Ever since I lost my physical library of books to a fire, I've been an e-reader zealot. There are so many advantages: instantly start reading virtually book you want, effortlessly take digital highlights and annotations, carry a whole library in your pocket while you travel, read at night while your partner is asleep... I could go on.
As an e-reader evangelist, I've encountered all kinds of resistance. In fact, it's the norm. There is a widespread emotional, aesthetic attachment to physical books. To me, it's purely irrational. My favorite author, Nassim Taleb, tries to explain it:
> Whenever I sit on an airplane next to some businessman reading the usual trash businessmen read on an e-reader, said businessperson will not resist disparaging my use of the book by comparing the two items. Supposedly, an e-reader is more “efficient.” It delivers the essence of the book, which said businessman assumes is information, but in a more convenient way, as he can carry a library on his device and “optimize” his time between golf outings. I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment.
The only shortcoming of e-reading, in my opinion, is the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office. You can tell so much about a person by their library. I've been testing some solutions to this problem.
Physical books provide random access. I can open a physical book to any arbitrary page without doing data entry. This is part of the a bigger difference, physical books don't require me to be a systems administrator managing files and licenses and network connections and accounts tied to credit cards.
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Physical books provide parallel access, I can pile open books on and around my desk. I can leave one particular book by my favorite chair and two others by my bed for months at a time and each will be there to create a different experience for my different moods.
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To me, ebooks are like Skyping a lover or dining in an Indianoplis Olive Garden. Sometimes the best available option, but not an experience worthy of trans-Atlantic travel...sure maybe travel is purely irrational when Google can show me pictures and video of Tuscany and Wikipedia can give me its demographics.
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The touch of a clothbound book is not like holding my cellphone and the typeset pages of a trade paperback are distinct from my laptop's screen and the heft of one book is different from the other. Tufte is not a flavor of Soylent.
> Physical books provide random access. I can open a physical book to any arbitrary page without doing data entry...
Ebooks provide near instantaneous access. I can open my ebook reader, search for "alkyl-alkyl bond formation" and be provided with a list of references with their surrounding context across many different books at once. Digital books don't require me to laboriously look up something in the index and flip to it, only to find that the specific thing I was hunting for was actually in another textbook.
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> Physical books provide parallel access, I can pile open books on and around my desk...
Digital books provide perpetual access. I can read the same book on my phone on my commute, on my computer during work, and on my kindle at home. My physical books can be left at home or lost.
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> To me, ebooks are like Skyping a lover or dining in an Indianoplis Olive Garden...
To me, paper books are like getting around town in a horse carriage or listening from a vinyl. Fun and entertaining once in a while, but there's a more efficient method available to me day to day.
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> The touch of a clothbound book is not like holding my cellphone and the typeset pages of a trade paperback are distinct from my laptop's screen and the heft of one book is different from the other...
The heft of 600 page reference textbooks or the tiny, inscrutable font of mass market paperbacks are both vices I'm happy to do without.
Of the twin vices of heft and tiny print The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has both. I've had my used (two volume) flea market copy of The Compact for over twenty years. The magnifying glass and slipcase were absent when I purchased but back then I could read the tiny text. These days, I default to +2.0 reading glasses and a 100w equivalent lamp though I could probably get by with less...I think.
It would be great to have as an ebook, but such a thing does not exist and if it did, I suspect the price would close to two magnitudes more than the $8 I negotiated for my copy...heft perhaps had the virtue that the seller was less inclined to lug those many pounds back to their car.
Why not both? Each has their own set of pros and cons with different values depending on use-case and lifestyles. I have collections of both, and a many books in both formats.
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eg lookups...
Ebooks win for fact lookup, like "alkyl-alkyl bond formation", however I'd go to the internet for that. Lookups that require the appendix are roughly on-par.
Physical books win for plot referencing. Pages provide a physical heuristic for binary search, and current eink tech is much slower than physical page turns. Active displays are OK but I've yet to find a UI for effective binary searching Kindle books.
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Some more pros/cons, comparing physical books against the ebook+ereader combination.
- A physical book can be purchased and immediately read. Ebooks require a devices (cheap but not free).
- Physical books can be sold by their owner. Ebooks are cheaper, but often not by much and they can't be resold.
- Used books can be purchased for dirt cheap. Ebooks are easier to steal, but legal acquisition requires buying new.
- Loss of a book only blocks that one book, and costs as much as the one book. Ebooks cannot be stolen, but ereaders are much more expensive to replace.
- Books can have form-factors tailored to their content. ereaders can zoom and reformat content, but their screen size is fixed.
- Books offer rich calibrated colors. Most ereaders do not.
