> Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands.
Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.
Digital files that you store on your own storage media with free software also can't change (without your intervention). But in new generations many only have phones, not even laptops.
Absolutely, and the future where everything digital is "in the cloud" seems closer and closer every day. RAM and SSD costs skyrocketing sure is squeezing out the consumer and making her more dependent on cloud-based services.
There's plenty of books that have revisions, but yes, the first version does not physically change. Then again, other than collectors, I don't know many people that have multiple books of each revision/reprint of the same book. To your point, it's not like you can read a book, go to bed, and then wake up to a modified book. However, you could damage your book and go to have it replaced with a different version. Say you loan/give your copy away knowing you can get a new one easier than having your recipient get a copy for themselves. Your new one could be different. It's happened to me
I've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.
After I started reading essays printed in books, like Emerson's, I realized there is no blogger alive that is worth reading anymore. Something to consider.
It’s not merely that—I’ve found that reading a book on a technical topic is a faster route to understanding than trying to learn it from random webpages spewed forth by the google.
Amen. I never understood how such an avid blog reading community existed when, compared to published essays, the vast bulk of it is drivel. I guess I simply hadn't realized that many people out there may have never read a formal or published essay. What a shame.
I feel like most of these types of beliefs are in the realm of people's desires to differentiate themselves rather than anything intrinsic about how they do it.
There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups.
If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction.
The problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them.
On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.
I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I highlight often when reading on my kindle. I have created a small program that scrapes my highlights and sends me a daily email with one of them. I get it before I wake up and it’s the first thing I read once I check my email (usually that happens after my morning reading).
I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book.
That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.
I wrote a python script that I run locally which scrapes read.amazon.com (think this is the URL, I’ll double check when I’m home). Kindle highlights are automatically synced there. The Python scraper extracts all highlights into a json file and stores this in S3.
I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails.
I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop.
No but I have thought about making some sort of card or pseudo-book. Still not quite the same though, as the object wouldn’t be the one you actually read, just a reminder.
TBH I'd rather have both and in sync, namely physical in place, nearby, and digital always with me. Unfortunately I can't afford that so I have a messy compromise.
I'm not an ebook reader, but I would have assumed that these apps would have some sort of indication if you've read a book or not and if you've not read to the end some sort of progress. Like opening an ebook that you did not complete should hopefully take you to where you left off at a minimum. I'd also expect your app to have a management type of display where I'd expect some sort of sorting/filtering where you can see only the books completely read, the books started but not finished, and books not yet started. I'd even somewhat expect a skeuomorphic layout of books on a shelf that you could somehow rearrange like it was iPhone 1.0. Again, I'm not an ebook person and never used any of the apps, so maybe these are standard things. However, it should make things easier to know if you've read them or not.
If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.
If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.
They do, but a physical book has a presence that digital books lack. Like weight, cover material, print quality. I can learn from digital books fine and read novels on an ereader. But a physical book anchor your memory like no other.
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.
Maybe the cartridges could even contain the actual music. On an engraving that stores the audio information perhaps. This engraving could be played back and reproduce the audio. It probably would never work though.
“The actual music” is just so hard to contain. A recording of a performance - is that the actual music? Or is the actual music the playing back of the recording with speakers and audio? Will all that be in the box? Or is it the entire band in your proposed box, ready to play whenever you pull it from the shelf? Or is it what you hear in your head in the shower?
Hmm, I’m thinking that for this to work best, it really should be some sort of round medium, a disk or a cylinder of some sort. I think disks might be best because then you could engrave the music on both sides of the disk and more easily store them in protective containers on shelving units.
I have mixed feelings about Kindle, but I mostly read books on my phone these days, and my Kindle library is always there. I also have a physical bookshelf, but if I'm not home I can't review it so in some ways it's often less tangible than my Kindle library which I always carry with me.
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
This agrees with studies that show that memory retention is better among students when using physical books rather than ebooks. That's because we're embodied. The book is a physical object with physical features. These intelligible physical features create associations (spatial anchoring, sensory engagement) that reinforce memory. You also get a sense of progress as you read. For instance, when I read something, I better remember at what depth certain content is, and given the depth, I know more or less what is in that part of the book. You could think of it in terms of spatial indexing or in terms of data locality.
