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Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen. But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive. The
by romaniv 12y ago
Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen. But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive. There are so many advantages to printed books that people ignore it's not even funny.
Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen. But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive. There are so many advantages to printed books that people ignore it's not even funny.
- No need for batteries.
- You can gift them.
- You can lend them.
- You can sell them.
- You can add sticky notes to bookmark and add notes without relying on some crappy software.
- No need for constant backups. Many books have been preserved for generations. People have trouble finding files from couple years ago.
- Format-agnostic. Remember about all the dead floppy drives and outdated formats, such as VHS and ZipDrive.)
- Great decoration, conversation starter and a kind of personal statement.
- As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find.
- Personally, I remember when and where I bought most of the physical books. Seeing them on a shelf serves as a great reminder. You are less likely to forget about physical book, than about a file. Before you proclaim this a silly point, take a look at your Steam/GOG "library". Do you even remember what's there? Do you remember how and when you bought it? Does it bring any contextual memories?
I can continue the list, just don't want to.
- xasos 12y ago> - As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find. This is the main reason I still use paper. While digital may be cheaper and more portable, print is so much easier in the eyes and I tend to read much faster than on a bright panel.
- omaranto 12y agoHave you tried an e-ink screen?
- xasos 12y agoI haven't, but would to give it a shot in the future. I feel like it would be a hassle to convert books that aren't already ePub/(insert DRM format here) though. Do you find this to be a problem?
- widowlark 12y agoCalibre ereader management is any easy piece of software that makes those conversions a lot faster
- omaranto 12y agoWell, I had an old Sony PR-505 eReader and while it could read PDF's it ccertainly wasn't ideally suited to it. I did usually preprocess them by at least cropping the margins as much as I could (a program called briss makes this easy). But I think modern eReaders are much better and might be able to zoom in on PDFs. Every other format I came across I converted to ePub using Calibre, which is fairly painless.
- the_af 12y agoAgreed, and I'll add one more to the list: when reading for pleasure, I have the habit of going back and forth, sometimes going a few pages back to remember who was the character that said something. Sometimes when I continue reading a novel, I go back a few chapters and re-read a specific paragraph. I don't know exactly where it was, but I know it was "some pages back, in the middle of the page". For some reason, doing this with an actual book is a lot faster than with an ebook. Partly this is because of the slow screen refresh in my 2nd gen Kindle, which makes repeatedly changing pages a pain, but mostly it is because "random access" for a print book is way faster than for an ebook. The only ebook feature that beats a print book is searching for a specific word or sentence that you remember verbatim, but I seldom remember things verbatim...
- pakled_engineer 12y agoThey also can't be remotely stolen from you like when proprietary reading devices wiped ebooks for various copyright changes, and the print edition can't be quietly changed. Print requires errata or apologies from newspapers about corrections but ninja editing is too easy with digital.