4 ms·

I have the opposite view for most of the items you've listed. I'm a millennial. I think that most of it boils down to two things: UX and sense of worth. First,

I have the opposite view for most of the items you've listed. I'm a millennial. I think that most of it boils down to two things: UX and sense of worth. First, for UX, I find most e-formatted books to be terrible. Sure fiction is okay in such a format. It's linear. Start on page 1. Work through until end. Sadly, I don't read fiction (my wife gets on me for this). I read technical things. I read things that require a House of Pain level of Jumping Around. I get five pages into a a section then need to backtrack. E-books are terrible for this. It's because they suck on Kobo and other e-readers. The screens too small to hold the code information. Large screen e-readers for A4 style documents never really existed (in a reasonable price range) on an open platform. Many technical works are A4 PDFs. They don't work well on e-book readers. I tried reading on two tables to get a better UX. The first was an HP flippy notebook. I read over 3,000 pages of IBM Red Books on Websphere Process Server and the old IBM MQ BPM whose name I'm forgetting. It wasn't terrible. A bit small because the resolution on the HP was lower than a modern laptop. However, it was 5-6 lbs. Crap was that tiring. So I got an iPad. Turns out that the resolution on that is too low for A4. Sure I can zoom. Sure I got GoodReader. Sure it was annoying when I tried to page through on a zoomed page. UX still sucks. Non-PDF tech books are better in iBook or the other readers available. I ran an experiment with Joy Of Clojure 2: The Clojuring. Not bad. Only worked inside. So I never got read at the beach (I moved to Florida to do that, amongst other reasons). UX never worked for me. I hope for a day when an e-reader fits a full page of information comfortably in the screen with ability to quickly leaf back through pages without slow refresh rates. Until that day comes, physical, heavy books it is. Second, I've come to the conclusion that I don't care for media. That isn't to say I don't use it. I do. Like crack. I sit on my sofa and do nothing but watch TV shows that I don't really care for, but it's easy enough to be motivated to just sit there. As a result, I don't pay for cable. I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime (Prime more for the shipping, but combined with the streaming, I get my money's worth). I don't buy DVDs any more. I don't watch the ones I have (except for once a year watching the Harry Potter movies over a weekend). I just don't care. So Netflix is fine with me. Control what they want, but the media companies wouldn't have made money off me if they were open. Media has almost no value to me. If my wife wasn't around, I'd get rid of Netflix (keep Prime, shipping to a small Florida town makes life better). From what I can tell through anecdotal observations, media is on the wane for most millennials. We don't philosophically care. That's why we're fine to rent access. It's not an asset. It's not an investment. It's something to do to distract and we've got phones with the Internet and its Tumblr and Facebook and Rock'em-Sock'em-Robots.

anigbrowl 12y ago
I find most e-formatted books to be terrible Several people have brought this up, and I think it's a great example of path-dependency and bad choices. I remember when CDs first became available and enterprising publishers were trying to think of what to do with all that space, so they made 'shovelware' CDs containing hundreds of shareware games or other commodifiable stuff - particulary the 'Project Gutenberg' collections of classic books in electronic form. Great! But when you'd open them up, they were a mess of line breaks, chapter headings (on every page), page numbers. Even today, the default UTF-8 text versions are still formatted for 80 character terminals or the dot-matrix pritners that preceded them. The basic literary units (regardless of topic) are words, sentences, and paragraphs. Not lines. Even the most humble text editor has an inbuilt word-wrapping capability; there is no reason to add line breaks to a digital text. 'But,' some will argue, 'what about people who are in a terminal and trying to read something using 'more'?' Well, use a damn pipe. It's insanely stupid to digitize a text and then impose device-specific formatting on it. If something needs to be highly organized in the manner of a technical book, then mark it up properly with TeX or whatever. But if it's linear and doesn't depend on specific typography, then there's no reason to be baking any formatting in.

anigbrowl 12y ago

I find most e-formatted books to be terrible Several people have brought this up, and I think it's a great example of path-dependency and bad choices. I remember when CDs first became available and enterprising publishers were trying to think of what to do with all that space, so they made 'shovelware' CDs containing hundreds of shareware games or other commodifiable stuff - particulary the 'Project Gutenberg' collections of classic books in electronic form. Great! But when you'd open them up, they were a mess of line breaks, chapter headings (on every page), page numbers. Even today, the default UTF-8 text versions are still formatted for 80 character terminals or the dot-matrix pritners that preceded them. The basic literary units (regardless of topic) are words, sentences, and paragraphs. Not lines. Even the most humble text editor has an inbuilt word-wrapping capability; there is no reason to add line breaks to a digital text. 'But,' some will argue, 'what about people who are in a terminal and trying to read something using 'more'?' Well, use a damn pipe. It's insanely stupid to digitize a text and then impose device-specific formatting on it. If something needs to be highly organized in the manner of a technical book, then mark it up properly with TeX or whatever. But if it's linear and doesn't depend on specific typography, then there's no reason to be baking any formatting in.