Paper books for me are a universally superior product, they require no battery, don't feature update popups, wifi conncetions, eInk artifacts on page turns, accidental touchscreen events, inflexibility preventing storage in an inside jacket pocket, ...
I could go on.
And despite all that, they're priced as if they're in some way equivalent to the real deal. I've tried and failed to make the jump via Kindle and Kobo, and until such times as pricing on the major stores reflects the eBook's status as an inferior, vastly cheaper to produce knockoff of the real deal, I won't be tempted to buy any more ebooks (the price difference should be closer to 50%, not 15%)
Another aspect as an IT guy is that my ability to relax and focus when holding a computer is vastly reduced over a paper book. The limitations of paper books in that sense are actually a feature. I can't search, bookmark (without folding a paper page corner), 'browse', play with some half-baked eInk web browser, switch book etc., all of which are real focus problems I suffer from.
>Paper books for me are a universally superior product, they require no battery, don't feature update popups, wifi conncetions, eInk artifacts on page turns, accidental touchscreen events, inflexibility preventing storage in an inside jacket pocket, ...
That's interesting, I seem to get the same benefit with less hassle. For me the portability of ebooks more than makes up for all of these issues. I think as it becomes less common to carry extra things that don't need to be carried and the ebook technology improves, ebooks with become a more ideal experience for more and more people
The side effect of that is that I'm always carrying my books. I wouldn't read nearly as much if I had to plan to read. (i.e. had to have my book with me.) I do most of my reading during unexpected waiting.
The price difference is even more absurd when you consider the second-hand/used market. I tend to buy and read books in ebook format for the ease of being able to copy-and-paste from them and port them around on my cellphone, but for the great books I want as keepers on my bookshelf (bookshelves are wonderful conversational topics), I buy them in hardback at 50% the cost ($0.99 plus $3.99 shipping usually) from Amazon's network of used bookstores. The other benefit of cheap used books is that I can lend them out without caring if I ever get them back since I can get a replacement copy with the click of a button.
I think you are greatly overestimating how much physical books cost to produce.
Paper, ink, cardboard, staples, and glue are all very cheap in large quantity. The actual material cost of a book is tiny compared to the book's selling price.
I don't know what manufacturing costs are, but based on what I've seen on "How It's Made" and similar shows it looks like it is highly automated, and so I suspect that for the big publishers it too is only a tiny part of the book's selling price.
The third cost that ebooks do not incur that physical books do is shipping. I'd not be at all surprised if this is actually higher than the material cost and the manufacturing cost for many books.
Putting this all together, if the publishers passed on all the savings from ebooks being "vastly cheaper to produce" I doubt that this would result in anywhere near a 50% lower price.
Here's a typical breakdown, from 2010: "Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about $3.25 to print, store and ship the book, including unsold copies returned to the publisher by booksellers."
I also prefer physical books and use them for most of my (non-internet) reading. But there are a couple situations where I think e-books have an advantage.
1. No wait. Occasionally I've discovered a book and wanted to read it immediatly. My kindle lets me do that easily.
2. Reading before sleep. There is something nice about getting ready for bed, turning off the lights, and reading on a backlit e-book reader. It means that I can read until the exact point that I feel like I am drifting off to sleep without needing to get up and turn out the light. Obviously this is good for light fiction. You wouldn't want to read anything that demands attention this way.
Actually paper books are an inferior product for many reasons:
1) moderately large to large books are uncomfortable to hold after a while.
2) Fixed font size.
3) Take up physical space (i.e. you can have books and other kind of "publications" like magazines in a Kindle).
4) Unsearchable.
5) Every reader essentially has to "hack" something as simple as progress saving.
>"they require no battery":
This doesn't really make paper books a superior product. The same argument could be said of landline phones but that doesn't make them better than cellphones.
>"accidental touchscreen events":
Not all ereaders are touchscreen based, an in any case it's a poor, circumstantial reason.
Your other reasons amount to pretty much preference, none of them make paper books categorically superior to ereaders.
