I think there's something about the spatial dimension of how information is arranged in a real book that really helps me learn and retain concepts and information.
I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning, but I agree with your result.
I've had a kindle for about six months, and I've been reading a ton. I'm usually more of a 3-5 books/year type of guy, but I've gone through ten since getting the kindle. Problem is that I really haven't retained the content as well as I have been able to with tree books.
Probably because having a kindle doesn't mean you can't read real books. I use my iPad/Kindle app to read most of my books but will still borrow real ones from friends to read.
> Most of those responding aren't old enough to have experience of pre-web real books... [flagged]
You aren't old enough to have experienced the pre-printing-press real books. Nowadays they just print everything that comes to their filthy minds, regardless of the content or even position of the author in our society. Just a machine printing away inked paper. Oh, how I miss the good old days when you could feel the woodblock pressure immortalized against the pulp, that subtle off-white coloring; the tasteful thickness of it.
>You aren't old enough to have experienced the pre-printing-press real books
That's true. Not sure how it's a counter-argument though.
Pre-printing press books were great as well, and even more important (regarding historical importance, and in terms of the price they'd fetch at an auction today) than printing-press books.
And it would also be true that having no direct experience of them, I'd be not very qualified to compare them to the printing-press books. Which is my point exactly.
It's not a counter-argument. I'm making fun of you. Something something beat a river into submission. Go belittle humanity's distribution of knowledge and information elsewhere, prick.
I like books better than any screened material. BUT nowadays I have found extreme comfort in audio books, kindle (Amazon Fire - rooted), and Scrivener on my PC (so I can keep notes)(pause the audio, email myself some thoughts and then copy & paste them on my Scrivener).
I got rid of (gave away) about 200 books. I haven't felt better 'minimizing' in my life. Now other people can get value from them, and I don't feel the obligation to read them again.
Why would you expect more people to miss books? Books didn't go anywhere. Anyone who wants them can easily buy them or borrow them.
You know what I miss? Dead tree user manuals that used to come with hardware and software. That's something that has gone the way of the Dodo, unlike most other books. Luckily I can still buy printed manuals from the FSF.
I just miss manuals, dead tree or otherwise. Where’s the manual for my iPhone? It’s just a vast unordered, sprawling, inconsistent, incomplete subsection of apple.com.
What I miss are schematics and parts lists. Of course, that would be virtually impossible with today's electronics, short of a bunch of PDF documents or something. Even then, they would almost be worthless.
But...back in the 1980s, just about any electronic device you bought (especially if you bought it from Radio Shack), the manual would have a schematic in the back, plus a list of parts (and in the case of RS - the parts list would usually have part numbers you could pick up off-the-shelf at the store!).
There's too many black-box chips on a typical product to make any sort of schematic meaningful.
There used to be full wiring diagrams for cars in manuals, but imagine that now where your car has 200 separate computerized systems, each with their own intricate circuits.
There's a pattern where people go along with technology and progress because it's the thing to do, rather than by making a conscious decision. We're constantly sold new ways of doing things by getting bombarded with messaging about their strengths. We have to figure out their weaknesses on our own and they creep up on us more quietly. There's no industry shouting at us about the pros of physical books the way Amazon does about the Kindle.
So it's not hard to believe that there are people who switched to e-books by default and later could realize they miss real books.
I was surprised about this too. I've recently switched back to buying hardcovers of older books on ebay that I know I'll re-read (library for everything else). In my opinion, a hardcover book is easier to read both in terms of hold and in terms of eye strain.
Kindle backlighting is far too pure-white/blue for me to use at night when it would be most useful and the text resolution on the paperwhite I have (can't remember what generation) is nowhere near print quality. I am still sad that physical paging buttons were removed as well.
A kindle with adjustable color temperature would be a game-changer for me.
It also bugs me that you can't really trade-in a digital copy, and the prices for a digital book are rarely significantly less than a physical book
I haven't used an e-reader in many years but I remember it being pretty clunky (kinda like a flip-phone interface). It seems like modern devices ought to have have worked out most of the kinks by now. I should try one out.
