

Who reads books anymore? - adrianwaj

Admittedly, I am not into fiction, and I can get magazine quality content on the web, so why read books?
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sebg
For me, reading non-fiction books allows me to interact with historical
figures and understand how they approached problems as well as how they
arrived at their solutions. I've been reading many auto/biographies lately and
more and more it has helped me realize that most over-night successes are
really 20 years in the making.

edit: Another thing that has helped me is in learning grammatically correct
english and sentence construction. This is something that I have yet to find
in abundance on the web.

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schtog
There is much deeper knowledge in books. Just learning from the internets and
reading magazine articles will keep you updated but make your knowledge
shallow.

~~~
adrianwaj
True, I don't read newspapers either, unless placed in front of me for some
reason.

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raju
I agree with a lot of the other commentators. I am a voracious reader, with
normally 3-4 books on my reading stand at any point that I read at different
points during the day. Reading provides a very cheap and easily accessible
form of entertainment that allows you to exercise your imagination and
creativity, and provide a wealth of detailed knowledge (even if it were
fiction - a good fictional story can provide an insight into different
situations, cultures, even the psyche of people in general)

A good book can keep you company at any point in time in a day, and more so,
stay with you a lot longer (this is true even with fiction). I have found
myself going back to several books over the years, because some are _that_
good.

Having said that, there are a lot of crappy books out there (I have commented
about that earlier) and invariably you will get one that is despite checking
it out (amazon reviews etc). That has not prevented me from continuing to find
good books, and it should not deter anyone else either.

A quick cursory glance over amazon's best-seller lists will give you a good
overview on the types of fictional books, and you will quickly see that almost
every kind of curiosity can be satisfied - technical, mystery, espionage, war
strategy, sci-fi, you name it...

And yes, staring at a tube-light all day cannot be a good thing...

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gills
Literature is often of higher quality than magazine articles. Non-fiction
books often delve more deeply into a subject than a series of articles. Many
books are not available online in their entirety; at least not for free. And
when I do spend money on a book I expect paper.

It also gets your eyes off the monitor. These things can't be healthy to stare
at 18 hours per day.

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noodle
by not being "into" fiction, you're closing off the vast majority of why you
would want to read books. if your only purpose is to simply learn about stuff,
you can do a pretty good job of it online.

i read books for many reasons:

1) pocket-sized entertainment w/o requiring electricity.

2) reading bulks of text on the computer is hard on the eyes, imo.

3) reading a book exercises the imagination and creativity more than watching
or listening to something.

4) writing a book/novel is an art form and skill. supporting it by buying
quality works is important, imo.

5) i personally personally know/knew several authors who make their living
100% by writing. i buy and read their stuff to help support them.

6) a typical book has higher quality content and more depth than what you'll
typically find online.

i'm sure there's plenty more reasons, i just can't think of them right now.

~~~
adrianwaj
Computer (with internet) however:

\- is basically free (or cost of retrieving new content is free)

\- tabbed browsing makes scanning fast

\- broadband makes news pages load quicker (or similar) to turning a page

\- commoditization of blogs and cms via open-source means more noise, but also
more signal

\- instant publishing

\- large lcd screens can be dimmed, and font sized enlarged

There is wisdom on the web, and books are still mobile and reliable. Text
books are important, but in my view the case for books is lessening. (unless
you like fiction, but much classic literature can be found freely on the web
due to copyright expiration anyway).

~~~
noodle
> Text books are important, but in my view the case for books is lessening.
> (unless you like fiction, ...

making a molehill out of a mountain, aren't we? more specifically, i think, a
hasty generalization. just because you don't read fiction or something doesn't
mean that others also don't.

i'll agree with you if we're talking about the NICHE of
instructional/scholastic/informational/reference books. i don't read those
types of books.

when you use the term "reading a book", though, you're typically referring to
reading for recreation/entertainment, which is typically going to be
fiction/literature. i do read those, and so do the vast majority of my family
and friends.

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ph0rque
You have a false dichotomy here: I read books (for free) _on_ the internet.