As far as novels are concerned, ebooks only have two advantages to me:
(1) They save space. If I were a voracious reader devouring many novels, this might actually matter to me. But as it stands, I'm the sort of person to be into a single novel at a time, and I don't make it a point to read fast but rather to read more slowly and enjoy every word. At the same time, there's a strange pleasure in assembling little shelves of novels I've read and loved. A Kindle or iBooks library just feels sterile and corporate in comparison.
(2) They're searchable. For novels, this is not as much of an advantage as I thought it would be, though. The senses of touch and sight are surprisingly powerful at forming a mental index of a novel. Even small things like the passing memory of the relative difference in weight or thickness between the pages on the left and the pages on the right go into helping me remember where a particular passage was. Holding a physical novel in your hands, there's a sense of seeing the entire book all at once, almost like a limited form of omniscience. Seeing only a page or two at a time in an ebook in comparison is like tunnel vision.
There's another "feature" which hurts my sleep.
At the end of one book in the series, my Kindle has a "click here to get the next book" link. This is really nice, as I don't have to wait for shipping or bike to the library, but it also means I don't go to sleep after the end of the book.
I also like the "airgap" benefits of books vs proprietary readers, nobody can log into a book and ninja edit for future political reasons or delete them for copyright reasons.
Personally, I'm not this paranoid. I buy the books on my kindle and copy them into Calibre and strip the DRM. I get all the benefits of having an permanent archive and being able to enjoy modern technology.
For now we can strip DRM, what if all near future readers have a TPM-like hardware key that can't be copied or sniffed that must be present to decrypt the text.
Probably the most terrifying "feature". I agree wholeheartedly. Its kinda scary how technology, if universally adopted, could be a past censors dream come true.
I suspect the pricing of the book has less to do with any judgment about the features and relative superiority of the delivery substrate, and more to do with the economics of authoring a worthwhile text, which require a risky up-front investment of time few authors have any reasonable assurance they'll see a return on.
So most of the cost is probably going to paying the people who produce the book and repaying investors/publishers.
Spot on. I have been involved across multiple publishers. The cost of the book is normally set by whatever is needed to pay the editors and authors to produce a quality book. And the continuation of the publisher.
I like to read in the dark. As a passenger on road trips, or in a comfortable chair that doesn't necessarily have a reading lamp, or while waiting somewhere that doesn't have good illumination. Gooseneck lamps are AWFUL, particularly on paperbacks. I also can't set paperbacks to balance nicely on my lap without curving like crazy in most circumstances.
So I get 1) freed from having to secure and power a light source, and 2) the convenience of the hardback for the price of the paperback.
I was also quite bothered by the low res low contrast screen on the Kindle. The Paperwhite is worlds better, eliminating all of my gripes.
I feel the same way about paper books but now have most of my collection as ebooks. The reason? It's infinitely easier to move when you don't have a huge library to box up and carry around. I had amassed a very nice collection at one point in my life and sold all of it off when I had to move to another country. Now I just toss my Kindle in a backpack and my entire library comes with me.
As much as I like paper books in theory (I have an entire room in my house dedicated to being a library), I found I haven't actually really read one in a few years. Kindles, Tablets and the like are more convenient for linear reading (novels, etc.). For my last couple vacations, where I do lots of reading, I just brought my tablet and kindle along, where I would have brought a couple of books in the past. Bonus, they do other things that books don't do.
Downside is all the obvious, needs batteries, charging, etc.
However, for non-linear reading (e.g. reference books), paper books can't be beat yet. But funny thing, I bought some reference books for one of my teams recently and had to teach a couple of them how to use an index because they had only learned to ctrl+f to find things. I'll admit that well organized hypertext reference guides work almost as well as a reference book, but you consume screen space trying to display the information while an open book on your desk automatically provides that "screen" space.
On the flip side, I can start reading a book on my tablet, move to my computer and then my phone all in the same day and modern reading apps keep everything synced pretty well.
I feel sad sometimes because my physical library hasn't grown much, but then I remember that I've read many times the number of books on my digital devices because they're so convenient.
I don't like e-reader software and the way the information is displayed. I've found that the full-page image scans of books is more beautiful in many cases and works wonderfully on modern tablets with high resolution displays. There's an entire library of these scans over at archive.org for those interested, in many genres.
