"E-book readers have the capacity to carry thousands of books while still being incredibly lightweight."
This is one argument I never understand. Why would you care if you can carry thousands of books at once? I rarely read more than one at a time.
I don't use ebooks. Physical books are still more attractive. You can abuse them without worrying about damaging them. And most importantly, when you have finished reading a spectacular book, you can give it to a friend to read.
>Why would you care if you can carry thousands of books at once?
Because you don't always know what you'll want to read next, especially while traveling.
Additionally, most eBook users don't just read books on their devices, but also newspapers, magazines, blogs, and articles from services like Instapaper and Pocket. (And for what it's worth, you can lend most eBooks.)
I was going to say exactly this. After two cross-city moves and one cross-country move, my wife and I converted our sizable (~100-150) book collection completely over to e-books before moving overseas. The most annoying thing about physical books is that they are so dense. Movers (especially long-distance movers) will charge on both weight and space, so even though it may not seem like you have a lot of stuff, the added cost of moving a couple dozen books can quickly eclipse the expense of replacing them electronically.
I'm a fan of Living Light. I don't see why people hang on to old books, unless they are useful for reference (which is becoming more and more rare with the internet as a resource) Books do so much more good being read than collecting dust on a bookshelf. I give all of mine away.
The lending thing IS an annoyance although many Kindle books have a limited loaning ability these days.
Like others, I do often find myself flipping between books on a trip depending upon my mood and level of energy: serious lit, brain candy, non-fiction, etc. It's nice to have the choice on a device (tablet) that I would tend to carry with me in any case. I also like having an illuminated screen. The lighting is often terrible in hotels and other locations.
That said--if I didn't travel a lot--I'd probably be relatively ambivalent about e-books. I like the de-cluttering aspect but I'm probably not going to re-read most books anyway and I find e-books generally a suboptimal format for things like cookbooks that I do keep around.
But 2-3 is a far more typical use case, and even at that scale, the carry weight matters. Plus people are carrying phones (and increasingly, tablets) around these days, in any case. So that's where the value proposition kicks in.
No, it's really not. A base model Nook can hold about 2000 books. If you have the older simple touch with an SD slot, you can expand that into the realm of....far more books than you'll ever live to read, quite frankly.
First of all, just because you only read one book at a time, doesn't mean that other people are the same way.
Second, even if you only read one book at a time (like yourself, and me as well), an ereader like the Nook or Kindle is still significantly more compact than even a trade paperback. A 700+ page hardcover? Forget it, it's not even a contest.
As always, context is king. Sure, physical books are desirable in certain contexts. They don't need to be recharged, they smell nice, you can proudly display them in your bookshelf, and you feel like you actually own something since you can hold it in your hands. But I'm guessing a percentage of 16-24 year olds much higher than 38% prefer ebooks when traveling long distances.
Why? Even on longer train rides (3+ days) I've never wished that I was carrying more than a book or two at most. A novel or two of adequate length and complexity is more than enough, unless you plan to be reading literally the entire time.
Sure, maybe an e-reader is superior for those 14-day treks, but the vast majority of people don't make those kinds of trips anymore considering that most of the world is reachable within a day at most.
I disagree for novels etc, but for textbooks and review papers it is really unbelievably better to have a printed copy. The ability to flick back and forward and quickly take notes is so, so useful. Nothing to do with the smell or cracked spine though. Fuck cracked spines.
I've found it depends on what the text book is for.
If it's going to be a constant reference, I would prefer a searchable ebook as it is a lot easier to carry many of them on my Nook too and from work.
If it is a book I am reading to increase my knowledge of a subject but not one I expect to be a constant reference back too, like a study guide or the like, I prefer a print book.
Precisely. The Kindle does a fantastic job with simple linear text, but there's still no really good electronic solution for large-format, illustrated books. I'm talking both hardware and software.
The rumored larger iPad, if it ever sees the light of day, would probably be aimed at this kind of use.
I've found this to be a problem with reading technical books on my Kindle. I'm constantly flipping back and forth between examples and text and it's really not as good (read: not as fast) as flipping physical pages.
I find keeping track of "context" is much easier with a real book. For example, I know that I saw an equation 3 or 4 pages ago on the top left, so I can quickly flip back and find it, whereas on a digital form a would have to PGUP a couple of times and be presented with a "blur" of pixels and try to catch the same equation.
Then again, I'm not sure what UI modern eBook readers have for setting and going to bookmarks.
Not only is flipping back and forth much easier in a math/technical book, but, for some reason, I find I actually learn better.
Something about associating a piece of information with a physical location on a real object makes everything "snap" together better in my head ("Oh, I remember this concept, it was about a third of the way through Dummit & Foote. Yep, it's all coming back now.").
