Paper is the real 'killer app'

I love physical books; my wife and I have a library of well over 1000 volumes - certainly not the largest collection, but large enough. Most of it is fiction, but we also have a lot of non-fiction as well.

Even so - I like an e-reader for certain uses. The best use that I've found is for technical documents. Not books, per se, but documentation like electronic component datasheets and the like are much more convenient to access on an e-reader, especially when you're in the middle of a project. Before, one would have to spend a lot of money to get the datasheets in book form from the manufacturer, and then find a place to store the behemoths (some were as thick as phone books, and multi-volume - especially components and such from places like Motorola, ST, and others with extensive component lines). Not only that, each year (or more often) you'd have to get the new versions for the year, and the various errata pages (filed somewhere). Then to search thru all of that...

...today, I can download and read these documents online or offline with a reader, store them locally, search them fairly easily, etc. All on a small and easy to use electronic device.

We have books too. I don't love them (smelly, dusty, heavy) but I have never gotten into an e-reader. So much friction to use - fiddly menus, losing my place, even changing pages or trying to go back and find a passage I read before - all tedious.

So we have a collection. Every bookcase in the house two-deep and books stacked on top of books. When the boys grew up and our church asked for kids books in English for a Romanian school, we donated 1000 books to the effort. Still have a bookcase full of kids books (for the grandkids someday, sigh).

The small electronic device is certainly a selling-point. If they don't expire (go out of business) or get lost changing to the latest gee-whiz gadget, it would be nice to have them all in one place.

For me, paper is necessary for mindmaps, or any task that exercises spatial intelligence and building relationships between concepts.

If you're like me, you've spent many times that on books. E-readers often have books at a discount or even free. So its a value proposition: how many e-books over what time make it a bargain?

There definitely is an appeal to the analog and the idea of slowing down to be more creative and productive.

Photography is a hobby of mine. I own a Nikon D500, which is one of Nikon's flagship professional DSLR cameras. It can shoot at 10 frames per second with a buffer of 200 shots. The storage cards hold thousands of images. All of this is great when you're shooting high-speed action where every shot in a short time frame counts, but it also means there's very little risk in each shot. So if you take 900 pictures and only 9 are keepers it's no big deal. I shoot in RAW mode so any type of color and lighting adjustments can be made in post, and the resolution's high enough that I can crop for a good composition after the fact.

But recently I've decided to get into plain old fashioned 35mm film photography. The equipment is all still relatively inexpensive, but the film costs $5-10 per roll of 24 or 36 exposures. Then you either have to send the film out to be developed, which can take days or weeks (since there are very few places that do it in house anymore), or you can develop it yourself (as I have started to do) which involves an hour long process mixing chemicals, making sure everything's the right temperature, shaking and stirring, drying and cutting, then finally scanning the processed film. Each shot has more risk, and so you take more time and compose more carefully, which makes the end result that much better. I've found it to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding.