Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.
I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal.
My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.
P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.
> For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great.
E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaking lines that have been around for ages. Some poetry ebooks are in fact preceded by a publisher’s warning to this effect.
Agreed generally, but this one is on the publisher or whoever is in charge of making a digital copy. I was recently reading some of Bukowski poems on kindle, and the "weird" formatting intended by the author was relayed just as well in digital as it was in paper.
Interestingly, I find I'm the other way. Reading for pleasure, I want a physical book. Anything where I'm flipping back and forth, I prefer an e-book, so I can quickly make bookmarks and have a clickable table of contents/index.
Relative niceness of ebook vs. physical book depends a lot on the actual ebook hardware. i.e. An ereader is much nicer than a tablet/PC for reading text, but nearly unusable if you need to flip around or do anything interactive other than turning pages from front to back.
For me textbooks are best consumed as a pdf. I don't kill my back, I don't kill my wallet, and I can ctrl-f through the entire book and annotate as needed. I throw it on a flashdrive on my keys and I can pass it around to classmates.
Any other kind of book and I'm reaching for print. It's much more satisfying to bang out 50 pages in a novel and see the bookmark move deeper into the book than to scroll scroll scroll through an ebook.
I find the opposite. If I just want to read, I prefer a book. If it's a text, I want to be able to read and search, and I want to be able to scale the graphs and footnotes. Not all eBook formats support color and scaling, but some do.
It's nice although our preferences are reversed to find someone else who has preferences for both in different circumstances.
I really like the books that include an eBook with the print copy.
It's the interface and interaction of physical books which is lost.
I can keep my hand between two sections and flip between them, insert colored post-its, or bokmarks or index cards. Dog-ear pages, make marginal notes, star, underline, or (shudder)highlight.
The one thing missing is full-text search, though a good index is a 90% solution (and so: not optional).
Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works. Fluid layout is great for screens, but lousy for recall.
And the interface is consistent across books, authors, publishers, and centuries. Whilst, yes, various ebook formats offer facsimiles of many of these features, they are just that, and mediated to bot. Want to highlight? Better hope that's a rendered or OCRd (and reliably) PDF, or you're SooL.
Source; A tablet with over 5,000 epub-type docs, of various sources and provenance, from single page to multi-volume book length. I appreciate the weight and space savings, but miss much physical books deliver.
I remember roughly how far into a book, or chapter, passages are. Where on a page, or with relstion to other elements, how or where a line breaks (especially if that's awkward). Where the book itself lives within my collection. Where I was when first reading (or later re-reading) it. Etc., etc.
Spatial associations.
Consistent pagination is useful, but it's a small subset of the whole.
I generally print out research articles because I can write all over the figures and take it with me to lunch and not be bothered when I spill on it, or fold it up into my back pocket. I feel like I get better comprehension too. For textbooks that's a no go for me and probably most students, because this thing is getting resold once I'm through.
I agree with this sentiment when using a paperwhite tablet (glowing screens with stuff formatted for paper is painful). Serial reading, ebooks are fine.
There are a few cases where a PDF/djvu textbook with strategic bookmarks can also be used. When I'm on the road I have a decent reference library in a rooted Kobo H2O running koreader. Not an ideal solution; something with an 8x12 screen would be much closer to it, but nobody makes these any more, and if I need to look something up in Golub, it can be done.
FWIIW the only thing that makes this doable is koreader does reflow on columnated text.
I find retaining information in digital books much more difficult. I think the lack of a tactile third dimension when reading eliminates a search index in my memory and it really effects how I parse the book. I tried reading the most recent GoT book in digital form and I just could not keep track of everyone (admittedly it had been several years since I read the previous installment in dead tree form, so I didn't have a current index of all the characters fresh in my memory). I gave up about 1/4 of the way through and just watched the tv show :)
Honestly, and I dislike admitting it, but paper books instill the same feeling as any other "collection" hobby for me. I take more pride in reading them knowing that my bookshelf is growing.
Fair point. I agree that the incumbent digital avatar is more of a file and less of a book, a classic enterprise solution for a consumer category of products.
And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!