I can still pick up my calculus textbook from a class I took 5 years ago and open more or less in the right section of what I'm looking for. I've associated that object, it's weight, feel, and size, with the information it contains.
I can't say the same about any of the dozens of pdf's I have on my tablet. I'd probably have trouble opening the right file, let alone where inside that file the information is!
If it matters or is long-term knowledge, I always get the book. (Even if given the insane pricing of textbooks, I wish this didn't have to be the case...)
This statistic is not very useful in isolation. What percentage of people in this age group have tried using ebooks? They say that 45% of those surveyed don't have an ebook-ready device... what percent of the ebook naysayers have not even tried it?
It also seems odd to me that they treat 16-24 as one group. 24 year olds are adults who hopefully have college degrees, jobs, perhaps have a long commute, and nontrivial income. 16 year olds are most commonly living with parents and unemployed. It's not hard to imagine these differences being a factor in digital media habits.
Also, I can imagine differences between people who have had to move a few times on their own with limited funds (most adults), and those who haven't (most teenagers). That was what originally pushed me into ebooks, and since then I've become very glad to have it.
As a parent, it's incredibly important to read physical books.
First, it shows your children you can be entertained without an electronic device. My oldest son is three and already an expert on the iPad and iPhone. It worries me how much he wants to use the device, and telling him he can't use it and the whole family is taking a timeout from electronics is important to his growth. He can draw while I read a book, for example.
Second, buying physical books at a bookstore is a great bonding experience. I love taking my little guys to the local Half Price Books which always has a great dedicated kids section.
These reasons aren't only for parents, of course, but as a parent I find having physical books present is important.
I buy physical books for my daughter. We also go the library every week and borrow books. I have the same experience without having to resort to reading a physical book myself. I use a kindle fire and have gotten rid of 99% of my physical books and have no intention of ever buying another physical book with the exception of hard to get computer science books that are not available in digital format in any form or shape.
> taking a timeout from electronics is important to his growth
My 5 year old daughter has been able to self-regulate her ipad use, she's had an ipad since she was 3. We only limit videos: when and how many videos she can watch because she won't stop watching them unless we intervene.
I'm a parent, too, but to me the fear of giving children too much "screen time" is anachronistic in this day and age. Not to say that screen time SHOULDN'T be limited, but the reasons for that are primarily because of the passive nature of, say, watching videos where images on screen change quickly. There is evidence that this sort of constant passive entertainment can erode attention spans. What we're concerned primarily about is !) instilling self control, which in and of itself has nothing to do with electronic devices, and 2) exposing our kids to a variety of stimuli and not just whatever appears on a screen. But again, this latter point is important irrespective of whether we're talking about electronic devices, legos, or barbie dolls.
As to buying physical books being a great bonding experience, I agree, but I think it's also beside the point.
> to me the fear of giving children too much "screen time" is anachronistic in this day and age.
Given that there's overwhelming evidence that screen time is completely worthless for language aquisition in children, as one example, not worrying about screen time demonstrates ignorance around different modes of learning and interaction.
I don't understand why would you need to read a physical book to show them you can be entertained without an electronic device (doesn't playing with them already show that?), nor why would the whole family need to take a "timeout" from electronics so that you can tell him he can't use the devices.
I agree that physical books are best for children, and I certainly give physical copies to my younger brothers, but the reasons for the parent to read physical books seem specious.
Here's an important piece of demographic information for the survey:
> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.
So almost half of those polled don't actually have steady access to ebooks. I wonder how the statistics change for a sample who have ready access to both.
Either many of those 45% don't realize they don't have access to devices that can read ebooks (may not know their iOS/Android device can run Kindle/iBooks/whatever) or this was a really weird sample.
> Twenty-somethings are the leading smartphone users in the U.S., with a full 81% of Americans aged 25 to 34 using the devices. Teens aren’t far behind, with almost 70% of those aged 13 to 17 already using a smartphone.
Sure, but even more key than that is that this is a question about perception, which can potentially be overcome with education.
How many of the people who say they prefer a physical book have read a complete book using a modern e-reader? How many of them have learned about a book, gone to their e-reader, bought it, and started reading, all within 5 minutes, while sitting in their pajamas, at 11pm? How many have purchased enough e-books that they feel they are carrying a small library in their bag, even though it still only weighs less than a pound.
There are compelling reasons to like an e-reader even if you still really prefer a physical book.
Or they don't really consider smartphones or PCs suitable devices for reading ebooks. I know I'll read an ebook on my smartphone from time to time but if that were all I had, I certainly wouldn't buy ebooks for it. Of course, I think it's also entirely possible that at least some respondents just answered whether they had an ebook reader or not--however the actual question was worded.
I have never used my smartphone to try and read a book, I think most people around me would agree that it would not be a fun experience (most people around me have older smartphones with small screes).
I do own a Kindle, though, but my point is that I think many people don't consider their smartphone a "reading device".