I definitely prefer real books when reading technical documentation. However, when I'm at work, as long as I'm staring at a computer screen, nobody bothers me. The minute I start looking at a printed book, somebody with some (real or imagined) authority comes along and says, "watcha readin', commandlinefan? Why are you reading a book? Not enough real work to keep you busy? Why are you reading about Scala, why don't you ask Srinivas, he knows Scala? 'cause you should know by now that nothing matters except the deadlines, just work without understanding what you're doing or looking for optimal ways of implementing things because if we miss those deadlines it doesn't make any difference whatsoever but it's the only fucking thing we keep track of and the only fucking thing we measure performance based off of", so I settle for the far inferior freely available online documentation or the eye-straining PDF scans I can find.
I prefer my kindle because it is light and doesn't require a light like a regular book. I would never travel without it. I don't find books more immersive, if the writing is good I'll get lost in the book even if it was on my laptop or phone.
I used to love physical books and the feel and the smell and the looks. Until the day I moved overseas and couldn't take my collection with me. I left them stored in boxes at friend's house and one day, during a storm, his house was flooded and my books were destroyed like most of his stuff.
Today I love my Kindle and I like the peace of mind that my books are safe.
At least for the physical books, it took a major weather event to destroy them. For virtual goods, cloud-hosted content, and permissionware, your ability to access the works can be taken away at any time for any or no reason, temporarily or permanently.
Jailbroke my kindle to prevent updates from Amazon permanently. I download epubs (from apple and libgen) and wirelessly transfer them to my paperwhite.
The main thing I miss with the physical books, as opposed to e-books, is the ease of giving them as presents. Right now, when I want to give a book I just buy a physical copy; but it's been a long time since I bought one for personal consumption.
The second way physical books are still superior is that the non-text-based ones (i.e. anything with plenty of illustrations, especially in colour) still look much better than their electronic counterparts (and with that type of books, the appearance matters at least as much as the content).
I feel nostalgic about real books. I'm not sure that's exactly the same as missing real books. Having a book on my phone means that when I have time to myself I have the book I want to read. A real book would take effort to ensure I have it.
No, not at all, because I read both "real" books and on the Kindle. I have thousands of print books and keep buying more. I have the Kindle for books which are too expensive to buy in print format.
And not all books are available on the Kindle - I thought this last one would be obvious, but apparently it's not.
I too love physical books. I love holding them, collecting them, reading them, and having them visible in my home, because that also helps discovery by my visitors; who hasn't taken a look at someone else's book case and thought: "That book looks interesting"? You lose that if the books only exist on a harddisk or memory card.
But recently I've been digging through some reading material which partly exists in PDF, and partly in big physical books, and I'm going way faster through the PDFs than through the physical books, because I read the PDFs on a tablet that I always have with me, and the physical book is big enough that I really need to sit down explicitly to read it.
This is the biggest thing for me. I can cary my library with me all the time and when I have to wait longer than planned I can read something meaningful instead of just playing a stupid phone game or reading internet banality. I mean there's times when I don't want to think and those things are great. But now I have an option.
As much as I love my (physical!) library, I don't feel the need to carry all of it around with me. Just the book I'm reading at the moment suffices — perhaps a completely different second book (e.g., non-fiction if the other one is fiction) if I expect a long trip.
When I go to the barber I know that there is a good chance that there will be a queue, so I grab a book. I got through six chapters of Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco, 1986) that way last week.
y, it's nice having a book on a phone or iPad or kindle, but it's not the same a flipping through a physical book, adding post it notes, marking notes in the book.
Probably miss physical books more for something you are studying rather than just reading a novel.
So if I'm learning something I'd rather have a physical book, for reading either one works.
I do like having books on shelves though, just the look of it and seeing what you have read, having books for reference.
1. These discussions are often framed as digital vs physical books and the reality is more "books vs all other forms of entertainment".
Kindle, etc. really set up books to compete with Netflix and Gamepass in the "It's 9 pm on a Wednesday what should I do to entertain myself for a few hours before I fall asleep?" category of entertainment. Which I think is fantastic.
2. Given cost and printing constraints there are lots of obvious and non-obvious forces at play that constrain authorial expression. Case in point: novellas are more or less non-existent in printed form as printing costs don't make sense for a "book" in the 50-100 page range, but they're starting a real revival on Kindle where it's entirely possible to charge a $1 for a shorter work.
Ebook readers generally last long time, may be even a month or more on a single charge.
