Sorry, Ebooks. These 9 Studies Show Why Print Is Better

[Vurbal]

For reading novels, I prefer even my wife's inferior (compared to a dedicated ereader) 7-inch Android tablet to dealing with a book.

-Vurbal (March 03, 2015, 01:27 PM)

Vurbal, what makes it inferior? The hardware or the software experience? Not much you can do about the hardware except lay out money for a new tablet, but if it's software then there are many, many different ereading apps available. It's just a matter of finding the right app that does the things you want.

-Innuendo (March 07, 2015, 11:32 AM)

It's a cheap, older tablet and doesn't have a display that's optimized for reading. That's fine. I need a tablet, and it's available when I need to read a book. I'm quite happy with both of the reader apps I use, which cost me a grand total of $10 between them.

[Curt]

In the last maybe five years I have purchased at least ten times as many eBooks as paper books. But each and every time I buy an eBook, I get a little frustrated, even angry!, because I know that if it had been a paper book, someone would inherit it after my death, but no-one will be getting the virtual books.

-Curt (March 03, 2015, 03:13 AM)

Why not? Put them on a DVD, box it, and place it on the bookshelf.

-zenzai (March 03, 2015, 07:46 AM)

I think paper books and ebooks have their different pros and cons. But the main problem with ebooks in the quoted situation ("after my death") is that the ebooks, I am talking about here, are all part of my bible study program, Logos. Without the program there are no books. And for these books to keep working, their next owner must pretend to be me (log-in for software update, etc). And keep pretending, to such an extend that Logos may think it is weird that Curt has now lived for exceptionally many years!

This may sound silly to some of you, but I have spend half a year's salary on these books, so to me it's a lot of money. If they were hard copies, they would be passed on to some one. But being virtual, no one will get it (do you get it?), because the people emptying the flat will just toss out such an old, almost worthless PC and what is this, a "DVD"?

[CWuestefeld]

For fiction and other pleasure reading, I'm all-in for ebooks. I use my Kindle almost exclusively for this. However, I do have a bunch of shelves of treasured books, mostly hardcovers, that I just feel good having near me.

On the other hand, I find the ebook experience for reference material - like programming manuals - completely awful. I find that I'm always wanting to flip back-and-forth between pages, and even have multiple books open simultaneously. Paper books laid out on a desktop, with bookmarks at important spots, accomplish this very well. It seems like this is an experience that ebooks *could* emulate, but I haven't found anything that does so well.

[superboyac]

For fiction and other pleasure reading, I'm all-in for ebooks. I use my Kindle almost exclusively for this. However, I do have a bunch of shelves of treasured books, mostly hardcovers, that I just feel good having near me.

On the other hand, I find the ebook experience for reference material - like programming manuals - completely awful. I find that I'm always wanting to flip back-and-forth between pages, and even have multiple books open simultaneously. Paper books laid out on a desktop, with bookmarks at important spots, accomplish this very well. It seems like this is an experience that ebooks *could* emulate, but I haven't found anything that does so well.

-CWuestefeld (March 09, 2015, 02:43 PM)

The reference book bit really hit home with me, so true.  It is a painful experience.  However, I do have to say that on the flip side, I have found it extremely handy to be able to take screenshots or clip text and such things like that.  Interesting.  I wonder how this will go in the future...how do we marry the two together?

[tomos]

^ how about buy a book and get a free ebook 'rip'  - like Amazon are doing for CD's

Sorry, Ebooks. These 9 Studies Show Why Print Is Better

and use both.

FWIW, at the moment, I'm working on a reference volume about an archaeological excavation:
it might never appear online or in digital format, but the illustrations will be downloadable - and also a spreadsheet with all 'features' referenced in some detail, including relative links to the related (searchable) illustrations.
Idea being that one would work with both the hardcopy and the digital information:

• Read about a feature of interest (there's almost 3,000 :p) in the book;
• go to spreadsheet for overview of info related to the feature:
• click link for the feature - relevant PDF illustration opens; search for feature number, click to zoom in

It's not high-tech in any way, but it already makes for a very efficient way of working with a large project like this.