I used to do this a few years ago when I was in London. When you have 5 minutes to wait for the next tube there wasn't much else to do as there was no wifi then :)
>> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.
I'd say this is the key variable in the set.
Another example:
>"The only reason I haven’t bought an e-reader is because I love the feeling of holding a book in hand and seeing the creases in the spine when I'm done. It’s like a little trophy."
I was the exact same way -- right down to the explanation as to why I didn't want an ereader. I just loved everything about physical books. The texture, the smell, and, embarrassingly, the vanity of having an apartment filled with books. And then my work bought me an iPad. Everything changed almost immediately.
I absolutely love being able to have an army of books with me at all times. As a guy whose still a student, 95% of my time is spent with technical books. It is absolutely amazing to have everything at my fingertips at all times. I can pull up whatever I feel like studying at any point throughout the day. Few minutes of downtime at work? Maybe I'll read a chapter in my Patterns book. If I'm not feeling that, I just swipe over to Programming in Scala and have some fun. Also, being able to search a book is worth its weight in gold.
That said, there are a few draw backs which irk me. Though, I think these can really be solved with better software.
Firstly, referencing two places in the book at once. How many times have you been reading a textbook and kept your finger in one section while reading another so that you can quickly hop back and forth? Impossible to do quickly with readers. You got to create bookmarks, with each "flip" open the bookmarks, find the one you need, and finally select it to view the page. With physical, all you need to do is flip to where your finger is and presto! Done. The digital equivalent requires multiple taps and a good bit of waiting.
The other drawback is DRM. After a fiasco with Amazon (which I otherwise love), It became clear to me that DRM books are not worth owning. I purchase almost exclusively from O'Reilly due to the fact that they offer a plain old, DRM free PDF. I give them money, then give me the product -- not a licence to use the product under their terms, the actual product for me to do with as I wish. Currently, it's very tough to find all the books I want to read as DRM-free pdfs. I'm doing my best to vote with my wallet, so that means there are many books that I simply don't buy anymore because I like actually owning the things that I purchase.
Other than those caveats, eBooks have completely replaced physical ones for me. The article is kind of pointless given that so few of the people sampled have any actual reference point.
> Imagine reading a book, and after a mention of a famous Italian structure, press on the name and have a Wikipedia description of its history appear, with an image.
I'm a great believer in ebooks. However, this is one feature I don't want. It's a distraction, it pulls me away from my book and I end up on a Wikipedia binge instead of finishing what I set out to do. It's not good for my attention span.
Then just don't press on the name for it (or click on the link, whatever). Problem solved. Just because you have self-control issues doesn't mean that this (extremely) useful feature should be denied to others.
There are some novels (Gravity's Rainbow comes to mind) where I frequently had to look up various events and people that were mentioned in the text. I can see this being helpful, but I'd probably prefer an "annotated edition" where you could view notes written specifically for the book you were reading instead of generic Wikipedia links.
Unfortunately I haven't encountered any ebooks that handle annotations in a pleasant way that takes advantage of the technology. The few I've seen that had annotations just had hyperlinks to a different page in the ebook, which makes you lose the context. With ebooks, endnotes like these seem absurd to me; the annotation should be viewable inline on the original page.
The blog article doesn't mention it, but I've found that the footnotes have to be in the same XHTML file as the reference for this to work in iBooks. Also, iBooks for OSX doesn't display these popup footnotes yet.
This age group includes college students, but do we know whether the surveys filtered out textbooks when polling physical vs. ebook preferences? I didn't see that mentioned in the article, and it would have a significant impact on the results.
>45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.
Completely anecdotal evidence here, but as someone who works at a university and sees a lot of people age 16-24, noses in their tablets/smartphones/laptops, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this number.
First of all, "a device that can read ebooks" could be anything from a desktop PC to a smartphone. I find it highly unlikely that in 2013, 45% of people ages 16-24 don't own ANY devices like this. Even if that number is accurate, it's misleading, as many teenagers perhaps don't OWN a device, but have access to a shared PC or the like.
Second, I'm curious about how the survey was conducted. Did they just ask a random sample of people in this group if they have a device that reads ebooks? How many of those people own a capable device and are simply unaware of it, I wonder?
I recently switched to a job where I deal mainly in bound paper documents. I have to say, I forgot how much more awesome paper is than computers. For processing complex documents, there is no technology that matches a big desk strewn with printed documents. It's like having dozens of lightweight flexible high resolution 13" displays. Marking up a piece of paper with post it notes, pencil marks, and highlighter is a tactile experience that even the best styluses simply can't match. The lack of "UI" between you and the annotations helps tremendously with processing and retention.[1]
It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital. I keep trying the livescribe, but the company can't write decent software to save their lives. I want to be able to print a document from my ipad onto dot paper, and have my markup automagically show up in the pdf copy. It can't be hard.