My experience is much like yours: linear reading is much superior on an e-device. But for technical stuff, I haven't found a reader device that gives me a good substitute for having multiple books open on my desk, with marked pages so I can flip between multiple locations.
One other thing that bugs me about e-readers is that they intentionally carry all the disadvantages of chopping text into discrete pages, when there's no reason at all to do so. In particular, it bugs me that, at the bottom of a page, I've got to memorize the context before flipping to the next. As I say it, it seems more jarring than it is, but even so, it's forcing a discontinuity that can interrupt the flow.
I just can't fathom why they don't do something to avoid that jump. Back in the early days of e-readers, I used software called "iSilo" on Palm and later PocketPC. This allowed me to configure it such that scrolling was in chunks of half a page. With this I could find any convenient spot (a paragraph or at least sentence break) on the lower half of the page, and choose to flip there. My previous "cursor" point would shift half way up the screen, and I could continue fluidly from there. I really wish Kindle allowed this.
I keep feeling like e-book readers need a "grab a bunch of a pages and flip them all" gesture along with the single page flip. When I flip a chunk of pages in a physical book all at once, I slide my index finger down some percentage of the remaining pages and just flip that entire section of book. Some kind of reasonable and intuitive two-finger equivalent seems like it would help with making e-books work better on digital devices.
> But funny thing, I bought some reference books for one of my teams recently and had to teach a couple of them how to use an index because they had only learned to ctrl+f to find things.
That's unsettling. Were they college educated? I assume that they are but I can't fathom how you can get a college degree and not know how to use an index.
For reference books I find myself preferring PDFs because of the fixed layout.
Right out of. I had to give the "back in my day" speech making me feel impossibly old. I think it's a function of both plowing through textbooks and then just googling for information when you need to find something again. It wasn't so much that they didn't know how to use an index, just that they hadn't done it since probably middle school or earlier and had simply forgotten what those 30-40 pages in the backs of reference books were for.
I work in ebook production for an academic publisher, and I think at least part of the reason sales have flattened is technological. The current crop of ebook readers are optimized for mass-market books, and have little or no support for complex text or layouts. My life would certainly be easier if I could rely on the Kindle to properly display math or tables, but I can't. Apple iBooks is a little better in this regard, also the newer Kobos, but not yet a big market for us. The money, for them, is in disposable genre books, so they have little incentive to do much software development (hell, some days I'd settle for just consistent behavior across product lines...)
> My life would certainly be easier if I could rely on the Kindle to properly display math or tables, but I can't.
From a pure consumer point of view, I'd already be glad if I had consistent, working footnotes in my Kindle books. Somehow, every ebook does them differently, and exactly zero make them convenient enough to bother with them.
Even the one or two foot notes per page in Discworld books are a chore to handle, non-fiction books with 5+ are impossible – and I only read those for leisure. At work I'd never even consider using ebook formats. I'd honestly prefer PDFs. At least their reader ecosystem isn't quite as dysfunctional…
A 'footnote' at the bottom of the page doesn't work when there's no bottom of a page. Our books normally have endnotes, which can be linked to a numbered callout (I've even written a little QA script to make sure all the notes are correctly linked). With traditional footnotes that have a separate number sequence for each page, that has to be resequenced and it is a chore. Some publishers are lazy about that stuff. (We have authors who insist on having both footnotes and endnotes, and I curse them).
End notes work… if the software can return back to where I came from. The Kindle can't. So I have to memorize my page number before tapping an end note. That's assuming I know the book uses end notes, which I can't without testing – some books use pop-up footnotes instead (which obscure half the screen, including the referencing text).
In both cases, the Kindle loves to insist that I tap exactly the 5pt big footnote number itself (around the size of a fleck of dust) and will happily ignore any taps missing it (and just flip to the next page instead… or previous, who cares? Not Amazon).
All that, of course, is assuming I use a newer one with touch screen. Otherwise, I'll have to muck around with the arrow keys.
“For my grandchildren, the idea that reading is something you do by yourself will seem arcane,” he says. “Why would you want to read by yourself if you can have access to the ideas of others you know and trust, or to the insights of people from all over the world?”
Though what's authored in a book might not be from anyone we know and trust (in itself not a "bad" thing) it's quite likely still a body of (possibly collective) insight already—perhaps even from someone(s) in less-local parts of the world.