Many ebooks are in the public domain and can be had free of cost from Gutenberg and other sources, which are free from any kind of lock-in or DRM. Especially for English, eReaders have opened up almost the entirety of the corpus of authors like Trollope, Scott, Thackeray, Meredith, Conrad, Henry James, George Eliot, Stevenson, Bennett, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis etc, many of which works are no longer easily obtained as physical copies.
Not the parent, but at least for me my ebook collection is far less likely to be irretrievably lost than my physical library. I keep important data like photos, documents, and books backed up in multiple places, including off-site. So if my house burns down or floods, my physical library will be irretrievably destroyed, while I will still be able to access my digital library.
That's why I think it comes down to what your using the book for. If it's a resource for something, then digital just makes sense. If it's for blowing your mind with a story about Flagg and the super-flu killing almost everyone on Earth, then it's almost a trophy or monument to your experience. Especially a book like The Stand.
To me, it's the difference between the 100k photos I have sitting in the cloud and the photo albums my mother has sitting on her shelf, which she knows by heart. Or having access to pretty much ALL the music on the play store, or holding a new album by Jack White and seeing the artwork off a screen. Maybe it's just a luxury now to have physical items, or maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, I don't know.
* hauling books around at college damaged my back
* classic Microsoft texts like ASP v1.0 and SQL Server v1.0 make great monitor height boosters
* waiting for a Commodore 64 book to be delivered at the local library in the 80s taught me extreme patience
* you can’t flick through an ebook quit like a real book
* one of the favorite pastimes was the personal collection of books you inherit when you leave your old job
* a shelf full of obscure titles makes you look impressive to passers by
I don't use e-readers much myself, but I do have a Kobo e-reader (Toronto-based company bought by Rakuten a few years ago), and I was surprised to see how effective the rapid page turn feature they added is. Pressing and holding along the edge of the screen quickly flips through the pages at a speed where you can just catch the gist of the page.
I prefer the convenience of ebook readers. But strangely the advent of e-readers, has, to my eyes increased the value of physical books, as a physical collectible items. So even though I do most of my reading on the eReader, I buy physical books, whenever I see a beautifully made one or one which is noteworthy any manner, and it gives me the same feeling that collectors of any physical artefact gets. Moreover physical books may become a rare prized commodity in the future, when only the most popular of works may continue to get physical prints, so for many books the time in which they can still be got as physical copies might be passing soon.
In a related matter, ebooks have made the concept of works going out-of-print largely obsolete.
Books as collectibles is an interesting development; you see the same happening in the music industry, where especially vinyl is making a comeback. I've bought a number of vinyl albums, despite not having a vinyl player. It's music that I pirated 10-15 odd years ago; I still wouldn't buy CDs (lack of CD players, inconvenient compared to digital), but buying vinyl as a collectible is definitely a thing. Also because they're a lot more tangible, have a nice exploded view of album art, and often have some neat collectable features like multiple disks, fancy colors, etc.
> In a related matter, ebooks have made the concept of works going out-of-print largely obsolete.
I'd argue the opposite:
With DRM and other reasons/issues - it's made the possibility of a book going out of print - forever and permanently - a very real and possible thing.
For instance, you could purchase an ebook with DRM from the publisher and/or author where - should the author or publisher change their mind - they could pull the "publishing" of it (no longer available to purchase), and revoke the license of the work from all people who purchased it, and effectively remove it from your collection!
Imagine if you owned a physical book and then one day - p00f - it disappears off your shelf! Off of everyone's shelf - plus all library shelves!
That could easily happen with an ebook; it could never happen with a physical book. With a physical book, while it might disappear from publication and sale, it could still be purchased secondhand, and possibly sometime in the future scanned or otherwise re-published (see the number of out-of-copyright and out-of-print books on archive.org and Project Gutenberg). With an ebook, this could be made impossible.
We already see this with music - I know I've had tracks on spotify "disappear" off of playlists; I'm sure entire albums or playlists could also "disappear". I haven't seen it yet, but I am certain it is possible.
Or what about the efforts of Nintendo which has largely made it virtually impossible to get ROM images of "out of print" video games for emulation or backup purposes? Not only of Nintendo titles, but other consoles as well...