[1] In school, I found the low tech approach of carrying around heavy case books to be the most effective. My pop psychology explanation for this is that computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize myself highlighting something in specific physical book, but on a screen it all just blends together in my memory.
I'll add one to your n - For me, the mental image of where on a page something was, as well as physically, where in the book that page exists helps. I can get something similar from audiobooks by picturing where I was when I heard something (I typically listen to audiobooks when running or driving). E-books are a difficult case.
I'm very pro-paper. Flipping back and forth in a book (is there any other way to read a textbook?) is just a much better experience than swiping madly or spamming PgDwn. I feel trapped inside that little rectangle of a viewport, waiting for pixels to change.
>computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize
I still remember the page of my linear algebra textbook that related rowspace, nullspace, transpose. It seemed terribly confusing at the time so I was staring more than reading. I remember the layout on the page, the red lines. I don't recall the exact formula, so it's not magic, but the memory is so unusually sticky I can't help but agree.
>It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital.
If there's a (cheap) way to use a whiteboard and not resort to A) writing down the novel bits, B) taking a picture, I am all ears. Putting the tech in the board is probably too expensive.. perhaps a marker attachment would be more realistic. Once it's digitized, OCR / vector drawings can be tried & improved. I like the idea of the Evernote/Moleskine duo, but I just don't use moleskines like that.
Random tidbit: in the Mad Men-styled issue of TIME (2012?), there was a very good full-page ad on the real benefits of reading/using paper. Might have it somewhere.
I definitely agree with you on your spatial memory explanation.
There are so many applications out there trying to come up with new digital ways to record / access information, but almost all of them discard the spatial organization tools we have in physical workflows.
When you are trying to use information in your head (the most important stop in a workflow), you often need to build a lot of organizational structures in order to make the information maximally accessible from memory. Spatial "shuffling" is one of the quickest ways set up informal organizational structure. It makes use of our brains' good memory for spatial locations, compared to our brains' memory for abstract concepts.
In order to use spatial shuffling to organize information, you need to be able to place things freely, and have them stay there. Digital applications so infrequently offer this ability - they do not allow informal organization or spatial organization.
In an application, pieces of information are usually laid out according to a well-defined sorting algorithm. Layout-by-algorithm breaks both your ability to place a piece of information freely, and your ability to find a piece of information by location (because a new piece of information could shift the whole layout according to the sorting algorithm).
Yeah, so all this just points to an opportunity within the ebook realm to create a more refined experience. It does not necessarily mean physical books are superior in any way.
This is very true — if your scope only encompasses a couple dozen pages' worth of data. If your data is actually desk-able, then that will probably work well because it comes very naturally to most people. But if you have a large dataset (say, 100 pages), my experience is that the computer is going to do a lot better both at retrieval and at processing.
So basically, this is another example of things that are great but don't scale.
I find the opposite. I can handle a couple pages on the computer, but after that I want to print it out and tape it to the wall. It's much easier for me to find relations when looking at everything on the than trying to scroll around on the computer.
I regularly print out large amount of code across dozens of files to mane sense of someone else's mess.
I might have overgeneralized a bit. I feel like things like messy code are a different matter, though, and both kind of suck for those problems. Some kind of computer-assisted visualization† would often be more helpful than either scrolling around or manually drawing lines through 80 sheets of paper, especially as that number grows. Inevitably, retrieval gets to be really prohibitive in the real world.
† Heck, even just stepping through the code in a debugger often helps me make sense of spaghetti faster than anything else, though obviously not by itself.
I think it depends on what you're doing with the documents. My current job involves writing 10-20 page legal memos based on a couple of 30-50 page briefs, and maybe a few hundred pages of supporting cases. I have to get comfortable discussing all the material orally. I print out everything because I find it to really help with recall (particularly verbal recall). On the other hand, if I'm looking for some particular quote I highlighted, its a very slow process to shuffle through dozens of printouts looking for what I highlighted. If I'm trying to sort and categorize my annotations, say by legal issue, dealing with paper highlights is obviously a bit cumbersome.
What I really want is to be able to write on and mark up paper and have it automatically digitized and indexed for sorting and retrieval.
I think this depends on how much you read. If reading books is just a past-time, maybe those responses make sense? But if you're a heavy reader, there's just no competition.
- The physical feeling of a book is nice until you need to carry it around. Or more than one, if you're reading more than one book at a time. I'll take my nexus 7 over a mid-sized paperback (or 4) any day of the week.
- Bookstores in my home town were filled with "Network Marketing" people who just walked around there all day with paper planners, trying to get people into their pyramid schemes.
- E-readers are getting better at note-taking. And you can search your notes, and search the text. I wish there was better math support, obviously, but I also don't get constrained by how much margin space there is in the book.