Maybe I missed the point, but it felt like the quote was missing that a book is already a view into others' ideas and insights.
That said, even if printed books are to fall out of favor with the majority of literate people, it could still be a good idea to maintain physical libraries of works that many would find essential in the (perhaps unlikely) case that digital records fail or become inconvenient to access.
I'm not super interested in the thoughts of those I "know and trust" as I'm reading (since a circle of real friends would be too small and too unlikely to have all read the same things for this to be effective, I'm assuming this is the social-network definition of "know and trust", which is to say "follow on Twitter", so that's an even stronger no) but high-quality, extensive commentary and annotation by multiple experts would be great. Many books have some of this in the form of an introduction and some footnotes/endnotes, but I'd love the ability to turn on much higher levels of this for, say, second readings.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like ebooks are good at handling even basic annotations—certainly no better than dead-tree books—so I'm not seeing that happening any time soon. Plus if it ever happens it'll probably be some stupid online service, which I don't want. I want it to be part of the book, like DVD commentary tracks, or at least a downloadable add-on file of some kind that sticks around as long as I want it and can be backed up.
Historically reading was kind of a shared experience. Before press "scribes who copied manuscripts often made marginal annotations that then circulated with the manuscripts and were thus shared with the community; sometimes annotations were copied over to new versions when such manuscripts were later recopied" I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_annotation , references 2 and 3. Interestingly reference 3 is this paper http://jbt.sagepub.com/content/15/3/333 (paywalled PDF, sorry) about the future of annotations.
I get the joke, but that highlights something I value in books: their physicality chimes well with my ways of thinking. Sometimes I can only remember that a book was blue, and will wander my shelves looking at blue books until I find it.
Likewise I can remember the bit I'm looking for was on the bottom left of a page with a big picture on it, and will scan through the book till I get to it.
Both things I lose with eBooks; though of course there are plenty of other compensations.
I've found that I remember authors and titles of books far less well when reading ebooks. My guess is it's because I don't see the book's cover lying around the house even when I'm not actively reading it as I do with a real book, and because it always starts right where I left off, so I don't see the cover when I pick it up to start reading. Plus no author/title page headers.
I enjoy physical books too (have ~3000 in my house). Its long past the day I could ever find one again, except by accident. They're two or three deep on the shelves; not sorted out by any rational principle; more than one copy of some and others I probably loaned out and never got back. But I can never part with them, without losing a piece of myself.
Despite all the downsides of ebooks, I must admit I've gotten lazy and generally won't purchase a book if it's not available through Kindle. Having to carry around a book with me is a huge nuisance and I'd much rather just get my phone and read from it. I've recently got a paper book as a gift from a friend and I'm currently reading it and I kind of had forgotten how annoying it is to carry this huge stack of paper around.
I buy lots of technical books in early-access programs like MEAP from Manning and read chapter as they come. Since price difference between eBook and eBook+print is just $10, I usually buy paper book too (for backup). In MEAP chapters come as they ready and by the time book is printed, I already read the whole book. Over last 6 years I haven't touched any of these printed books, but I still remember the heaviest boxes during my latest move - all filled with books :D
Audible is another good substitution for non-technical paper books. It transforms daily commute into productive time. You don't need constant connection to network - books can be pre-loaded and then accessed offline without any problems plus I have a luxury to set 1.25x play speed and enjoy speed of reading above average.
Though, while role of paper books is reduced, there's still a lot of value for paper books. Paper books are much easier to follow for home repairs (DIY guides). I like printed catalogues more than electronic ones (like IKEA's one [1]).
Thanks for the reminder about audio books! I would love to see a list of HN recommendations for audiobooks similar to what has been scraped together a few times from all the various book recommendations!
3) Loaning books. I frequently give family and friends print books that I've recently read. Currently Amazon's loan functionality is very poor (only once per book, must be read within 14 days).
This leads me to buying books twice, first as an ebook and second in print to loan. Whilst publishers may well like this, it's scummy behaviour if they do and scummy business practices always come back and bite you eventually.
Or alternatively I never buy the ebook because I want the print book to loan, but the print is too expensive so I never buy either...
