8 ms·

I recently started buying paper books. Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (d

• acchow 3y ago
  These sound like common traits for ADHDers.
• iamacyborg 3y ago
  Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections. I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.
  • SubmarineClub 3y ago
    Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.
    • UncleOxidant 3y ago
      It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.
      • Tor3 3y ago
        It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through. Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.
    • maximilianthe1 3y ago
      While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it. I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.
    • dhosek 3y ago
      My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book. Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
  • skydhash 3y ago
    I classify skimming as a "distracting" activity. I always ask myself: What information do I need? And then it's very easy to get to the relevant passage. And outlines are there for a reason (PDF Expert can edit them) so navigating between the same file is not that cumbersome for me. I do agree that the experience is more pleasant with a paper book, but in a focused session, the result is pretty much the same. Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    > Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections. Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.
    • Tor3 3y ago
      I prefer PDFs for informative material (various documentation), though they're less useful if it's just a photocopied old manual (no OCR). It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.
  • Ferret7446 3y ago
    That's a software choice issue. You can definitely flip through digital texts more easily than physical. With a decent monitor, you can flip through multiple books at the same time which is quite difficult to do with physical books, assuming you haven't summoned eldritch appendages to help.
• echelon_musk 3y ago
  The older I get the less I trust myself to know how to administer or even to care how to work any current or future reading e-device. A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency! I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.
  • ethbr1 3y ago
    When I'm on vacation, I always read paper books. Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock) Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden. Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopamine baseline / memory, but that's just suspicion from having lived pre-smartphone. PS: Also, re: environmental impact. eBay and Amazon sell tons of used books. Sure you're shipping them around, but I really buy new these days.
    • dripton 3y ago
      I'm just the opposite. One of the worst things about vacations was having to carry along all those books or take a detour to a bookstore (if there were any) to buy more. Now I just carry a single small e-reader. It's a great savings in terms of cargo space. I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.
    • AlotOfReading 3y ago
      You forgot the third and fourth failure modes: weight and bag space. Books take a lot of it. An e-reader is thinner than any book and weighs the same no matter how many it's holding. I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
• roughly 3y ago
  I do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus. Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the energy and resources required to create, use, and dispose of an e-reader would be markedly higher than one would suspect, and I think people replace them more often than necessary. Books, on the other hand, are trees. Bury 'em in your yard when you're done with them and the fungi will know what to do to recycle them.
  • karmakaze 3y ago
    This is not good news. I just got my first eInk reader today and first thing I did was go through all the navigation setup pages. I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.
    • Nifty3929 3y ago
      FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort. Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything else to do except read my book. How much time can I spend on settings? Browsing my library? As far as brightness I leave it alone mostly and don't think about it unless it's irritatingly one way or the other. I have no idea what "navigation setup pages" are - I've been through several different Kindles and I pretty much just take them out of the box and start reading. There's nothing to "set up" outside of logging into my Amazon account. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
      • jhbadger 3y ago
        Also, while I know the readership of HN skews young, but when you reach your 50s, having the ability to make the text larger in an ebook is a killer feature.
• skydhash 3y ago
  I use my iPad and my Kobo for digital reading. I have paper version of "important" books (stuff I'd like to read if I don't have power), but some are unwieldy (Algorithms by Cormen et Al). I prefer e-ink for reading, but it's too slow for my learning workflow. I highlight and mark interesting stuff, that I export later to condense and reflect upon. And that is cumbersome on an e-reader. There's also the matter of size. I generally like the PDF version of technical books as they're typeset well, but my e-reader is too small for them. So I use my iPad for those (Distraction is handled by the fact that I read those in short focused sessions). But for fiction books, the e-reader is perfect. I don't highlight text in those books, I just read. Any other operation is slow enough that I just can't fiddle with it. And it's perfect for long sessions of reading as it does not project light in my eyes. It's light, so I just bring it with me everywhere.
  • alexpetralia 3y ago
    I recommend the Fujitsu Quaderno. Great for marking up textbooks on A4 size pages, and far lighter than a book itself.
    • Koshkin 3y ago
      An Apple-esque expensive stuff. (A pen sheath, $32.)
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      Will you be able to read those textbooks and markups in 10 or 20 years, if Fujitsu stops making Quadernos?
• duderific 3y ago
  I have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.
  • hollandheese 3y ago
    Well you can get the cover art, but yeah. I mean you can get the differing font faces and etc. if the publisher built that into the file, but most don't go to that amount of effort on their e-books.
  • beautron 3y ago
    I feel this strongly. Physical books make a deeper impression in my memory. There are all sorts of particularities of how the book was bound: it's size, it's smell, the texture of the paper, etc. It's like the book exists in its own unique space (vs all digital books existing in the single shared space of my computer/reader). I think a book's reading environment loses some richness when all these subtle little details are homogenized.