Still, my daughter's getting a bunch of paper Dr. Suess (&etc) books for some time :-)
It really seems to me it depends on the book and the circumstances. A nice, reasonably sized paperback or hardcover is great for reading; it's less great for carrying around with you or storing. On the other hand, a 1000+ page monster is much easier to read as an e-book. (Though it might look beautiful on your bookshelf.) And the convenience of having 5000+ pages of reading material on my phone is completely unbeatable.
The great thing is, there's absolutely no reason not to do both. Usually at any time I'm reading two or three physical books and two or three e-books.
I have a Nook but I don't really use it that much and still buy lots of printed books. I don't know how to explain it, but every physical book has a sort of personality (size, color, font) that goes with it and with the nook all books are the same. I only ever buy books online if they are hard to obtain or are digital only.
Ebooks are also very expensive, often as expensive as a phyisical copy and until the publishers start to bundle every printed book with it's digital copy I don't see myself spending more money on them.
That's a great site, with all the stats you might want about the subject :) . Thanks for sharing.
For book readership:
"22% who told us they had not read a book in the previous 12 months"
"72% of Americans age 16 and older read at least one book in the past year in print; 16% read at least one e-book; 11% listened to at least one audiobook."
That's a surprisingly high number for audiobooks, didn't know it was that big a market.
"Among those who had read a book in the past 12 months:
8% said they had read 1 book
17% had read 2-3 books
16% had read 4-5 books
19% had read 6-10 books
18% had read 11-20 books
22% had read more than 20 books"
Actually, I think that study is more interesting that the submitted article :) (less catchy headline and less processed data)
"In June 2010, 95% of the book readers “yesterday” were reading print books and 4% were reading e-books.
By December 2011 in our survey, 84% of the “yesterday” readers were reading print books and 15% were reading e-books.
The shift toward e-book reading on a typical day is being driven by those who are college educated, those living in higher-income households, and those ages 30-49.
Those groups disproportionately report they were reading e-books yesterday."
Which means 38% prefer them electronically. And taking into account the historical trend, this is good for e-books business!
Do you remember these days when Macs were only 9% of the US laptop market? And look at them now. Customers love convenience.
I'd probably prefer ebooks if I could find a good e-reader. I don't want to stare at a backlight, so it'd have to be e-ink. However, the e-ink readers I've found are too small and lacking in resolution.
I prefer the paper version of my books, too. However, sometimes I like to have a digital copy, for example in order to search for content using a phrase.
When I buy a vinyl record nowadays, I often get a download-code for the mp3-version. Book publishers should do the same. Buy a printed book, get the digital for free.
Or just buy the digital, at a lower price.
But hey, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen soon.
"For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases now allow you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free."
Unfortunately Matchbook only covers a handful of titles. Out of the hundreds of paper books I have bought from Amazon, many of which have ebook versions, only five are on Matchbook.
They are also only doing it for books you bought in the past. They should be doing it like AutoRip for CDs where you get the ebook for free or small cost when buy the paper version. Bundles with ebook would make a lot of sense for hardback books. Get the ebook immediately and the paper version to get on the shelf.
>Voxburner sourced 1,420 respondents and surveyed them between 25 September and 18 October 2013. Follow-up interviews were conducted and the report includes comment from marketing professionals.
Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years and we are still burning fossil fuels and exchanging information by the means of painting pieces of wood. Fascinating.
I've always found this type of comment interesting. It assumes that we are supposed to "be" more advanced than we actually are. Time or our date of existence doesn't mean too much in the end.
We're also using remote-controlled stealth fighter planes to bomb dissenting peoples out of existence. With pin-point accuracy through gps, gyroscopes, and million dollars worth of tech. I'd say there's more pressing priorities than using organic renewable paper to exchange information..E-ink looks like crap. I know a bunch of people who prefer to read without a backlight, and e-ink doesn't cut it either. I'm really surprised many HNers are saying they would read a book on an iPad..all I can say is good luck with their vision after 20+ books read. They might need an eye doctor.
Does anyone have any statistics or articles about the price differential between ebooks and print? I use my kindle for things like biographies and novels, and exclusively print for things like technical books, mostly due to the poor experience I've had with technical books on e-readers.
More and more though, I've been buying print books simply because, in my own experience, the last couple of books I've purchased have BARELY been cheaper in ebook format than in print. I don't have any data to support me, but I can't help but feel like over the last few years, the gap between prices of ebooks and print books has closed, and with it, one of the big selling points (for me at least) for ebooks.
I'm curious to see if this is actually the case, or just my own personal experience.
A piece of processed wood should not be preferred over a notebook sized device capable of storing over 3000 books and capable of wireless connection basically removing the size limit.
Wood is a renewable resource. Environmentalists also tell me it traps carbon. The ereader still has to be made with parts from the environment.