People think the medium doesn't matter. They think that it's just a matter of encoding. But the medium very much matters, because the senses are involved in memory formation in all sorts of ways. It's also why handwriting leads to better retention of information than typing.
I’m a big proponent of physical books: I have several thousand in my home. But last week, I finally got my first e-reader, the Xteink X4, which I got because it was small and cheap.
In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.
This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!
Then again, there is more to life than increasing its speed. (Gandhi). When I read a physical book, especially an early (hardback) edition, I’m reliving the experience of all the early readers of that book. A mug of tea, a warm light, perhaps a candle or oil lamp, a period chair — and I’m recreating the experience the Author imagined his/her readers would be experiencing. Digital for work, analog for pleasure.
That is very true, and certainly I’m in agreement that fast, digital reading isn’t necessarily desirable as a mode. Then again, my academic background is in English lit, and I’m a priest, so my professional reading has generally been slow and analog! Reading novels quickly allows me to become immersed in them without allowing my analytical lit-crit brain entirely to take over, and that itself is a nice change of pace, so the e-reader has been a welcome introduction. I do enough wrestling with dense theological texts that I appreciate being able simply to read.
That's exactly how I feel although I do wonder if a lot of younger people, if any still become readers, will just a different, less physical relationship with their books than I do or you do.
It's probably a bad example but I don't have any physical connection with music or video anymore for instance, but I definitely remember having that kind of relationship with favorite records and tapes when I was a kid. And now I just... don't. It must be the same way for some people with e-books.
As a bit of anecdata, my kids show a slight preference for physical books over ebooks, although they’re happy enough to listen to digital audio books. They have literally no experience with physical media for music but have at least encountered DVDs and Blu-Rays (although when I talk about watching something on disc they actively resist it—the convenience of pulling up something on streaming outweighs the limited selection available).
I raised my kids with physical books. But when I was growing up we had a record turntable, and then a tape player, and I do remember having some kind of physical connection with my favorite music because of that.
It IS more inconvenient to have them pull them out. No question about that.
Not as satisfying as seeing your books, but I keep a running doc where I note the title, dates, a short synopsis, and a few sentences of thoughts for books I’ve read. It helps me keep track a little better.
My greatest moment of this was being able to find a quote in a 500-page book I had read 8 years earlier in about 2 minutes thanks to the physical memory of my first encounter with that text.
Even unread books form a physical reminder to read, and of the import of the topic they cover.
When I come across a book that covers something important well, I buy it. I will likely read it, but even if it just keeps reminding me of the topic, reinforcing my integrated web of understanding, it is doing good.
Im just contemplating that the cultural filter function that was the recognition of a work by the pulic is deactivated. Even a book that just drowns without any splash may reincarnate as an "idea" from the training material. Yes, the author is forgotten, but the idea lives on.
I didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.
Personally, I don’t see any advantage of a real book over an ebook (locally stored) in an e-ink reader. And there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment.
EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.
Keep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with.
That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.
I hope you're saying that is only applicable to you personally and not applying that to every other human on the planet. There are plenty of real world advantages a physical book has over an ebook, even if you can't think of them. On of my favorites was not having to turn my book off during airplane take off and landing. Also, books do not run out of battery so they do not need to be recharged. You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session. But I'm not going to sit here typing out every single difference I can think of just because you can't think of any
I haven't flown in many years (and god willing will never have to again) but at the time you had to turn your electronic stuff off, whether it was in airplane mode or not.
> You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session
True, on an e-reader at best you can have a couple books at half size (side-by-side), although you can switch between books fast and it remembers where you left off
Those are some incredibly minor advantages. The advantages of ebooks - easy backups, infinitesimal physical storage requirements, searchability, accessibility for people with visual needs - each one of those outweighs every advantage you listed.
