No one buys books • Hacker News Board

karmakaze wrote: post #141

roughly wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus. Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the…

This is not good news. I just got my first eInk reader today and first thing I did was go through all the navigation setup pages. I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.

Chiming in with the others to say that my experience with e-readers has been great. Physical books can grow to be a huge burden over the years.

For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word.

I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is lost when using an e-reader, but for me it's well worth the trade-off for the the portability and space saved.

Also consider that often, people who are expressing skepticism of digital reading have only ever tried it on laptops and iPads, which is a very different (more distracting) experience from an e-ink reader.