Plus, when the dystopian future arrives, I'll have plenty of kindling with my growing collection of books. Plus entertainment after all the ereaders grow dark.
Yeah, the ecological benefits of an ereader may or may not be a wash. Sure, you're saving on trees, but most of the trees books are made from are farmed anyway, and electronics are incredibly, outrageously polluting and energy intensive to manufacture.
131 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadThis is one argument I never understand. Why would you care if you can carry thousands of books at once? I rarely read more than one at a time.
I don't use ebooks. Physical books are still more attractive. You can abuse them without worrying about damaging them. And most importantly, when you have finished reading a spectacular book, you can give it to a friend to read.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/
Because you don't always know what you'll want to read next, especially while traveling.
Additionally, most eBook users don't just read books on their devices, but also newspapers, magazines, blogs, and articles from services like Instapaper and Pocket. (And for what it's worth, you can lend most eBooks.)
Like others, I do often find myself flipping between books on a trip depending upon my mood and level of energy: serious lit, brain candy, non-fiction, etc. It's nice to have the choice on a device (tablet) that I would tend to carry with me in any case. I also like having an illuminated screen. The lighting is often terrible in hotels and other locations.
That said--if I didn't travel a lot--I'd probably be relatively ambivalent about e-books. I like the de-cluttering aspect but I'm probably not going to re-read most books anyway and I find e-books generally a suboptimal format for things like cookbooks that I do keep around.
But 2-3 is a far more typical use case, and even at that scale, the carry weight matters. Plus people are carrying phones (and increasingly, tablets) around these days, in any case. So that's where the value proposition kicks in.
Second, even if you only read one book at a time (like yourself, and me as well), an ereader like the Nook or Kindle is still significantly more compact than even a trade paperback. A 700+ page hardcover? Forget it, it's not even a contest.
Sure, maybe an e-reader is superior for those 14-day treks, but the vast majority of people don't make those kinds of trips anymore considering that most of the world is reachable within a day at most.
If it's going to be a constant reference, I would prefer a searchable ebook as it is a lot easier to carry many of them on my Nook too and from work.
If it is a book I am reading to increase my knowledge of a subject but not one I expect to be a constant reference back too, like a study guide or the like, I prefer a print book.
The rumored larger iPad, if it ever sees the light of day, would probably be aimed at this kind of use.
Then again, I'm not sure what UI modern eBook readers have for setting and going to bookmarks.
Something about associating a piece of information with a physical location on a real object makes everything "snap" together better in my head ("Oh, I remember this concept, it was about a third of the way through Dummit & Foote. Yep, it's all coming back now.").
I can still pick up my calculus textbook from a class I took 5 years ago and open more or less in the right section of what I'm looking for. I've associated that object, it's weight, feel, and size, with the information it contains.
I can't say the same about any of the dozens of pdf's I have on my tablet. I'd probably have trouble opening the right file, let alone where inside that file the information is!
If it matters or is long-term knowledge, I always get the book. (Even if given the insane pricing of textbooks, I wish this didn't have to be the case...)
It also seems odd to me that they treat 16-24 as one group. 24 year olds are adults who hopefully have college degrees, jobs, perhaps have a long commute, and nontrivial income. 16 year olds are most commonly living with parents and unemployed. It's not hard to imagine these differences being a factor in digital media habits.
First, it shows your children you can be entertained without an electronic device. My oldest son is three and already an expert on the iPad and iPhone. It worries me how much he wants to use the device, and telling him he can't use it and the whole family is taking a timeout from electronics is important to his growth. He can draw while I read a book, for example.
Second, buying physical books at a bookstore is a great bonding experience. I love taking my little guys to the local Half Price Books which always has a great dedicated kids section.
These reasons aren't only for parents, of course, but as a parent I find having physical books present is important.
> taking a timeout from electronics is important to his growth
My 5 year old daughter has been able to self-regulate her ipad use, she's had an ipad since she was 3. We only limit videos: when and how many videos she can watch because she won't stop watching them unless we intervene.
As to buying physical books being a great bonding experience, I agree, but I think it's also beside the point.
Given that there's overwhelming evidence that screen time is completely worthless for language aquisition in children, as one example, not worrying about screen time demonstrates ignorance around different modes of learning and interaction.
I agree that physical books are best for children, and I certainly give physical copies to my younger brothers, but the reasons for the parent to read physical books seem specious.
> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.
So almost half of those polled don't actually have steady access to ebooks. I wonder how the statistics change for a sample who have ready access to both.
> Twenty-somethings are the leading smartphone users in the U.S., with a full 81% of Americans aged 25 to 34 using the devices. Teens aren’t far behind, with almost 70% of those aged 13 to 17 already using a smartphone.
via http://www.webpronews.com/u-s-smartphone-penetration-hits-64...
