

Sorry, iBooks, paper books still win on specs - sheldor
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/20/2720158/sorry-ibooks-paper-books-still-win-on-specs

======
dkarl
Agreed on all the points in his list except "readable with any form of light."
Books lose to my cell phone in darkness or very dim light.

My book reading is roughly split into two categories. First, the books that I
read straight through and can get in and out of very quickly, reading in
bursts whenever it's convenient. I read these while I'm eating, while I'm
waiting in line, while I'm on the toilet, whenever I arrive to meet someone
and they aren't there yet. These simply must be e-books; I can't go back to
the days of trying to carry a book everything yet so often being stuck without
one.

Second, the books that I immerse myself in for periods of time, because
they're more difficult or because I'm reading them specifically for the sake
of that immersive, relaxed experience. These I prefer to be physical books,
and the arguments in the article weigh very heavily against e-books. It would
be a great loss to me if physical books disappeared before e-books improved
their navigation and their navigational cues dramatically. I could imagine
e-books eventually overtaking physical books for navigation and note-taking.
Personally, I write slowly, hate my own handwriting, and do not like marking
up books, so note-taking is a chore for me even with physical books, but
e-books are just pathetic. Even for me, physical books beat them simply by
virtue of their ability to hold different colors and shapes of sticky notes
and because I can _look at them_ and see where I've dog-eared pages and stuck
in sticky notes and other bookmarks.

There are a few more categories, such as cookbooks and reference books (both
of which I prefer to be physical) but the first two comprise 90% of my reading
and purchasing. (EDIT: To clarify, I think many reference works that were
formerly structured as books should not be books at all in the digital age.)

~~~
Retric
Weight is probably my biggest issue, I have around 2,000 pounds worth of books
which makes moving far more painful. After my last move I left most of them in
boxes in my closet and if I don't unpack them for my next move I am probably
just going to dump them at a library or something.

------
RandallBrown
I hate reading paper books. Yes, you can see them in bright light. You also
can't read them in no light. I read in the dark way more than I read outside
in direct sunlight. I find that I'm constantly readjusting a book to get the
light to hit it correctly. With an iPad I get constant light across the whole
page all the time.

You can't ctrl-f a paper book.

Page numbers? Page numbers vary per printing of the book depending on its
size. It is no better for paper than it is for ebook. In fact, an ebook's word
count will be the same across all editions of the book (assuming there aren't
any changes).

The only thing I like about paper books is that you can read them on a plane
before 10,000 feet and sometimes the covers look cool.

~~~
zecho
Funny. I always run into issues of glare under florescent lighting with the
iPad and it drives me nuts. And no matter how long I use the Kindle, I can't
stop noticing the distracting flash between pages. On the flipside, searching
and highlighting is advantageous with ebooks, which is why I've primarily used
them with reference books.

This is a great piece on interaction design that's been posted to HN already,
but in case you missed it, have a read:
[http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...](http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/)

The parts on distribution of weight make perfect sense to me, especially when
I compare that experience of sensing place to the experience of sensing place
in, say, the New York Times iPad app.

~~~
technoslut
As someone who was a former book enthusiast who now owns an iPad, I also miss
the appreciation of the binding of hard books, how the pages felt and the
musty smell.

I think the iPad is great but the part of the atmosphere of a good book is
gone even though digital is desperate in the attempt to replicate it.

------
cobralibre
As an erstwhile wannabe literary scholar, I would be much more excited about
ebooks if they were generally available in non-DRMed formats amenable to
processing and analysis with arbitrary software tools. For example, I can't
generate a concordance of a Kindle ebook by any means, and I certainly can't
use one with the NLP Toolkit.

As a general reader, I'm unimpressed by the OCR errors, poor typography, and
formatting mistakes of backlist ebooks. As for reading devices, I'm
unimpressed with the cumbersome library management UI and generally poor fit
and finish of my Kindle 3. I'm very impressed, however, by the light weight of
the thing; I was reminded of this recently while reading a 700-page hardbound
novel – I would have gladly traded it for an ebook.

As for TFA, I'm disappointed to see the author accused of an appeal to
nostalgia when he clearly was arguing on the basis of practical advantages and
disadvantages. Shifts in communications forms bring changes in artistic and
intellectual production as well as shifts in the culture at large –
investigating and critiquing these changes strikes me as inherently
worthwhile. There's certainly a rich body of work along these lines that pre-
dates the ebook; c.f. Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and Hugh
Kenner, for example. (Thank goodness that the secondhand paper book market
exists, since so many of their books are out of print.)

------
maxharris
Here's a spec that barely got a mention at the end of the article: paper is
extremely heavy. It's almost 3/4 the density of water!

I just moved across town, and I had a terrible time because about half of all
my possessions are paper books. This is roughly 35 boxes, and keeping them all
is just too expensive. They take up a lot of space, and it's nearly impossible
to find what I'm looking for anyway, so after I've read them once, I don't
often return to them at all.

I've been getting rid of them. The reduction in clutter has been both
uplifting and liberating!

------
kmfrk
Another thing we lose with digital books is serendipity. Erin McKean talked
about this amongst other things in her brilliant TED talk:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY>.

~~~
vasco
I got a kindle 7 months ago and I was given a regular physical book to read
this Christmas. I don't know if it's just me but I found it really hard to go
back to the book format. Just holding it is much more of hassle. I also love
how I can instantly go to the dictionary on my kindle, which also has the
serendipity factor! It's not unusual to hop around from word to word on the
definitions of the previous one or just finding words which are above or
bellow the word I'm looking at! So maybe that serendipity factor isn't all
lost after all.

------
asparagui
Here's my spec: how many books can I carry with me?

Books: 10, 20 tops. iPad: 25MB/file, 64GB, 2000+ books easily.

~~~
mvanga
Books you can read at any point in time: 1-5 :)

~~~
Retric
That depends on what your doing. If your coding it's nice to have 50+ books of
reference material on hand but I don't want to take that to and from work
every day.

------
denzil_correa
I am worried about one particular fact : these so called disruptive firms
don't want to conform e-books to a standard format. Paper has this huge
advantage. One can read old literature because they "conform" to one format.
In the e-book space, everyone has their own. While Apple did disrupt the music
industry, I don't necessarily feel they have set the fire in terms of e-books.
They may get the numbers (they do more often than not) but they may not get
the innovation.

------
caublestone
I understand the romanticism with paper books. They are beautiful works of art
that gain character over a period of time as different readers come into
contact with their pages. Each book as a story of its own outside of the words
on the page.

But I, like many, grow tired rather quickly when I read. The small type and
lack of interaction causes my to feel sleepy as I try to find out how Alice is
going to get out of Wonderland. This issue is completely eliminated on the
ereader, and I am surprised the customizable type features aren't mentioned in
this article. Instead of having to find the formatted edition that suits my
needs, I simple increase the font size to suit my needs. With ebooks, the
limits are really non-existent with what can be done to story telling.

When the printing press came around, the powers at be wanted to control it to
only produce the bible. But eventually, people were printing powerful material
such as "Common Sense" and "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"
inspiring nations through the power of mass distributed information. eBooks
(and obviously the Internet in general) is another step in our progress.

------
kstenerud
tl;dr: waffle waffle waffle romantic nostalgia waffle waffle highlighter
waffle waffle DRM waffle waffle.

The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If
you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of
storage. Furthermore, the more people who have a copy, the less likely the
work is to be lost.

\- DRM will fail eventually, like it did with music.

\- Storage formats will evolve, but there will always be programs to convert
to the latest format.

\- Resale will become less of an issue as price comes down. We're seeing the
same thing with video games and music.

\- Rare works won't slowly disappear over time like they do with paper books.

With the advent of ebooks, distribution of knowledge is becoming less and less
restricted. There will, however, be those who cling to the old technology out
of nostalgia. They'll be forgotten in a generation or two; it was the same way
with scrolls.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkucf6wxU4>

~~~
dkarl
I don't think you understand the point of his post. You certainly missed the
last section, titled "Ebooks are inevitable," where he admits that e-books are
already better in many ways and are very far from fulfilling their potential.
_With ebooks, we're still looking at the equivalent of the day after Gutenberg
printed his first Bible._ His "spec" comparison (like most spec comparisons)
is meant to point out where e-readers are deficient, because he wants e-reader
development to focus on those deficiencies. _We need to decide which paper
book "specs" are important and ensure that they get recreated in our new
digital world._

 _The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If
you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of
storage._

By the "long view" he's talking about world history, not rereading a book he
bought twenty years ago. Most of the texts we have from over a millennium ago
had to survive through centuries when _nobody_ cared about them.

Also, I don't want to be rude, but when you follow "tl;dr" with a putative
summary, it means you've read the whole thing yourself and want to save other
people the trouble of reading it. If you decide something isn't worth reading
straight through and just skim it instead, say "tl;dr" and leave the
summarizing to people who actually read it.

------
xenophanes
eBooks win big on being able to break the DRM then put it in a speed reading
program. Speed reading is a huge time saver, and software support for it is
very helpful.

I wonder when they'll allow some decent speed reading GUI option for Kindle or
iBooks without breaking the DRM first.

~~~
nupark2
What is a speed reading program? Are you referring to the types of software
listed here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading>

~~~
xenophanes
use whatever kind you like. one is:

<http://www.spreeder.com/>

------
sigzero
iBooks kill how many trees? Zero. That is a big win.

~~~
fl3tch
That's a big can of worms. iBooks are assembled out mined materials and in
factories that also have an impact on the environment. And think about the
conditions for the workers. The conditions in a paper mill in the American
northwest are much better than an Apple factory in China. So I guess it
depends on what you consider more important, and what you want to support.

------
Craiggybear
Well, purely on aesthetic terms paper books win hands down.

eBooks suffer from no hyphenation, no widow and orphan control, no good math
markup, huge rivers of loose lines, etc. The list of typographic atrocities is
endless.

I liked my Kindle at first (especially for the convenience of having lots of
titles on one device) but the reading experience is not good. Paper is
definitely the winner still even though it is heavy.

