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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)
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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)
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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)
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Why not? Put them on a DVD, box it, and place it on the bookshelf. ;) -zenzai (March 03, 2015, 07:46 AM)
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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)
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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.
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