(And, to be honest, I never use my smartphone to read e-books.)
How many of the people who say they prefer a physical book have read a complete book using a modern e-reader? How many of them have learned about a book, gone to their e-reader, bought it, and started reading, all within 5 minutes, while sitting in their pajamas, at 11pm? How many have purchased enough e-books that they feel they are carrying a small library in their bag, even though it still only weighs less than a pound.
There are compelling reasons to like an e-reader even if you still really prefer a physical book.
I do own a Kindle, though, but my point is that I think many people don't consider their smartphone a "reading device".
I'd say this is the key variable in the set.
Another example:
>"The only reason I haven’t bought an e-reader is because I love the feeling of holding a book in hand and seeing the creases in the spine when I'm done. It’s like a little trophy."
I was the exact same way -- right down to the explanation as to why I didn't want an ereader. I just loved everything about physical books. The texture, the smell, and, embarrassingly, the vanity of having an apartment filled with books. And then my work bought me an iPad. Everything changed almost immediately.
I absolutely love being able to have an army of books with me at all times. As a guy whose still a student, 95% of my time is spent with technical books. It is absolutely amazing to have everything at my fingertips at all times. I can pull up whatever I feel like studying at any point throughout the day. Few minutes of downtime at work? Maybe I'll read a chapter in my Patterns book. If I'm not feeling that, I just swipe over to Programming in Scala and have some fun. Also, being able to search a book is worth its weight in gold.
That said, there are a few draw backs which irk me. Though, I think these can really be solved with better software.
Firstly, referencing two places in the book at once. How many times have you been reading a textbook and kept your finger in one section while reading another so that you can quickly hop back and forth? Impossible to do quickly with readers. You got to create bookmarks, with each "flip" open the bookmarks, find the one you need, and finally select it to view the page. With physical, all you need to do is flip to where your finger is and presto! Done. The digital equivalent requires multiple taps and a good bit of waiting.
The other drawback is DRM. After a fiasco with Amazon (which I otherwise love), It became clear to me that DRM books are not worth owning. I purchase almost exclusively from O'Reilly due to the fact that they offer a plain old, DRM free PDF. I give them money, then give me the product -- not a licence to use the product under their terms, the actual product for me to do with as I wish. Currently, it's very tough to find all the books I want to read as DRM-free pdfs. I'm doing my best to vote with my wallet, so that means there are many books that I simply don't buy anymore because I like actually owning the things that I purchase.
Other than those caveats, eBooks have completely replaced physical ones for me. The article is kind of pointless given that so few of the people sampled have any actual reference point.
I'm a great believer in ebooks. However, this is one feature I don't want. It's a distraction, it pulls me away from my book and I end up on a Wikipedia binge instead of finishing what I set out to do. It's not good for my attention span.
If it's distracting, there can just be an option in the reader to disable it. Problem solved.
Unfortunately I haven't encountered any ebooks that handle annotations in a pleasant way that takes advantage of the technology. The few I've seen that had annotations just had hyperlinks to a different page in the ebook, which makes you lose the context. With ebooks, endnotes like these seem absurd to me; the annotation should be viewable inline on the original page.
The blog article doesn't mention it, but I've found that the footnotes have to be in the same XHTML file as the reference for this to work in iBooks. Also, iBooks for OSX doesn't display these popup footnotes yet.
Completely anecdotal evidence here, but as someone who works at a university and sees a lot of people age 16-24, noses in their tablets/smartphones/laptops, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this number.
First of all, "a device that can read ebooks" could be anything from a desktop PC to a smartphone. I find it highly unlikely that in 2013, 45% of people ages 16-24 don't own ANY devices like this. Even if that number is accurate, it's misleading, as many teenagers perhaps don't OWN a device, but have access to a shared PC or the like.
Second, I'm curious about how the survey was conducted. Did they just ask a random sample of people in this group if they have a device that reads ebooks? How many of those people own a capable device and are simply unaware of it, I wonder?
It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital. I keep trying the livescribe, but the company can't write decent software to save their lives. I want to be able to print a document from my ipad onto dot paper, and have my markup automagically show up in the pdf copy. It can't be hard.
[1] In school, I found the low tech approach of carrying around heavy case books to be the most effective. My pop psychology explanation for this is that computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize myself highlighting something in specific physical book, but on a screen it all just blends together in my memory.
>computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize
I still remember the page of my linear algebra textbook that related rowspace, nullspace, transpose. It seemed terribly confusing at the time so I was staring more than reading. I remember the layout on the page, the red lines. I don't recall the exact formula, so it's not magic, but the memory is so unusually sticky I can't help but agree.
>It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital.
If there's a (cheap) way to use a whiteboard and not resort to A) writing down the novel bits, B) taking a picture, I am all ears. Putting the tech in the board is probably too expensive.. perhaps a marker attachment would be more realistic. Once it's digitized, OCR / vector drawings can be tried & improved. I like the idea of the Evernote/Moleskine duo, but I just don't use moleskines like that.
