As a Kindle owner, if Amazon offered me bundles, I would probably never buy another book at Barnes & Noble.

kghose 15y ago

Kindle -> fiction/non-fiction text Real books -> books needing many illustrations (e.g. art books) But, I really appreciate the issue of "What do we put on the bookshelves?" my wife and I have bookshelves filling a wall where we have our combined libraries - and that is aesthetically very pleasing for us. What will our children do if they only have electronic format reading material?

caela_ielle 15y ago

I read very specific types of books on my Kindle. Thick classics that are too big to carry around, New York Times bestseller page-turners, interesting books with an intriguing synopsis or something recommended by a friend. Things that I will read once, and maybe twice. Even though the ebook selection is still appalling with my local library, I've found it useful in this. What I don't buy: textbooks, and the favorites I've probably read at least ten times. Those are the books I want to keep in physical form--eReaders don't flip well, and no amount of slick e-ink and shiny devices is going to have the same soothing effect on my nerves as my much-loved copy of The Hobbit. Kindle, et al, at least for me, is dramatically streamlining the way I consume one type of book--the ones that before, I would go to the library, read, and return without a second thought. But not a whole lot else.

manojlds 15y ago

One way my reading habit has changed is that now I read even upto 3 books at the same time ( as in reading them not one after another, but switching between them.)

joelhooks 15y ago

The killer feature for me is the highlighting. I can fully review a book (technical) in minutes. Wife appreciates the shelf space.

Tichy 15y ago

I love ebooks, but I hate the kindle way that ties me to Amazon and makes it hard for me to share my books. Effectively, I no longer own books, I only borrow them from Amazon. Every now and then I get weak anyway and buy a kindle book. But often Amazon tells me I first need to switch my account from Amazon.com to Amazon.de. That is the reminder of what is wrong with it. Why does it matter where I buy my ebook? I want to buy my ebook wherever and whenever I want, and just have a device that can handle all my books. I know it is possible to get other books onto the kindle, but it is very cumbersome (I don't own a kindle, so the email transfer does not work). And they won't sync between devices, either, afaik. I find this very depressing, because it seems unlikely to change in the near future. Everybody wants to own their customer, nobody is going to deliver a reader that is simply a good reader. Not the least because it would also require titanic negotiations with book publishers to make their content available somehow.

pauljonas 15y ago
I believe there should be a law, or at least some economic disincentive to motivate Amazon (and other ebook providers) to export/import collections from their proprietary readers onto competitors. Ereaders should not be tied to a given collection -- it is an insane state -- imagine buying a CD or DVD that could only be played in players belonging to a single company or an appliance that would only run on selected utility systems. Why is this considered a natural and beneficial state for books?

WalterBright 15y ago

I've been running my old paper books through a scanner and throwing them away. The resulting pdf's are readable on the Kindle or my computer, or even on my ipod. I've probably done around 500 books by now. There's a looong way to go yet :-) I don't see much point in having physical books anymore other than coffee table books. I like having my library at my fingertips rather than scattered everywhere.

swah 15y ago
And by throwing away you mean "donating them", right? :)

rogermugs 15y ago

from comment I made on the website: Here's my thought. I don't read a whole lot of "crap fiction." I typically read the kind of books i want to reference later and would like to lend to people. If I could lend books an unlimited number of times (as i should be able to), I would never buy another hardcover again. As it is, I often end up finding a book I think I'd like to lend out, since I can only lend once ever on kindle, i buy a hardcopy used book (giving nothing to the publisher) for a few dollars used, then download an ebook copy pirated and read it on my kindle.... ticks me off that this is potentially the best thing since sliced bread and I'm fearful the model will be broken for the rest of my life due to these fools. if i could lend books i would buy books like crazy from amazon, everything from amazon, and the publishers would get something. as it is, i buy rights to the book used and then read it how i want. annoying.

restreitinho 15y ago

I think the most positive outcome of Kindle and other digital reading platforms is the ability you suddenly gain to carry a whole library without effort. It's just there. Also, I find the notes functionality to be a lifesaver (I love taking notes of things I read but hate to write on books, so) and overall the reading experience is just very swift.