The Deep Space of Digital Reading

Ebooks provide near instantaneous access. I can open my ebook reader, search for "alkyl-alkyl bond formation" and be provided with a list of references with their surrounding context across many different books at once. Digital books don't require me to laboriously look up something in the index and flip to it, only to find that the specific thing I was hunting for was actually in another textbook.

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> Physical books provide parallel access, I can pile open books on and around my desk...

Digital books provide perpetual access. I can read the same book on my phone on my commute, on my computer during work, and on my kindle at home. My physical books can be left at home or lost.

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> To me, ebooks are like Skyping a lover or dining in an Indianoplis Olive Garden...

To me, paper books are like getting around town in a horse carriage or listening from a vinyl. Fun and entertaining once in a while, but there's a more efficient method available to me day to day.

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> The touch of a clothbound book is not like holding my cellphone and the typeset pages of a trade paperback are distinct from my laptop's screen and the heft of one book is different from the other...

The heft of 600 page reference textbooks or the tiny, inscrutable font of mass market paperbacks are both vices I'm happy to do without.

1. Some books have horrible formats. In the physical books, shitty formatted texts are not printed (hopefully) and fixed. 2. Too many filetypes and some books tend to be only in a particular format, hence creating a separation. Though this is easily remedied by using converters, it loses formatting sometimes.

I still prefer EBook reader for the convenience. However, a physical book is great. I find it better but I do not have a good reason as to why.

At this point, I think the attachment that people have to analog books is purely emotional. There is no practical reason to have books over e-readers.

People mention things like the feel of the book, the feel of the paper in your hands, etc. Well I don't particularly like the way paper feels, particularly old paper when it starts to change color and get stiff and slightly misshapen. But even if you do like that sort of thing, in the end that's not what you're after, you don't read books for the feel of the paper or the smell or whatever, you read books because you want a good story or good information.

Yes some nostalgia books might be good for paper format for collectors or people who have preferences (like those people who like to vinyl instead of MP3s , but for ever-day, practical reading, digital readers are better in nearly every respect. They are cheaper, they have adjustable fonts, you can make a backup copy of the book and store it in the cloud so you don't have to worry about ever losing your book. You can adjust the font and font size. You can tap twice on any word and instantly get the dictionary definition. If you have a kobo you can save we articles on the kobo for later reading. It automatically keeps your page for you. Bookshelves take up an enormous amount of room, having that in the space of a small notebook is an advantage. It's much more environmentally friendly. By any measure e-books are better.

The only mildly sensible detraction I've seen on here is the inability to show off your bookshelf or share books, which frankly I don't care about. I don't care about showing off to other people, that's not why I read, and I can share books just fine without pulling it off a bookshelf and showing it.

I doubt this is true for everyday reading. Because if that were true you would just open up old books and sniff them and rub them in your hands from time to time. And yet I have never once seen anyone do this. Lets face it, we read books for the words not for the feel for the books.

People are just going back to "feel" based sentiments now to justify what they see as a major change in a cherished hobby which they dislike. And while feel based arguments for preserving books aren't completely without merit, they only apply to a narrow type of book and a narrow type of reading (beautiful classic books) and not to actual every day reading.

I understand the nice qualities in old classic books. I get the nice feeling of opening up a really old book that has been around for a long time - but that really is a limited scope sort of use that doesn't capture every day use of books, and it's not really connected to the reading - it has more the value that an antique or a collectible has.

I think the best example is two copies of Shakespeare I have. One is an old classic version of Shakespeare in hard cover printed on high quality paper with ink illustrations. The other is a college paperback copy of Hamlet with torn covers and introduction pages. The prior might not be a good candidate for replacement with an e-reader but the latter certainly would. But if your goal was just to read Hamlet, both would be just as effective. This isn't to say there isn't a place for the great feeling you get with the hardcover beautiful Shakespeare book, just that the feeling isn't necessarily connected to the actual reading of Hamlet.

If you're reading a PDF on most e-readers, it automatically remembers that you're still on page 1 if you made the mistake of opening 2 or 3 other PDFs in the meantime.

This applies to every PDF reader I've tried except Foxit and the older Kindles.