From a publisher's point of view, you're infringing on their intellectual property. To them, it's no different than simply pirating the book out of piratebay since they'll never see the revenue from it.
I think "case based reasoning" is going on. We have no problems loaning books out to friends because we always have. But pirating a copy is considered unethical, even though the net effect on the publisher is the same. One can argue that the former is slightly better because the both of us can't read it at the same time, but in my view we're just rationalizing.
The loan view was just an extension of private property. We can loan a chair because we lose access to it while loaned. With immaterial things like ebooks, we do not lose access while on loan.
That has always been the reasoning. Ebooks are not considered property. You are licensed a nontransferable copy of the book.
> One can argue that the former is slightly better because the both of us can't read it at the same time, but in my view we're just rationalizing.
With books, most of us just lend books when we're done reading them. It's rare where both need to read at the same time, although (I guess) that can happen.
My greater point is that we, as a society, are perfectly comfortable lending books out to friends or having public libraries simply because we've grown up doing it that way. In an alternative universe, if public libraries or paper books were invented today, most people (especially intellectual property lawyers) would view it as a form of intelletual property theft and consider those things "morally wrong". Not that I'm saying that's right or wrong, it's just that people have a tendency to understand the present in terms of the past (case-based reasoning).
I agree those are useful. But consider they are also hard(er) to do with paper books. Pack a paper book up in a box; write an address label; hike down to the Post office?
And backup? What does that even mean for a paper book? Photocopy? EBooks are in the cloud; you can never actually lose one forever. Just buy it again, which is very, very likely to be cheaper than photocopying a paper book.
> EBooks are in the cloud; you can never actually lose one forever. Just buy it again, which is very, very likely to be cheaper than photocopying a paper book.
In 2012 I bought some music in electronic format from Amazon. A bit later they introduced the Amazon music service. I looked in my purchased music section, and the music I'd bought in 2012 wasn't there, and if I lose the downloaded files it's not available to me unless I buy it again or the rights holders come to some agreement with Amazon.
It's possible that stuff will drop out of the cloud when the rights become impossible to work out. I'm not sure how likely that is with books, but it happens with films. The most well known is "Point Break", which now can't be shown in public by cinemas because no-one knows who owns the rights.
Books go out of print too - maybe the e-form is more reliable in that regard.
And sure we're not quite there yet - the entire library of congress isn't online yet. But we all imagine its going to end up there, no contest.
The real issue is, does e-book loss (losing rights) compare unfavorably with real book loss (loaned out and forgotten; burned or discarded; degraded to unusability)?
Paper books and CDs are an expensive pain when you move to another home, plus they take space and make you spend money in bookshelves. I'd love to be able to zip all my books :-) At least I can't lose the right to read them (unless very bad things happen).
Loaned books and not returned: same thing with files if cloud service will ever let you do that and you can't make a copy for yourself. However they could let us set an automatic return date. That will solve the problem. The point is: why bother if they won't make money out of it? Pay a little fee to borrow or to lend?
Accidentally burned vs accidentally deleted: same thing. Only the ability of backing them up is going to save you. Or a cloud service unless we are ruling it out for the rights issue.
Degradation: hard to say. Ebooks haven't been around for enough time to say how many of them I could lose in the next years. However I still have files from the mid 90s so if one really cares about them it's probably safe to say that they won't be lost. I can probably read some cassettes and floppy disks from the early and mid 80s if I bother to switch on their original hw (and if it works). However it's a vastly larger pain than reading an old book on aged paper. My parents have some of those books from the early 20th century and we can read them. Obviously they might have thrown away other books and it won't be the case if those books were bits.
Still: without cloud services are we going to be able to read epub or mobi in a 100 years? And with cloud services how many books won't be available anymore by then because of policies, politics, commercial rights, censorship?
Sure, but your access to the books is (at least currently) highly restricted, legally. I'd say it's much more likely I'm going to have some issue with accessing my kindle books (who knows, maybe I break my kindle) than I am having a fire.
I agree, and deal with this by using a Kobo and purchasing books from DRM-free publishers such as No Starch Press. It's not ideal -- the hardware is lacking polish and the book selection is limited -- but it works.
for the same reason as the 2nd point above, I would only buy technical books in paper format. For the other books that I can read and then forget, I choose ebook. If I lose it, its not much of an issue.