An embarrassingly large number of epubs have absolute no care put into formatting, in my experience. That and how do I get my "old book paper smell" fix and those beautifully illustrated hardback covers neatly lined on my shelves?
For me the advantage is simplicity. I pick up the book and I read it. No matter where or when, I know I can read it. If the book gets damaged, I pick up another book, I don't mind.
The problem with digital books is that I need 3 different things working together: 1) a (charged) reading device, 2) corresponding software, 3) the actual digital book.
So the reading device can be put in unmaintained mode any time by the company who sells it. That sucks. Same goes for the corresponding software, although in this case I have more flexibility sometimes (i.e., I can install some open source software... but that's a hassle in itself). As per the actual digital book, don't get me started with DRM. One can pirate books, though, but then some people have ethical considerations.
I typically buy second-hand books. It's the best deal for me because I don't have the feeling to be super protective with them, and they are very cheap.
The reading device, software, and books shouldn’t be locked down or remotely controlled. Buy a BOOX, Kobo, or jailbroken old Kindle.
You do need to set up the right software and make charging a habit (which can be helped by buying a wireless charger), but picking up an e-reader and just reading can be as fast and easy as a physical book. And getting new digital books is faster and easier.
I admit, books have the advantage in durability and individual cost.
There are some fields where there are a real measurable advantages of physical books, essentially as an archive.
I can name two:
1) Chemical Engineering
2) Classics
In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.
In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.
In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).
In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.
Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:
He of the stout quarrel chest said:
It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.
Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.
> there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment.
I read a lot, was really into ebooks and now mostly buy paper books. The inverse of the cost point iis a big reason, cost of ebooks is much more than paper books in a lot of cases because there is no second hand ebook market.
Environmentally I think it's complicated- an ebook is certainly better, but an ebook reader itself is much worse for the environment than many books. I can't claim any moral high ground since I have both.
You don't have to actually pay for ebooks. I have been an avid reader on a Kindle and then a Kobo for over a decade, and I have never once bought an ebook. Even in 2015 the shadow libraries already had nearly everything I was ever looking for. Nowadays with Anna's Archive, downloading ebooks is made so convenient that even my normie friends use it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot less to do with "seeking tangible connections to the past", and much more with the fact that there are a few book collecting Youtubers who's short form content is getting popular and shows how much people can theoretically earn with old books.
The signs sure seem to be indicating a Gen Z rollback to the analog and middle tech. Newspapers, books, cursive clubs, letter writing (pen pals), cassettes and albums, printed photographs, even carb/gas based auto hacking. These are just in my circle, but I have seen stories in the paper too. Anyone else seeing interesting trends from the youngers? I especially like to see the blending of new and old - like building a music server for VLPFM neighborhood station, hyper local phone co, text clubs on paper, etc.
As you mentioned, it’s trends. There’s nothing really sticky or mass-adoption like. This also isn’t necessarily new, as polaroids have been trending for over a decade now.
Most of the same kids still scroll instagram, listen on spotify and etc. At least that’s what I’m seeing around me.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. As someone who regularly buys old stuff, the price goes up and down with trends that bare little resemblance to any “return to form”. It’s mostly people looking to turn a quick buck before they go onto some other trinket. We sit and wait it out, or wait for sellers who are not clued in on a given hype cycle.
The interesting thing to me is how media choices like these are becoming elements of identity, kind of like how if you were into 'zines there was a shared mindset and some assumptions about your beliefs and cultural approach baked into that. When everything becomes monoculture, the bar to stand apart can be almost any vector.
Personally I would want to collect books which are now out of print, for the sake of preserving information. I don't understand the appeal of first editions or autographed copies.
I have a fair number of autographed books, but I work in publishing so a lot of them are signed by friends and people I've worked with. Which means there's no way I'd willingly part with them. I'm less interested in 'collecting' as such so much any more. And my cookbooks all show visible signs of use.
