Reading actual books is MUCH more fun than reading ebooks

[D-E-M-Emrys]

Being in the army, I have very little room in barracks for extra shelf space to hold all of my books, hence the kindle. I miss REAL books, but I can't afford to store them. It's a win-win/lose-lose, but I have to say that the kindle really is handy.

[tmso]

I'm pretty happy with my Nook. Because I read in bed, I actually find it immensely easier. The lazy bastard that I am, I don't have to shift my arms to turn the page, just a little 'tap' and I'm onto the next page.

Though not in the army, I lack space as well. It is amazing how many books I can carry around now!

[Loerwyn]

I find the Kindle a bit on the thin-side, so my hand tends to feel kinda uncomfortable when reading on it.

[Action Avenue]

Well, my wife's preference is reading on her Nook. I am still old school and prefer reading an actual physical book. I guess my household supports both these sources of information and entertainment.

[ebusinesstutor]

I love ereading but I still have many of my favourite series in paperback that I read.

To me, they are both "books" and my enjoyment isn't diminished by reading on my Samsung Galaxy Note.

I love that my ereader lets me download many ebooks for free and to take a whole library in a pocket when I travel.

I still browse book stores, but most of my purchases are ebooks.

[livens]

I am definitely a paper person. And its all in my head

For whatever reason I don't feel like I really own something when its 100k of data stored on a chip. But my hundreds of paper books sitting on my shelves feel very real to me. Sometimes I just sit and stare at them all, daydreaming or reminiscing about reading them. Im also a bit of a pack-rat and still have every book I have ever owned starting from back in middle school. I wouldn't dream about selling my books, ever. Ive even written down an inventory of my books, so that if I ever do lose them to fire, water damage, theft or whatever, I can start over again and buy new copies of them all.

And then of course there is the thrill of the hunt! I love going through used book stores and finding something on my wanted list. Even if I waste and hour or two in a store and come up empty handed Ive still enjoyed myself. You cannot get that same thrill by going to amazon and clicking a download button.

All that said I do think e-readers are great. Im not ready for one myself yet, but eventually I will get one. Convenience when traveling being my main reason. Or if there is a book that is rare and out-of-print that I cannot find anywhere else.

[CandyP]

I came across an article this morning with regards into this issue. Here is the link: Why books are better than ebooks

The march of technology stops for no one. This applies to all forms of technology, including reading entertainment. Reading has been forever transformed by the changed medium. I think we would do well to consider how books will change as they become electronic. What are the ideologies carried by the digital media and how will these begin to transform books? And how will that in turn shape us? These are things worth thinking about.

But the news is not all bad and I want to be fair. I cannot deny that e-books have some clear advantages over their printed counterparts.

[Anjasa]

The thing I hate about reading digitally is that I miss the feeling of knowing how far I am in the book instinctively.

Other than that, it's fantastic for me. I find it so much more convenient.

[glutton]

And hardly anyone keeps a gadget more than 18 months these days...

Only if you're a slave of consumer culture.

I've had my cell phone for 2 1/2 years, desktop for 4 years, my printer for longer, my monitor for 8 years and my speaker the same... I am NO slave!

Or just dirt poor.

[Vandervecken]

Up until 18 months ago, I was adamant that digital could never replace paper. Then I needed to do a massive clearout due to having no space any more, and decided to give an e-reader a try. Purely on the grounds that digital didn't take up much space, I read a lot and I don't have much storage space.

Now?

For straight text, I actually prefer an e-reader. Not just the price, but also it's far more convenient to carry around, and I'm more than happy to push buttons instead of turning pages. On the other hand, any kind of artistic or academic books I stick to paper - while e-readers work fine for straight text, they're not so great when it comes to fixed visual arrangements.

[Kaeru]

I prefer paper books for the smell, the feel, the look of books on a shelf, (the fact that my iWhatsit has crashed and lost all my books more than once) the reading in the bathtub, but I lately do most of my reading on my itty bitty phone screen. I don't enjoy it more, but I keep finding myself bored and desperate for a book, so I get it.

[Window Bar]

I just finished Fortress in the Eye of Time by CJ Cherryh. Wonderful book, but somewhat dependent on an up-front map which had been irredeemably reduced to fit onto the printed page. Many times it would have been helpful to expand a region of the map and view a region in enough to detail for the geography to make sense. Granted, on my old-fashioned Nook I couldn't have done so... but on new tablet-style computer/e-readers it would have been quite possible and helpful.

[JunkMonkey]

Nope. I've tried and I've tried but I still can't get on with eReaders. For one thing you can't throw the buggers across the room when you get fed up with the author. (You could but it would get expensive really quickly. The satisfying thump of a three hundred pages of turgid drivel hitting the far wall would be replaced by a mildly expensive crunch. Not nearly as gratifying.)

You can't read them in the bath (or the shower*). You can't really lend them to people very easily. You don't find large denomination notes tucked into them by previous owners as bookmarks. You don't find odd letters and enigmatic lists that puzzle you for days left by previous owners with less money to throw around. You don't find marginalia. You can't prop up shonky table legs with them. You can't press flowers in them. You can't stand on top of piles of them when you can't reach a high shelf.

They look sh!t on a bookshelf. You can't browse other people's Kindles when they're out of the room and find out more about them than they want you to know. (What is all that BDSM Black Lace erotica doing hidden down the bottom there?)

eReaders warp and wrap the text so that books that were designed and laid out with care and precision just become a long string of words like any other. (I'm thinking here of the greatest living Scottish writer Alasdair Gray who, legend has it, so disliked hyphens breaking up words that he would rewrite paragraphs to avoid the typesetters having to use them.)

eReaders don't smell like books; they smell like televisions.

They don't burn very well.

They look like rubbish on film. Can you imagine the opening sequence of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 having anything like the same impact if Montag set fire to a single Kindle instead of that huge pile of Penguin paperbacks? Nope, nor can I.

The batteries run out. None of my books has ever stopped halfway through because I forgot to plug it in. And some of them have been on my shelves for years and not become obsolete file formats in the interim - or suddenly developed Rights Management issues which mean I can't open the buggers.


Final Score? Paper beats Nook.







*Trust me, you can read books in the shower.

[MrBF1V3]

Yeah, and I like my 8 track better two, the warbles and skips make for a more intense experience. My vinyl albums have vintage skips and scratches.

Kidding.

I think each has it's place, but ebooks are the new cheap paperbacks, and hopefully within a reasonable amount of time all my paper books become collectors items. I probably have the cheapest ebook made, but I use it at least half of the time.

B5

[JunkMonkey]

Related to the 'warp and wrap the text' thing I mentioned above. I'm convinced that writing styles are affected by the way the words are presented (and vice versa- it's a two way process). Thus Dicken's & Gaskill's (to modern eyes - heavy, dense, tightly-written) prose was first presented in (and tailored for) long lines of heavy, closely-spaced type; while Chandler's and Hammett's (shorter, snappier, pithier, faster-moving) style was written for narrow columns of large type. (I know they are bad examples taken at the extremes and from different markets but bare with me, please.) It would take longer to read across a line of Dicken's words than Hammett's when they first appeared.


eReaders (and a lot of modern paper books) present the texts in exactly the same way. And they read differently from they way they first appeared They feel different.

The way our eyes move changes the way we feel. Film makers have known this for as long as there have been moving pictures and will frame and edit the images to make your eyes move in certain ways and induce the emotions they want you to feel. A feeling of dread can be helped by cutting between the heroine approaching the door at the end of the corridor with the 'Horrible Thing' behind it, and the door itself at the end of the corridor. Keep her face and the door occupying exactly the same place of the screen and the audience find themselves staring intently, as the heroine, is doing. It induces a feeling of concentration, concern, dread. A stand-off sequence, with people pointing guns at each other and edging their way out of danger, is helped by cutting the pictures so that the audience are forced to look from side to side to see what is going on. Their eyes are made to dart from one side of the screen to another. Increases the confusion and tension in the audience's mind. The same thing is I am sure true of text. The way our eyes move across a page are part of the process. Reading is not just a passive ingestion of words. Poets know this. That's why poems don't look like prose:

eg.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed; and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; but thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, when in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(I cheated a bit and slightly re-punctuated from poetry punctuation to prose punctuation but you get the idea.)

eReaders are like watching Panned and Scanned films. Your eyes don't move as much. It's too passive. You loose something.