I'm not saying that Nintendo doesn't have the right to do this, but rather to make the point that if they can do it - then so can ebook publishers, effectively making books disappear, never to be found again.
Book burning couldn't get any easier than with digital books.
The main thing I miss in physical books is the ability to flip around in them, so while it's technically possible to do this in a kindle, any time there is like a map or something similar in a book I end up just finding a picture of it online and saving it on my phone.
This is also why I tend to prefer physical copies of technical books and RPG manuals.
I use my ereader for entertainment and paper books for technical information.
I'm not really a book person though. I don't think owning a bunch of physical books makes me smarter and I don't particularly like the look of shelves upon shelves of books.
Depends on the kind of a book. Novels, easy read - definitely better in e-form. Anything complex - textbook, or science popularization or even rich fiction - makes me miss real print. Mainly due to the lack of easy navigation. It is a lot easier to go back and re-read fragments in the real book than it is in the e-book.
TL;DR; Working with the book is easy in printed form and pain in e-format.
Huh, interesting that our preferences are polar opposites despite being formed for the same reasons. I much prefer technical or 'hard' literature in electronic format due to ease of searching and bookmarking, since I will often need to refer back to previous sections or take notes. However, for something like fiction novels I far prefer paper books, since I don't often need to reference back for something like a SF novel, so I don't care that it's harder to find a specific section.
Might be a difference in reading style, but for something like a physical textbook it is normal for me to have 40-50 separate bookmarks, which I always found unmanageable.
Which is a shame, because the primary reason I like ebooks is because technical books are so much cheaper in electronic format. Likewise, I'd much prefer to read a paper electronically than kill trees, but (even if you reflow a pdf [grr!]) it is so hard to follow the text when it references a diagram or a code sample on another page, as I want to see two different things at once, and it is so easy to have two pages open in a book (or, more likely, one two-page spread open flat) and switch between them quickly.
One more thing I'm torn on: I really like reading on a dedicated reader; it has much less eyestrain, and doesn't come in with built-in distractions (like the internet being a click away, or notifications popping up). OTOH, the responsiveness, being able to zoom in and out, for example, on a tablet, is really nice.
My first job was as a library page. It was natural; I had been reading thick paperbacks since I was 8 or so. In Pennsylvania I needed to check those out under my parents' library cards, because my juvenile library card wouldn't allow me access to them. At age 12, the library finally stopped putting them under my parents card and just granted me an 'Adult' card at an early age. When an opportunity came up to shelf books for $4/hr, I jumped at it.
I was and am a voracious reader. Before ebooks, packing for a vacation sometimes meant I needed an extra bag just for books. It wasn't possible for me to throw a couple changes of clothes in a backpack and head off for the weekend; I needed an actual suitcase because I'd need space to tuck at least a couple of paperbacks.
But I don't miss real books. It took me a few years to get used to reading on an iPad. I can finally travel light, even if I'm spending a chunk of an entire weekend in airports. I don't need to choose between bringing one technical book and three paperbacks. It's so much more convenient.
86 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAlso see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
I've had a kindle for about six months, and I've been reading a ton. I'm usually more of a 3-5 books/year type of guy, but I've gone through ten since getting the kindle. Problem is that I really haven't retained the content as well as I have been able to with tree books.
I love physical books, I like how they look laying around as a reminder to read them and I like how they disconnect me from technology.
Tried e-readers but I can never stick to them.
If I am doing dry reading, I put my computer somewhere near by for dictionary etc
And I can move around physical books much more easily and it still feels more natural.
Most of those responding aren't old enough to have experience of pre-web real books...
You aren't old enough to have experienced the pre-printing-press real books. Nowadays they just print everything that comes to their filthy minds, regardless of the content or even position of the author in our society. Just a machine printing away inked paper. Oh, how I miss the good old days when you could feel the woodblock pressure immortalized against the pulp, that subtle off-white coloring; the tasteful thickness of it.
That's true. Not sure how it's a counter-argument though.
Pre-printing press books were great as well, and even more important (regarding historical importance, and in terms of the price they'd fetch at an auction today) than printing-press books.
And it would also be true that having no direct experience of them, I'd be not very qualified to compare them to the printing-press books. Which is my point exactly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.techjunkie.com/demographics-reddit/
Any other passive-aggressive question?
Well, the question is asked in r/kindle. Ofc they are kindle fans; Otherwise they wouldn't have been there at first.
I got rid of (gave away) about 200 books. I haven't felt better 'minimizing' in my life. Now other people can get value from them, and I don't feel the obligation to read them again.
You know what I miss? Dead tree user manuals that used to come with hardware and software. That's something that has gone the way of the Dodo, unlike most other books. Luckily I can still buy printed manuals from the FSF.
But...back in the 1980s, just about any electronic device you bought (especially if you bought it from Radio Shack), the manual would have a schematic in the back, plus a list of parts (and in the case of RS - the parts list would usually have part numbers you could pick up off-the-shelf at the store!).
I miss that.
There used to be full wiring diagrams for cars in manuals, but imagine that now where your car has 200 separate computerized systems, each with their own intricate circuits.
So it's not hard to believe that there are people who switched to e-books by default and later could realize they miss real books.
Kindle backlighting is far too pure-white/blue for me to use at night when it would be most useful and the text resolution on the paperwhite I have (can't remember what generation) is nowhere near print quality. I am still sad that physical paging buttons were removed as well.
A kindle with adjustable color temperature would be a game-changer for me.
It also bugs me that you can't really trade-in a digital copy, and the prices for a digital book are rarely significantly less than a physical book
My main issue with ebooks is the DRM around them.
Today I love my Kindle and I like the peace of mind that my books are safe.
Until AMZN decides to take them away from you.
The second way physical books are still superior is that the non-text-based ones (i.e. anything with plenty of illustrations, especially in colour) still look much better than their electronic counterparts (and with that type of books, the appearance matters at least as much as the content).
Books are lovely physical objects, but the convenience of carrying a library with me at all times far outweighs any sentimentality I have.
As a compromise, I will buy books from foliosociety.com as gifts for others instead.
But recently I've been digging through some reading material which partly exists in PDF, and partly in big physical books, and I'm going way faster through the PDFs than through the physical books, because I read the PDFs on a tablet that I always have with me, and the physical book is big enough that I really need to sit down explicitly to read it.
When I go to the barber I know that there is a good chance that there will be a queue, so I grab a book. I got through six chapters of Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco, 1986) that way last week.
Probably miss physical books more for something you are studying rather than just reading a novel.
So if I'm learning something I'd rather have a physical book, for reading either one works.
I do like having books on shelves though, just the look of it and seeing what you have read, having books for reference.
Why miss ? Millions of them are still sold every month.
Besides, it's not an XOR proposition.
I had 3 e-readers, as they are handy in a trip. However, it takes less effort for me to read from a real book, and I also read faster.
1. These discussions are often framed as digital vs physical books and the reality is more "books vs all other forms of entertainment".
Kindle, etc. really set up books to compete with Netflix and Gamepass in the "It's 9 pm on a Wednesday what should I do to entertain myself for a few hours before I fall asleep?" category of entertainment. Which I think is fantastic.
2. Given cost and printing constraints there are lots of obvious and non-obvious forces at play that constrain authorial expression. Case in point: novellas are more or less non-existent in printed form as printing costs don't make sense for a "book" in the 50-100 page range, but they're starting a real revival on Kindle where it's entirely possible to charge a $1 for a shorter work.
- I prefer reading on paper
- Not having to think about charging and battery life (book light excluded)
- Used books can often be had cheap or free
- No proprietary lock-in bullshit
Why I do not like books:
- Turning pages is cumbersome
- No way to search the text
- No way to alter the font size
- No way to look something up in a book you read N years ago unless you're home with your bookshelf
- Harder to find a comfortable reading position
- Books are heavy and take up a lot of space
Despite all that, I still mainly read paper books.
Many ebooks are in the public domain and can be had free of cost from Gutenberg and other sources, which are free from any kind of lock-in or DRM. Especially for English, eReaders have opened up almost the entirety of the corpus of authors like Trollope, Scott, Thackeray, Meredith, Conrad, Henry James, George Eliot, Stevenson, Bennett, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis etc, many of which works are no longer easily obtained as physical copies.
Physical better:
- Persistent subconscious knowledge of where I am in the book (weight in each hand).
- Much easier to flip back multiple pages to re-read a section and flip to where you were.
- Resilient to collapses of information/power infrastructure.