I was more of a collector as a younger person than I am now (as evidenced by my 2000-volume personal library). I generally only sought out first editions by authors that I really loved (Graham Greene being the primary exemplar). Most of the signed books I have are either written by friends (oddly the Pulitzer prize winner in my friend circle isn’t from my writing life but from my music life) or were purchased second-hand and already signed. I will admit that I’ll generally prefer a reader edition of a book over a collector edition—I own both of Greene’s retracted novels, one was dirt cheap from a second-hand bookshop in Canada and has a slightly warped spine so that the book viewed from the top is a parallelogram rather than a rectangle, and the other I paid a bit more for, but not at the extremes of price because it has a library rebinding (from the era of libraries rebinding hardcover books to increase their shelf life, a practice which has since been replaced with plastic-wrapping the dust jacket).
For what it's worth, in the U.S. at least you can connect to your local library with an app named "libby". I used this frequently on my Android phone to download books and magazines, and you can connect with the InterLibrary Loan system too. My use of the public library is much, much higher than before, when I had to travel to the physical library branch to check out books or read magazines.
Regarding the feeling of something missing by reading on electronic devices, expressed in a few comments:
Some (not all) answers I was able to find in Maryanne Wolf's book "Reader, Come Home". Main concept there is what she calls deep-reading, a complex back and forth between different brain areas and the hemispheres, that needs time and is replaced by specific forms of skimming on the mentioned devices. In particular, the shift between hemispheres allows for integration into the reader's personal store of knowledge and, more broadly, into their own worldview.
The "wasted" time is essential for memory building and consolidation. Add enforced linear reading without immediate availibility to break the flow by googling/notifications/jumping to whatever, also consider haptics and more. Similar effects can also be found in handwriting vs typing, manual sketching etc.
black6 | a day ago
Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.
bonoboTP | a day ago
black6 | a day ago
Shellban | a day ago
My server drives are not going to last forever...
dylan604 | a day ago
everdrive | a day ago
eudamoniac | 23 hours ago
everdrive | 23 hours ago
eudamoniac | 23 hours ago
dhosek | 19 hours ago
voidhorse | 17 hours ago
eudamoniac | 6 hours ago
cyanydeez | a day ago
There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups.
If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction.
but you be you.
willrshansen | a day ago
keiferski | a day ago
On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.
I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
Insanity | a day ago
I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book.
That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.
stuxnet79 | a day ago
Insanity | a day ago
I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails.
I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop.
It’s a bit hacked together but it works lol.
madcaptenor | a day ago
esafak | a day ago
madcaptenor | a day ago
utopiah | a day ago
keiferski | a day ago
utopiah | a day ago
throwup238 | a day ago
dylan604 | a day ago
dsr_ | a day ago
If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.
skydhash | a day ago
raddan | a day ago
I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.
Carrok | a day ago
cadamsdotcom | a day ago
Sounds like it’ll be quite the innovation.
dhosek | 19 hours ago
lukeschlather | a day ago
lo_zamoyski | a day ago
This agrees with studies that show that memory retention is better among students when using physical books rather than ebooks. That's because we're embodied. The book is a physical object with physical features. These intelligible physical features create associations (spatial anchoring, sensory engagement) that reinforce memory. You also get a sense of progress as you read. For instance, when I read something, I better remember at what depth certain content is, and given the depth, I know more or less what is in that part of the book. You could think of it in terms of spatial indexing or in terms of data locality.
People think the medium doesn't matter. They think that it's just a matter of encoding. But the medium very much matters, because the senses are involved in memory formation in all sorts of ways. It's also why handwriting leads to better retention of information than typing.
cbfrench | 23 hours ago
In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.
This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!
onecommentman | 18 hours ago
cbfrench | 17 hours ago
armenarmen | 7 hours ago
daveshistory | 20 hours ago
It's probably a bad example but I don't have any physical connection with music or video anymore for instance, but I definitely remember having that kind of relationship with favorite records and tapes when I was a kid. And now I just... don't. It must be the same way for some people with e-books.
dhosek | 19 hours ago
daveshistory | 4 hours ago
It IS more inconvenient to have them pull them out. No question about that.
el_benhameen | 20 hours ago
m463 | 19 hours ago
- can't be read in dark mode
- can't change font or font size (or line/paragraph spacing)
- can't use search
- can't be in multiple places (multiple devices)... uh, easily
- etc
I think you just have embrace the positives of whichever you choose.
jen729w | 19 hours ago
I still vastly prefer paper books, however.
specproc | 3 hours ago
dhosek | 19 hours ago
Nevermark | 16 hours ago
My phrase for this is "Books are bookmarks".