[wraith808]

Well, the difference in that approach is the fact that when you purchase a DVD and/or a CD, on the physical media, you have the digital media.  It's just a different mode of distribution.

Books don't have that advantage.  And I think that's one of the reasons they started offering physical media with digital- they'd rather give it to you in their format than you ripping it and getting it in a format they can't control.

[tomos]

Well, the difference in that approach is the fact that when you purchase a DVD and/or a CD, on the physical media, you have the digital media.  It's just a different mode of distribution.

Books don't have that advantage.  And I think that's one of the reasons they started offering physical media with digital- they'd rather give it to you in their format than you ripping it and getting it in a format they can't control.

-wraith808 (March 09, 2015, 03:28 PM)

yeah, I dont see it happening - would be nice though...

[CWuestefeld]

The reference book bit really hit home with me, so true.  It is a painful experience.  However, I do have to say that on the flip side, I have found it extremely handy to be able to take screenshots or clip text and such things like that.  Interesting.  I wonder how this will go in the future...how do we marry the two together?

-superboyac (March 09, 2015, 02:51 PM)

One thing that I do find pretty useful in this vein is Evernote. I can copy out interesting pieces from various sources, including images, and tag them appropriately. When I want easy access between them, I can just search for the appropriate tag(s) to focus on just those. But I don't want to derail the discussion into note taking (for which there are already a zillion threads around here) - I just mean to acknowledge your point, that the digital realm does have some good solutions in this area.

[Nod5]

I still much prefer reading academic articles on paper where it feels more real and i can mark things up.

-mouser (March 02, 2015, 03:16 PM)

I find the ebook experience for reference material - like programming manuals - completely awful. I find that I'm always wanting to flip back-and-forth between pages, and even have multiple books open simultaneously. [---] It seems like this is an experience that ebooks *could* emulate, but I haven't found anything that does so well.

-CWuestefeld (March 09, 2015, 02:43 PM)

These are exactly the kind of reasons that made me first write sumatra_earmarks (earmarks!) and later the much better sumatra_highlight_helper (3 color text highlighting! Color dots! Hotkeys to jump to prev/next/first/last highlight in pdf! Color filtered jumps! And with the jump feature the highlights can also function as earmarks!). Caveats: these only work for pdf and djvu documents and with the Sumatra PDF reader (developer version), which however is a great reader. Sumatra supports having multiple copies of the same pdf open in separate windows so it is easy to have two pages of the same book side by side if the screen is large enough.

[mouser]

New e-reader Paper display with fast refresh?

https://liliputing.c...an-e-ink-screen.html

[Deozaan]

New e-reader Paper display with fast refresh?

https://liliputing.c...an-e-ink-screen.html

-mouser (June 11, 2020, 09:03 PM)

Or not?

Update: An earlier version of this article referred to the Hisense Q5 as a tablet with an E Ink display, but it appears this tablet’s grayscale display may actually be a reflective LCD screen. This could give it a faster screen refresh rate while still enabling high outdoor visibility without a backlight. But it may not feature the high contract and lower power consumption associated with E Ink displays.

[mouser]

Here's one that has a real e-ink display.. Uses Android. Refresh rates are slow but it has a big 10.3 inch screen and a nice pen:

Onyx Boox Note2

[Nod5]

With Kindle as the only big exception e-ink displays for reading and note taking is a technology that always seems to be on the verge of mass market breakthrough yet never seems to get there.

These are exactly the kind of reasons that made me first write sumatra_earmarks (earmarks!) and later the much better sumatra_highlight_helper (3 color text highlighting! Color dots! Hotkeys to jump to prev/next/first/last highlight in pdf! Color filtered jumps! And with the jump feature the highlights can also function as earmarks!).

-Nod5 (March 14, 2015, 07:37 AM)

Since this thread has arisen from a 5 year slumber I'll give an update to my old comment: I have since then remade and renamed my helper tool for SumatraPDF to HighlightJump

Unfortunately recent SumatraPDF updates has introduced a bug to the highlights system that also breaks HighlightJump. But once that is sorted by the SumatraPDF dev I will release a working, updated version.