Random tidbit: in the Mad Men-styled issue of TIME (2012?), there was a very good full-page ad on the real benefits of reading/using paper. Might have it somewhere.
This one?
There are so many applications out there trying to come up with new digital ways to record / access information, but almost all of them discard the spatial organization tools we have in physical workflows.
When you are trying to use information in your head (the most important stop in a workflow), you often need to build a lot of organizational structures in order to make the information maximally accessible from memory. Spatial "shuffling" is one of the quickest ways set up informal organizational structure. It makes use of our brains' good memory for spatial locations, compared to our brains' memory for abstract concepts.
In order to use spatial shuffling to organize information, you need to be able to place things freely, and have them stay there. Digital applications so infrequently offer this ability - they do not allow informal organization or spatial organization.
In an application, pieces of information are usually laid out according to a well-defined sorting algorithm. Layout-by-algorithm breaks both your ability to place a piece of information freely, and your ability to find a piece of information by location (because a new piece of information could shift the whole layout according to the sorting algorithm).
So basically, this is another example of things that are great but don't scale.
I regularly print out large amount of code across dozens of files to mane sense of someone else's mess.
† Heck, even just stepping through the code in a debugger often helps me make sense of spaghetti faster than anything else, though obviously not by itself.
What I really want is to be able to write on and mark up paper and have it automatically digitized and indexed for sorting and retrieval.
I think this depends on how much you read. If reading books is just a past-time, maybe those responses make sense? But if you're a heavy reader, there's just no competition.
- The physical feeling of a book is nice until you need to carry it around. Or more than one, if you're reading more than one book at a time. I'll take my nexus 7 over a mid-sized paperback (or 4) any day of the week.
- Bookstores in my home town were filled with "Network Marketing" people who just walked around there all day with paper planners, trying to get people into their pyramid schemes.
- E-readers are getting better at note-taking. And you can search your notes, and search the text. I wish there was better math support, obviously, but I also don't get constrained by how much margin space there is in the book.
Still, my daughter's getting a bunch of paper Dr. Suess (&etc) books for some time :-)
The great thing is, there's absolutely no reason not to do both. Usually at any time I'm reading two or three physical books and two or three e-books.
Ebooks are also very expensive, often as expensive as a phyisical copy and until the publishers start to bundle every printed book with it's digital copy I don't see myself spending more money on them.
For book readership:
"22% who told us they had not read a book in the previous 12 months"
"72% of Americans age 16 and older read at least one book in the past year in print; 16% read at least one e-book; 11% listened to at least one audiobook."
That's a surprisingly high number for audiobooks, didn't know it was that big a market.
"Among those who had read a book in the past 12 months:
8% said they had read 1 book
17% had read 2-3 books
16% had read 4-5 books
19% had read 6-10 books
18% had read 11-20 books
22% had read more than 20 books"
Actually, I think that study is more interesting that the submitted article :) (less catchy headline and less processed data)
"In June 2010, 95% of the book readers “yesterday” were reading print books and 4% were reading e-books.
By December 2011 in our survey, 84% of the “yesterday” readers were reading print books and 15% were reading e-books.
The shift toward e-book reading on a typical day is being driven by those who are college educated, those living in higher-income households, and those ages 30-49.
Those groups disproportionately report they were reading e-books yesterday."
When I buy a vinyl record nowadays, I often get a download-code for the mp3-version. Book publishers should do the same. Buy a printed book, get the digital for free.
Or just buy the digital, at a lower price.
But hey, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen soon.
Nice, but it should be free.
They are also only doing it for books you bought in the past. They should be doing it like AutoRip for CDs where you get the ebook for free or small cost when buy the paper version. Bundles with ebook would make a lot of sense for hardback books. Get the ebook immediately and the paper version to get on the shelf.
But it doesn't seem to have much support from the big publishers, who aren't exactly known for their customer friendliness.
wrt the survey details in the OP
>Voxburner sourced 1,420 respondents and surveyed them between 25 September and 18 October 2013. Follow-up interviews were conducted and the report includes comment from marketing professionals.
>It is available for download only at £495.
More and more though, I've been buying print books simply because, in my own experience, the last couple of books I've purchased have BARELY been cheaper in ebook format than in print. I don't have any data to support me, but I can't help but feel like over the last few years, the gap between prices of ebooks and print books has closed, and with it, one of the big selling points (for me at least) for ebooks.
I'm curious to see if this is actually the case, or just my own personal experience.
Nostalgia is great, but so is our environment.
Plus, when the dystopian future arrives, I'll have plenty of kindling with my growing collection of books. Plus entertainment after all the ereaders grow dark.
if not, why not?