Even unread books form a physical reminder to read, and of the import of the topic they cover.
When I come across a book that covers something important well, I buy it. I will likely read it, but even if it just keeps reminding me of the topic, reinforcing my integrated web of understanding, it is doing good.
warumdarum | a day ago
vmsp | a day ago
armchairhacker | a day ago
EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.
AlotOfReading | a day ago
That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.
dylan604 | a day ago
Novosell | a day ago
BigTTYGothGF | 20 hours ago
armchairhacker | 12 hours ago
armchairhacker | a day ago
My comment starts with “Personally, …”
> not having to turn my book off during airplane take off and landing
E-readers don’t need to be always online, some don’t even have cellular
> books do not run out of battery so they do not need to be recharged
Some e-readers have long battery life, and most support wireless charging (https://zens.tech/pages/which-e-readers-support-wireless-cha...)
> You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session
True, on an e-reader at best you can have a couple books at half size (side-by-side), although you can switch between books fast and it remembers where you left off
WolfeReader | 22 hours ago
BoingBoomTschak | a day ago
Otherwise, I agree.
gf263 | 9 hours ago
skydhash | a day ago
dakiol | a day ago
So the reading device can be put in unmaintained mode any time by the company who sells it. That sucks. Same goes for the corresponding software, although in this case I have more flexibility sometimes (i.e., I can install some open source software... but that's a hassle in itself). As per the actual digital book, don't get me started with DRM. One can pirate books, though, but then some people have ethical considerations.
I typically buy second-hand books. It's the best deal for me because I don't have the feeling to be super protective with them, and they are very cheap.
armchairhacker | a day ago
You do need to set up the right software and make charging a habit (which can be helped by buying a wireless charger), but picking up an e-reader and just reading can be as fast and easy as a physical book. And getting new digital books is faster and easier.
I admit, books have the advantage in durability and individual cost.
julianeon | a day ago
I can name two:
1) Chemical Engineering 2) Classics
In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.
In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.
In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).
In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.
Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:
He of the stout quarrel chest said:
It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.
Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.
armchairhacker | a day ago
BigTTYGothGF | 20 hours ago
Their advantage isn't that they're physical, their advantage is that they haven't yet been scanned in.
benrutter | a day ago
I read a lot, was really into ebooks and now mostly buy paper books. The inverse of the cost point iis a big reason, cost of ebooks is much more than paper books in a lot of cases because there is no second hand ebook market.
Environmentally I think it's complicated- an ebook is certainly better, but an ebook reader itself is much worse for the environment than many books. I can't claim any moral high ground since I have both.
TFNA | 15 hours ago
Finnucane | 19 hours ago
iLoveOncall | a day ago
ynac | a day ago
tokioyoyo | a day ago
Most of the same kids still scroll instagram, listen on spotify and etc. At least that’s what I’m seeing around me.
groan | a day ago
lubujackson | a day ago
0xDEAFBEAD | 21 hours ago
Finnucane | 20 hours ago
dhosek | 19 hours ago
wpollock | 17 hours ago
mbeex | 14 hours ago
Some (not all) answers I was able to find in Maryanne Wolf's book "Reader, Come Home". Main concept there is what she calls deep-reading, a complex back and forth between different brain areas and the hemispheres, that needs time and is replaced by specific forms of skimming on the mentioned devices. In particular, the shift between hemispheres allows for integration into the reader's personal store of knowledge and, more broadly, into their own worldview.
The "wasted" time is essential for memory building and consolidation. Add enforced linear reading without immediate availibility to break the flow by googling/notifications/jumping to whatever, also consider haptics and more. Similar effects can also be found in handwriting vs typing, manual sketching etc.