• m463 3y ago
  I found that I change the font size/lighting depending on time of day, which is harder to do with a paper book :)
• nate 3y ago
  Same. I recently got one of these wirecutter book lights: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/glocusent-reading-light-review/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/glocusent-reading... Does an amber color for bedtime reading, and now I' tearing through books again. It's so much easier to skim, skip, re-find something (yes, even without fancy search) and I just find myself reading faster with real books again. It's rekindled :) a love of books again I feel like I lost somehow only doing it on e-readers.
• endgame 3y ago
  On top of all of that, nobody's going to revise the book out from under me while I'm reading it, or prevent me from loaning it to a friend, or even yanking it entirely from my device.
  • Tor3 3y ago
    As far as I know (in the sense that I've never experienced anything like it in a decade of using a Kindle) that the book's getting revised from under me while I'm reading it. There's an occasional update for some books, but I have to actively choose to download the updated version, otherwise my original stays the same. I think I've only downloaded an updated version a single time.
  • BoringTimesGang 3y ago
    Reading ebooks doesn't mean submitting to Amazon's ecosystem.
  • kubanczyk 3y ago
    Let me introduce you to two of my best friends: Airplane Mode and USB cable.
• hintymad 3y ago
  Same here. I'm not sure if it's psychological. When reading my Kindle, I have to constantly fight my urge to do something else, maybe except for reading a page-turner novel.
  • jprete 3y ago
    That's exactly why I get paper books. An e-reader is too much like a smartphone and I start circling the UI looking for distractions.
• jhatemyjob 3y ago
  This was my opinion until I got the Kindle Scribe, turns out the Kindle was too damn small
• zem 3y ago
  exact opposite for me - the more i got into ebooks, the harder i found it to handle the ergonomics of paper books, and today my reading is pretty much 100% on my phone or kindle.
• Tor3 3y ago
  I prefer to read paper books, but there are three reasons I generally don't. a) Font size is getting too small for me. Years ago I changed to large hardcover (sometimes large but softcover) versions instead of the smaller-sized books I used to buy, simply because the fonts are larger then. With the Kindle I can set the font size to what I want. b) Weight and size. I read on airplanes, in hotels etc. I read a lot and I read fast, so I bring more than one book (and even that is too big and heavy, see a). The Kindle is king here. c) Storage. I don't have enough room for more books at home. I've sadly had to dump lots and lots and lots of books, even though I like to read the same books again (and again). Tried to sort out those most unlikely to get re-read, but.. I can't even give them away. Used-book stores have more than they can handle. As to the Kindle - I've never felt any urge to tinker with anything, except when I'm forced to: I set the font size, that's one single operation, forget it (at least for that book). If I occasionally read at night I have to add some backlight. And that's about it. I just read. What I miss about paper books is the nice cover (color..), how easy it is to "see" the book (bookmarks, flip it open somewhere else and so on). In addition to actually reading it. But the Kindle is actually very nice to read (unlike phones, PC monitors, tablets, all of that. I can't ready more than a couple of paragraphs on LCD displays)
• maxerickson 3y ago
  Paper is probably not the place you are going to be able to make your most significant marginal impact.
• wenc 3y ago
  I read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble. I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult. Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances. But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
  • kstrauser 3y ago
    I truly don’t mean to be pedantic, but there’s a giant implicit “for me” in there. I do not want or need to scribble or write in my books for “deep reading”. It’s totally fine if you want to, but that’s your preference and not a general requirement everyone has. I just finished “Moby Dick” on a Kobo. It’s no “Ulysses”, thank heavens, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it as a long romance or a beach read.
    • wenc 3y ago
      I think Moby Dick is a romance. I guess the term is confusing in English because people think “love story” but an older use of the word just means a novel with adventure, chivalric elements. There is also a giant implicit “for me” in your preference. It just happens that your preference happens to be one that is mainstream. A lot of types of reading are not linear —- for instance, if you have to read to write a book report, you have to go back, make notes, flip back and forth. A straight through reading will not produce a good book report. I read non-fiction and also great books (of the western canon) and in order to really read to understand, I need to flip back and forth and take notes and engage with the text. My reading instructor always tells me, “good reading is re-reading.” Single pass reading works for entertainment reading, but not for deep reading. (By deep reading, I mean the kind of reading that is taught in Mortimer Adler’s book referenced above) For deep reading you have to interact with the text, most commonly by debating with it in the margins. This is pretty standard for academic reading (say when taking a humanities or literature class). It’s a pretty common use case that eReaders don’t support.
      • 3y ago
• jszymborski 3y ago
  I've been buying used books from local booksellers and betterworldbooks.com when I can't find them locally. Seems like a fair compromise to me re: ecological impact.
