I've never had this relationship with books. With stories, yes, and with nonfictional texts, and to some extent even with whatever of an author can be found within his words. That's the magic and the pleasure that's kept me reading nonstop since my mother got me going when I was two. But the physicality of paper has, past earliest childhood, been little more than an encumbrance. I read my first book from a screen at...ten? Twelve? Something like that - and I've never wanted to go back to paper; I now only do so when no other option exists.
I've heard similar statements from others who began reading in digital media at a relatively young age. I wonder if that's what makes the difference? Certainly it makes as much sense as anything else I can think of offhand.
Getting close to sixty. By the sound of it, generations older than you. I used to own thousands of paperbooks - these days, they're down to around a hundred. I have preferred digital for as long as screen quality has made it viable, meaning roughly the last ten years.
Mind you, I don't own a Kindle, and most likely never shall. Nobody gets to looking over my shoulder as I read - and certainly not Amazon - because that distracts and destroys my reading experience.
Fewer generations than I'd prefer, if I'm honest; the plural doesn't really apply. I used to laugh when my mother would tell me that youth is wasted on the young. Lately I understand why she never laughed when she said it.
That said - an excellent point, with which I agree wholeheartedly. Calibre is an excellent tool, even if I could wish it handled PDF generation better - but that's a tall order, and really only an issue for The Art of Electronics and the like.
I also live in a ~600sf apartment, which is about all the space I really need but which also puts a pretty sharp limit on the volume of my physical library. It works well to go digital by default, and reserve paper copies
for special. (That said, I do wish I had space for a shop! Building a table in my front room is doable enough, but does rather cramp things while underway.)
I'm asthmatic so while I've always loved books for their content, I've always feared old paper books for their capacities to give me a runny nose or an asthma attack. !s much as I loved the stories, the physical form of books was the enemy.
And that's why, I love my ereader, it allows me to read books easily, it saves space and allows me to travel with all the books I currently read (that's why I started using ebooks on a palm a long time ago).
However, I don't love DRMs, I don't like the idea of Amazon knowing what I read, so I tend to either buy DRM free epubs or if I have no choice buy a DRM encumbered format and strip the DRMs with calibre.
ebooks are a godsend for people with poor eyesight.
I love my Kindle, but I've slowed down my ebook purchases because of Amazon's latest DRM (KFX). Until it's cracked, I'm only purchasing books I know are DRM free (many from Tor).
The only workaround I know of right now is to get Amazon to send you the file with the older DRM but then you lose all of the advantages of the newer file format (mostly around typography). I'm not interested in doing that.
Have we reached the age of actual strong DRM? AFAIK, iBooks DRM also hasn't been cracked. No idea about the epubs from Google.
In my opinion, the essay[0] referred to in the introduction of the article is a better read. It gives very good reasons why some people still prefer physical books, without denying (on the contrary, praising) the many advantages of digital books.
The reason I can't give up Kindle and return to physical books is because I get too much value out of my digital highlights and annotations. As the author writes in his essay:
> To return to a book is to return not just to the text but also to a past self. We are embedded in our libraries. To reread is to remember who we once were, which can be equal parts scary and intoxicating. Other services such as Timehop offer ways to return to past photos or past tweets. They, too, are unexpectedly evocative. Far more so than you might think. They allow us to measure and remeasure ourselves. And if a resurfaced tweet has an emotional resonance of x, than a passage in a book by which you were once moved must resonate at 100x.
Along these lines, we've developed a service that helps you effortlessly reconnect with your Kindle highlights. If you'd like an invite to the private beta, email me at dan@rekindled.io.
I've heard similar statements from others who began reading in digital media at a relatively young age. I wonder if that's what makes the difference? Certainly it makes as much sense as anything else I can think of offhand.