Digital better:
- Traveling with many books is impractical
- Built-in dictionary and wikipedia search
- Resilient to fire and water damage
To me, it's the difference between the 100k photos I have sitting in the cloud and the photo albums my mother has sitting on her shelf, which she knows by heart. Or having access to pretty much ALL the music on the play store, or holding a new album by Jack White and seeing the artwork off a screen. Maybe it's just a luxury now to have physical items, or maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, I don't know.
* hauling books around at college damaged my back * classic Microsoft texts like ASP v1.0 and SQL Server v1.0 make great monitor height boosters * waiting for a Commodore 64 book to be delivered at the local library in the 80s taught me extreme patience * you can’t flick through an ebook quit like a real book * one of the favorite pastimes was the personal collection of books you inherit when you leave your old job * a shelf full of obscure titles makes you look impressive to passers by
In a related matter, ebooks have made the concept of works going out-of-print largely obsolete.
I'd argue the opposite:
With DRM and other reasons/issues - it's made the possibility of a book going out of print - forever and permanently - a very real and possible thing.
For instance, you could purchase an ebook with DRM from the publisher and/or author where - should the author or publisher change their mind - they could pull the "publishing" of it (no longer available to purchase), and revoke the license of the work from all people who purchased it, and effectively remove it from your collection!
Imagine if you owned a physical book and then one day - p00f - it disappears off your shelf! Off of everyone's shelf - plus all library shelves!
That could easily happen with an ebook; it could never happen with a physical book. With a physical book, while it might disappear from publication and sale, it could still be purchased secondhand, and possibly sometime in the future scanned or otherwise re-published (see the number of out-of-copyright and out-of-print books on archive.org and Project Gutenberg). With an ebook, this could be made impossible.
We already see this with music - I know I've had tracks on spotify "disappear" off of playlists; I'm sure entire albums or playlists could also "disappear". I haven't seen it yet, but I am certain it is possible.
Or what about the efforts of Nintendo which has largely made it virtually impossible to get ROM images of "out of print" video games for emulation or backup purposes? Not only of Nintendo titles, but other consoles as well...
I'm not saying that Nintendo doesn't have the right to do this, but rather to make the point that if they can do it - then so can ebook publishers, effectively making books disappear, never to be found again.
Book burning couldn't get any easier than with digital books.
This is also why I tend to prefer physical copies of technical books and RPG manuals.
I'm not really a book person though. I don't think owning a bunch of physical books makes me smarter and I don't particularly like the look of shelves upon shelves of books.
TL;DR; Working with the book is easy in printed form and pain in e-format.
Might be a difference in reading style, but for something like a physical textbook it is normal for me to have 40-50 separate bookmarks, which I always found unmanageable.
Which is a shame, because the primary reason I like ebooks is because technical books are so much cheaper in electronic format. Likewise, I'd much prefer to read a paper electronically than kill trees, but (even if you reflow a pdf [grr!]) it is so hard to follow the text when it references a diagram or a code sample on another page, as I want to see two different things at once, and it is so easy to have two pages open in a book (or, more likely, one two-page spread open flat) and switch between them quickly.
One more thing I'm torn on: I really like reading on a dedicated reader; it has much less eyestrain, and doesn't come in with built-in distractions (like the internet being a click away, or notifications popping up). OTOH, the responsiveness, being able to zoom in and out, for example, on a tablet, is really nice.
My first job was as a library page. It was natural; I had been reading thick paperbacks since I was 8 or so. In Pennsylvania I needed to check those out under my parents' library cards, because my juvenile library card wouldn't allow me access to them. At age 12, the library finally stopped putting them under my parents card and just granted me an 'Adult' card at an early age. When an opportunity came up to shelf books for $4/hr, I jumped at it.
I was and am a voracious reader. Before ebooks, packing for a vacation sometimes meant I needed an extra bag just for books. It wasn't possible for me to throw a couple changes of clothes in a backpack and head off for the weekend; I needed an actual suitcase because I'd need space to tuck at least a couple of paperbacks.
But I don't miss real books. It took me a few years to get used to reading on an iPad. I can finally travel light, even if I'm spending a chunk of an entire weekend in airports. I don't need to choose between bringing one technical book and three paperbacks. It's so much more convenient.