I stopped buying new paper books about a decade before I started buying ebooks. And even then, I would buy maybe a book or 2 per year?
In my first year or two of owning a Kindle, I think I bought more ebooks than I had bought new paper books in my entire life. Even still buying ebooks doesn't give me a fraction of the pause that buying a physical book does. A physical book is a perpetual space commitment, after all.
So I didn't "switch to ebooks from paper," I switched to ebooks from nothing, largely.
I still purchase hardcover of books that I love, from a collectors standpoint. Especially if they contain complex layout, illustrations or just beautifully made. But there is no denying the convenience of using my kindle, and get $1-5 books. The last time I was in a book store, it was totally packed with people, so I really don't think they are going anywhere, at least not in the immediate future.
Not on my bookshelf (a physical thing, where I like to display physical things). Books are not just "data", but have an aesthetic appeal (especially hard backs) that a screen will never replace for many of us.
I arrange mine chronologically by author's first major work (or rough date of the first work in it in the case of collections, like Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature) so my very shelves are didactic. Even if I can't tell you exactly when a book was written I can probably imagine where it is on the shelves and pin it down to "after Fielding, before Dickens... after but very near Austen, I think".
Can't really do that with e-books. Even if you set up your collection to be displayed that way, you're not going to look at it several times every day as you move around your house. Won't be effective—probably just annoying.
Plus, shelves have two (possibly three) dimensions, so you can have organization running vertically and horizontally. The third dimension is into the bookshelf, if you have a bunch of double-shelved paperbacks. I have Jurassic Park shelved next to Frankenstein, with Tolkein up and to the right. The Lord of the Rings is in front of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and Unfinished Tales.
I've been wanting to look into a digital picture frame for this very reason, to have it cycle through some of my interests that I no longer have a physical copy of, for when company is around.
I am 70% e-books in the last three years or so. A quick count gives ~200 books in my kindle library, and I dont think I've bought more than 100 paper books in the same time frame.
Paper books are mostly read and dispose of for me anyway, and I don't typically re-read books, so e-books just give me the flexibility of not needing to bring 5-6 big logs when I go on vacation, and mean I dont need to run to the book shop when I need something new to read.It is also cheaper by a significant margin.
For me - having access to a huge library at the click of a button, and less weight to carry around far outweighs any disadvantages of screen light, battery time etc.
If I read an ebook and it really hits home for whatever reason I'll buy a paper copy. Not to read, but to act as a sort of physical reference point to stop me from forgetting about its existence. A souvenir of itself.
If you are one of the do not desecrate my book types you would not find this palatable. For me reading a book means having an outline of the chapter, section and the entire book on paper. Creating marginalia and annotating is in their infant state in the electronic form (epub).
If I've to consume something electronically, always prefer the PDF any day as they look gorgeous — the design, and the typography especially, though reading on very small screens are problematic.
I've just started writing marginalia, after long feeling like that was desecration. It's been a revelation, and has transformed how I read. I'm much more engaged, and it feels more like a two-sided conversation than a one-sided lecture.
Paper is nice, but electronics are nicer. I've been working on a book which began on paper, but has evolved into a digital format. It is not 'digital literature' or particularly interactive; but it cannot be replicated with paper. If anyone is interested, it's available in the Google Play Store alpha channel:
Ebooks are still inferior to paper books in many ways and that's mostly because of stupid, artificial limitations inflicted by publishers. Until Ebooks have open, multi device, easily reformatable standard (my experience reading on a small phone screen varies from terrible to utterly unreadable) and sharing ability among friends, it's no deal for me. PDF is close, but still not there.
Hm. Many of those objections are objections for paper books too? When was the last time you 'reformatted' an article from a magazine into a pamphlet form? When was the last time you magically ported a book onto your airplane? Even sharing - you have to actually give the book away to accomplish that, and you have to actually be in the same room as your friend.
Its easy to criticize ebooks; there's much to criticize there. But lets be careful not to claim that means ebooks are worse than paper. Because paper can do none of the many things that ebooks can do.
ebooks to me are a solution in search of a problem. I like how books look, how they smell, the feel of turning the pages, being able to dogear a page to keep my place, loaning them out, seeing them on my bookshelf. I also form memories of where information physically is in a reference book that I may want to refer back to.
>ebooks to me are a solution in search of a problem.
Especially since they haven't implemented all the features that would make them handier than books:
a) Copying excerpts (most DRM readers either forbid this or make it a time consuming BS process)
b) Adding notes (ditto)
d) Easy access to all your bookmarks and notes across your whole book collection.
e) Proper, book quality typography and layout (not markup BS that looks like a webpage), with overrides/re-layouts for larger font-size etc only as an additional option not as the main way to read.
Well, that's the parents case though, as that wasn't really much of a problem people had.
"Oh this random place I happen to be is a perfect place to read, if only I had my library with me to pick a book".
If people know they'll be traveling, they pack a few books to have with them (or buy at the airport). If they're commuting (e.g. to work on a train or long bus ride) then they bring along the book they are reading at that point in time. But usually they just read at their house/study/office.
As for casual reading, there's always tons of stuff on the web.
This was very much a problem I had. As a person who prefers to read books over stuff on the web, I enjoy the fact that as long as I have my phone (always) I can knock out a chapter virtually anywhere.
Since moving to ebooks my book consumption has increased 4x. I've replaced random phone scrolling during downtimes with books and it has been fantastic.
I'm to the point now where I actually prefer reading books on my phone even when a larger display device is nearby.
As a student, they are invaluable for textbooks. I hate lugging them around to the classes that might need them, or to collaborate with others. I throw many of my textbooks onto my old iPad, and I see many people on my campus with some sort of tablet (surfaces seem to be gaining in popularity) and some sort of relevant text on them.
>As for casual reading, there's always tons of stuff on the web.
For me, ebooks make it possible to replace much of the casual reading I do on the web with books. I've been happy with the change and I read significantly more books.
Unless Amazon cooperates with the regime in the future to censor the ebook too, most publishers won't but a major distributor like Amazon might if doing so allows them a large government contract with said regimes, or entrance to the market like Google's Chinese censorship.
I'm the opposite. I like technical books on paper, and I often print out RFCs I actively use. On the other hand, I think e-books are amazing for novels. They usually don't feature pictures, equations, tables or other weird stuff, and e-book readers are super-convenient for commute.
Serious reading is best with a book, but news and quick reads are ok on a screen.
These days I find I can focus much better with a physical book, maybe I've trained myself. With digital reading I'm automatically in skim mode - though I might be obtaining a broader sense of knowledge.
One thing I would miss is visiting someone's house and getting a very quick but quite profound insight into their life history and interests by browsing their bookshelves. A lot harder to do with an ebook collection.
The same in reverse - I have a lot of books, and visitors will often go straight to the bookshelves and start browsing. Lots of interesting conversation starters right there.
I like the way old books feel and look. The way you turn the pages can't be comparable to an ebook which I only find useful in certain cases such as a textbook.
I have no qualms with either format. Both have their pros and cons.
But until ebooks have an equivalent of "used" ebooks, I'm going to continue buying used paper books. $1 or $3 for a beautiful break from backlighting, as well as the opportunity to [gasp] use my hands, is the way I'll go. Ebooks, no matter how old, are an order of magnitude higher in price. No thanks!
And although this has nothing to do with my personal consumption, publishers need to figure out how they're going to stop ripping off libraries. It's part of the reason I'm personally against subsidizing the ebook industry in any form (for now).
I could go on.
And despite all that, they're priced as if they're in some way equivalent to the real deal. I've tried and failed to make the jump via Kindle and Kobo, and until such times as pricing on the major stores reflects the eBook's status as an inferior, vastly cheaper to produce knockoff of the real deal, I won't be tempted to buy any more ebooks (the price difference should be closer to 50%, not 15%)
Another aspect as an IT guy is that my ability to relax and focus when holding a computer is vastly reduced over a paper book. The limitations of paper books in that sense are actually a feature. I can't search, bookmark (without folding a paper page corner), 'browse', play with some half-baked eInk web browser, switch book etc., all of which are real focus problems I suffer from.