• petre 3y ago
  > Yes, it's not particularly ecological As if food packaging is particulary ecological, but we continue to order food, eat takeaway and processed food reliant on packaging. I also buy paper books. Cheap paperback ones. Books can easily be recycled as opposed to food packaging which mostly ends up in landfills or litters the environment.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  Another nice benefit of paper is that the company that sold it can't just bust down your door, steal the book, drop off a few bucks, and then go back along their merry way. Amazon did exactly this with, amongst other books, 1984. Such a perfectly appropriate book.
  • kstrauser 3y ago
    None of my ebooks are infected with DRM. Lots of online stores will sell you ebooks without that nonsense.
    • GolfPopper 3y ago
      And if they won't, there are ways to pay for a copy (in whatever way most benefits the author), and then then get your DRM-free copy.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    You've got to wonder what the hapless Amazon employee asked to implement this felt, and how much leeway they had in which book for that to happen to first.
    • wizzwizz4 3y ago
      I expect it's all on George Orwell. Numbers sort before letters.
  • lannisterstark 3y ago
    I don't think they can do that with my calibre, and calibre-web collection lol.
    • lithiumii 3y ago
      But if you accidentally exposed your calibre-web online, they may be able to DMCA you?
• antod 3y ago
  > Yes, it's not particularly ecological If it makes you feel better, just think of your bookshelf as a carbon sequestration facility.
• zymhan 3y ago
  Who cares about the ecological impact of buying a book? You have missed the forest for the trees.
• tombert 3y ago
  I am kind of the opposite; I have found it much easier to read on Kindle simply because I can make the text as big as I want. In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me. Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it. I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me. Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.
  • kaashif 3y ago
    > I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. Didn't you say you're 13 years older than last time?
    • tombert 3y ago
      From a “ability to comprehend it” level, I don’t think that that matters all that much. 16 year old me could read just fine.
  • avar 3y ago
    Yes, surely the only reason you'd dislike something at 14-18 years old and like it at 27-31 is the font size. I take it your tastes have otherwise been immutable in that time period, and that you listen to the same music, follow the same fashion trends etc. as you did back then?
    • tombert 3y ago
      I didn’t say that they were immutable, but from a comprehension level I don’t think that things have changed substantially. Is it really controversial that bigger fonts are easier for me to read? I thought I made that pretty clear, that it was that I was having trouble parsing and understanding the small text. ETA: Also, lol, my tastes in music really hasn’t changed either. Looking at my YouTube music history, the last 40 songs I listened to were ones I listened to in high school. I also wear more or less the style clothes; I still have of the shirts I wore back then actually.
• dotnet00 3y ago
  I haven't had much trouble focusing on reading on computers, my only expectation is for the device to be touch screen and a pressure sensitive pen. The touch screen makes moving through pages trivial (for casual reading on say, my kindle, I have the habit of laying back and just tapping with my nose to flip pages lol) and the pen makes it trivial to mark up more serious reading material. With paper books I tend to not be near them right when I need them, and tend to be too wary of just marking them up. With digital stuff, and all the syncing we have between devices these days, I pretty much always have multiple devices at hand where the material is accessible. I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.
• datascienced 3y ago
  Yes plus the emotion of sitting on a couch with a paper book vs. a device is very different. The feeling of flicking pages is better than the UI of book readers or smart phones.
• bhhaskin 3y ago
  Honestly it is likely more ecological than ebooks after you factor in everything. Think about how many e-readers are sitting in the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Screens, batteries, plastic shells. The energy to not only power the device but all of the infrastructure for transmitting and storing the book.
• 127 3y ago
  Paper is a carbon sink. As long as you don't burn them, the carbon will stay in the book.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I'm the opposite. I stopped reading books because I was accumulating too many and it was difficult to find the ones I like without paying full price for new copies (which I'd eventually just discard). Also I find them cumbersome. Now I have a Kobo I read a lot. I can read on my side in bed. It's great. However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.
• hoseja 3y ago
  What goes on in your head that you even consider the "ecologicity" of a book. It has no impact. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Stop feeling guilty about meaningless things.
• mrweasel 3y ago
  It's also more ... social perhaps. I'm reading a book that an uncle bought, but never really got around to reading. I would have never picked up that book myself, but he brought it over an I stuck it in the bookshelf. Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal. There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though. I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.
• AndyMcConachie 3y ago
  Last Saturday I went to the bookstore, bought a paperback novel, and then went home and started reading it right away. It felt great and it reminded me of doing this in the past as I used to do this a lot in the past, but for some reason I had stopped. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts now, and that really cuts into my book reading. But nothing beats sitting down in the sun and reading a good paperback.
• jxramos 3y ago
  Yes, there's a strange habit with things we can twiddle and the surface area for twiddling physical books is much more limited and less engaging than with electronic devices. There's something to dedicated physical entities being single purpose and dead end that allows them to serve you in a very focused manner. Things with more bells and whistles, knobs and pulls will simply draw you into their twiddling even when it serves no purpose. It's like working with these things creates an itch that we need to scratch and it is distracting even if the recovery for focus for those things is minimal, it all adds up and gets you out of the focus state.