Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
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Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
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Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#2i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.
i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.
i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#3 When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter
or read a couple of pages on the phone.
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#4I completely agree with the OP, at first I thought I would miss having a physical book in my hands, but to be honest I don't really miss it at all. There are so many advantages to eBook reading such as light weight (compared to some hard covers), increased font size, etc. I now find myself thinking of buying a hardcover book as more of a painful inconvenience rather than a benefit.
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#5Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#6When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter or read a couple of pages on the phone. Maybe you should spend these few minutes in quiet contemplation? You can learn a lot by exploring your mind during quiet times and not constantly binging on information.
For that I go outdoors. Restaurants in San Francisco are not precisely quiet :)
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#7I refuse to buy a Kindle.
TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service)
Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.)
Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.)
Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over-engineered. It's legacy. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a database for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards.
Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another.
[0]: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#8Novels and light non-fiction is easy to read on the Kindle but for non-fiction with lots of ideas that are new I often have to buy the hard copy as well and underline and notate. Still I like the Kindle version because I travel a lot.
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#9I got a Kindle about a month ago but have since returned it. It seems to be an excellent device for reading any book that should be read serially (e.g. novels), but any type of book that requires "random access" (e.g. reference/technical) doesn't work well due to the small screen, inability to jump to page X (which makes it difficult to use an index since you can't easily jump to it from anywhere), and poor search functionality.
Even if these features were implemented better, it would probably still be annoying as Kindles are sluggish, low-power devices (which is probably a boon for the serial-reading use case as it encourages you to just flip pages and not get sidetracked, as well as providing amazing battery life).
Then again, maybe I'm just missing something as my coworker seems fine using his Kindle for this purpose.
Re: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
#10I completely agree with the OP, at first I thought I would miss having a physical book in my hands, but to be honest I don't really miss it at all. There are so many advantages to eBook reading such as light weight (compared to some hard covers), increased font size, etc. I now find myself thinking of buying a hardcover book as more of a painful inconvenience rather than a benefit.
same here.