- Books can be loaned to anyone for as long as desired. Ebooks can be swapped, as long as the book allows loans and both parties use platforms/devices technology that support loans. Sometimes with time constraints.
- Books do not have batteries. Ebooks rely on ereaders with long-lasting but not infinite batteries.
- Books are unconditionally owned. ebooks have fine print and vendor-lock in.
- Books can be privately acquired offline. Ebooks always leave a paper trail.
- Books are physical artifacts that can be passed down. ebooks have some vendor support for "family accounts" and such, but are much harder to pass down (plus open questions around licensing when companies fail).
- Books can withstand serious blunt trauma, including getting thrown out of a 60mph car. Ebook readers cannot.
- Books can be freely copied for personal use. Publishers are hostile to duplicating ebooks for personal use.
- Books are an excellent source of emergency kindling when camping. ereaders are not, although some batteries can be used as fire starters.
> The only shortcoming of e-reading, in my opinion, is the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office. You can tell so much about a person by their library. I've been testing some solutions to this problem.
1. Can't re-sell, 2. tend to be significantly more expensive to begin with (no used market), 3. annotations, footnotes and such tend to be much worse, 4. often have severe formatting/editing issues (see: all the 1-star reviews for many books on Amazon, which are often full of "book's fine, but don't get the kindle version, it's terrible"), 5. lending can be tricky 6. two-pages-at-a-time and page-flipping is a really stellar interface that e-readers don't even come close to beating, 7. relatedly, use of spatial memory help with real books in a way they don't in ebooks, 8. on that line of though, shelved books aren't just for showing off: they can aid memory, and their arrangement can even help with finding related content and with learning (my literature is arranged chronologically for those reasons—I learn and reinforce some information just by existing in the same room as my books, basically), 9. can only have one book active per device. Switching is a PITA.
Ebooks' main selling points AFAIK are 1. space (admittedly a huge advantage!), and 2. full text search (OK, but not that great—there's such a thing as an index in most books for which this is seriously important, which will usually be better than full-text search). They're worse in just about every other way (though, again, the space thing is really nice)
> 1. Can't re-sell, 2. tend to be significantly more expensive to begin with (no used market)
Huge loss to society. We've lost a lot of things that we loved over the millenia, and we're still around. But I regret the eventual extinction of used (and new) bookstores. So many hours, sniffing those books and listening to the bell ring when the door opens ...
My coffee cup is sitting on a purpose-built book shelf housing a set of The Great Books, both bought used at the dearly departed Shorey's Books in downtown Seattle, decades ago.
When I moved in 2006, I gave away my set of Encyclopedia Britannica to a neighbor. 1957 edition with the dedicated bookcase purchased at a yard sale for $15 in 1989, just because 'Wow' and its own bookcase and some things don't go out of date. There's no Kindle edition of the '57 Britannica and if there was, it would not be $15 to me and free to my neighbor.
These days, my culled books go to a local charity's thrift shop or to Habitat's ReStore or to my public library for its book sale or to someone I know. Not the bitbucket.
The inability to loan a book and to curate a library are the biggest issues which brought me back to physical books after 3 years of being a devoted eReader. My Kindle gathers dust until a trip comes up and I read few things of meaningful value on it because of the aforementioned issues.
I do think much of this could be addressed by software and legal/copyright, lending & reselling being the most straightforward albeit they would likely lock you to a single DRM-heavy system.
My pipedream is to be able to separate the price of the IP from the method of delivery so that I could say buy a physical book for $10 and for $5 get a digital copy, and vice-versa spend $10 on a digital copy and $5 for a physical print.
April 05, 2017 – Rakuten Kobo Inc., one of the world’s most innovative eReading companies, today announced it has acquired Shelfie, a service that was built to enable customers to get free or discounted eBook versions of books in their print libraries, and get recommendations based on print books they already own. The deal includes technology assets, IP, and the infrastructure on which the ecosystem runs; it also includes hiring Shelfie’s skilled team, which specializes in the application of big data and machine learning for book discovery.
Shelfie ceased operations this January. Kobo worked with Shelfie to offer its customers the opportunity to transfer their eBook libraries to Kobo’s platform, ensuring they would continue to have access to their digital books. Over the coming months, Kobo will work to integrate the Shelfie platform into its Android and iOS apps, enabling readers to add their print libraries to their reading history to generate ever more tailored eBook recommendations, as well as the option to get digital versions of print titles they already own.
I hadn't seen MatchBook before, thanks for the referral.
Only got about a 10% match rate on books I purchased as physical copies through Amazon and only one direction (physical -> digital) but that's better than nothing. I hope they're investing in building up this service.
The main selling points of e-reading for me are the ones I listed previously:
1. I can get a new book immediately instead of visiting the book store or waiting for Amazon.
2. I can effortlessly take highlights and notes and then access those annotations through the cloud. I can't stand trying to write in the tiny margins of physical books and even if I did, I'd rarely reference my own notes because it's so much more laborious.
3. I can read at night without needing the light on (i.e., while in bed with my sleeping spouse). This is my main reading time. More generally, the form factor is better while lying down (and to the point above, I can still take notes).
> 1. I can get a new book immediately instead of visiting the book store or waiting for Amazon.
OK, yeah, missed that.
> 2. I can effortlessly take highlights and notes and then access those annotations through the cloud. I can't stand trying to write in the tiny margins of physical books and even if I did, I'd rarely reference my own notes because it's so much more laborious.
The cloud part's the only thing that's much different than having a little notebook, which I find so much easier to work with (aside from anywhere-the-Internet-is availability) that I wouldn't really count this as a win for ebooks, but if you find it easier, then it must be so for some.
> 3. I can read at night without needing the light on (i.e., while in bed with my sleeping spouse). This is my main reading time. More generally, the form factor is better while lying down (and to the point above, I can still take notes).
They make tiny clip-on lights for books that are little different. E-readers are nice for holding up, though I've discovered the hard way that the touchscreen e-ink devices, at least, are more annoying to use in bed than the real thing (brush a blanket or move your thumb a bit while shifting around->page turns)
1. Some books have horrible formats. In the physical books, shitty formatted texts are not printed (hopefully) and fixed.
2. Too many filetypes and some books tend to be only in a particular format, hence creating a separation. Though this is easily remedied by using converters, it loses formatting sometimes.
I still prefer EBook reader for the convenience. However, a physical book is great. I find it better but I do not have a good reason as to why.
An awful lot of books go in the trash simply because it is uneconomic to store them, ship them, or even sell them. If your interests run to more than a few hundred books, this becomes the crushing reality.
I find it hard to read on a kindle or iPad much as I'd like the convenience.
One reason is that they are so much slower -- you can go from page to page in a flick of an eye or a quick page turn. Another is that it couples the somatic memory, making it easier to flip back to an earlier place (I often read in a random-access fashion, especially as I proceed through a book. The paper typography is still so much better in almost every case. And of course there's the reflected vs transmitted light issue.
I really don't care what other people think about my books and have most of them hidden away in the part of the house where guests are not invited.
Nassim Taleb must not have met many librarians...we debate the physicality and other differences very regularly!
Joking aside, the "print or ebook" debate is a false dichotomy...both are here to stay. Both also have significant shortcomings. Thankfully, it's okay for feelings about books to be irrational.
> the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office. You can tell so much about a person by their library.
Plus books are aesthetically pleasing and bookcases are among the most interesting pieces of furniture people can have in their houses. If you invite me to your house, you can be sure I'll peruse your bookshelves, and ask you about your various books, and we'll have an interesting conversation. If we're friends, I'll borrow one of your books or remember to lend you one of mine next time we see each other.
With e-readers it's not the same. I won't ask you for your kindle, and it's definitely not an interesting piece of furniture.
> The only shortcoming of e-reading, in my opinion, is the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office.
An secondary advantage of pysical books is that they're much more beatiful to destroy. Burning books make a striking image, and not only because the ominous historical connotations.
Nobody would be bothered by an ereader melting in a fire or being crushed by a steamroller (unless it is their own, of course!) Even CDs were better for that.
Burning books can indeed be beautiful. I've destroyed badly written police novels this way, and once you overcome the nagging notion that burning books is naughty, it's actually very fun.
I'd never purify by the flame any book that didn't really deserve it on purely literary grounds; it must be really badly written trash. I think anything by Dan Brown would burn up nicely.
I would say I have experienced a similar feeling in a recent effort to reduce my fingerprint, deleting files on my computer/google drive that I don't use (which can be easily found over the internet). It just feels good, destroying information.
You're silly. In all seriousness, however, I did lose all my books to a fire so I can truly appreciate yet another advantage of e-reading: the digital books themselves are implicitly indestructible.
As an e-reader evangelist, I've encountered all kinds of resistance. In fact, it's the norm. There is a widespread emotional, aesthetic attachment to physical books. To me, it's purely irrational. My favorite author, Nassim Taleb, tries to explain it:
> Whenever I sit on an airplane next to some businessman reading the usual trash businessmen read on an e-reader, said businessperson will not resist disparaging my use of the book by comparing the two items. Supposedly, an e-reader is more “efficient.” It delivers the essence of the book, which said businessman assumes is information, but in a more convenient way, as he can carry a library on his device and “optimize” his time between golf outings. I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment.
The only shortcoming of e-reading, in my opinion, is the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office. You can tell so much about a person by their library. I've been testing some solutions to this problem.