Ebooks provide near instantaneous access. I can open my ebook reader, search for "alkyl-alkyl bond formation" and be provided with a list of references with their surrounding context across many different books at once. Digital books don't require me to laboriously look up something in the index and flip to it, only to find that the specific thing I was hunting for was actually in another textbook.
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> Physical books provide parallel access, I can pile open books on and around my desk...
Digital books provide perpetual access. I can read the same book on my phone on my commute, on my computer during work, and on my kindle at home. My physical books can be left at home or lost.
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> To me, ebooks are like Skyping a lover or dining in an Indianoplis Olive Garden...
To me, paper books are like getting around town in a horse carriage or listening from a vinyl. Fun and entertaining once in a while, but there's a more efficient method available to me day to day.
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> The touch of a clothbound book is not like holding my cellphone and the typeset pages of a trade paperback are distinct from my laptop's screen and the heft of one book is different from the other...
The heft of 600 page reference textbooks or the tiny, inscrutable font of mass market paperbacks are both vices I'm happy to do without.
It would be great to have as an ebook, but such a thing does not exist and if it did, I suspect the price would close to two magnitudes more than the $8 I negotiated for my copy...heft perhaps had the virtue that the seller was less inclined to lug those many pounds back to their car.
Ebooks don't necessarily provide perpetual access: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/07/... and https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-c...
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eg lookups...
Ebooks win for fact lookup, like "alkyl-alkyl bond formation", however I'd go to the internet for that. Lookups that require the appendix are roughly on-par.
Physical books win for plot referencing. Pages provide a physical heuristic for binary search, and current eink tech is much slower than physical page turns. Active displays are OK but I've yet to find a UI for effective binary searching Kindle books.
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Some more pros/cons, comparing physical books against the ebook+ereader combination.
- A physical book can be purchased and immediately read. Ebooks require a devices (cheap but not free). - Physical books can be sold by their owner. Ebooks are cheaper, but often not by much and they can't be resold. - Used books can be purchased for dirt cheap. Ebooks are easier to steal, but legal acquisition requires buying new. - Loss of a book only blocks that one book, and costs as much as the one book. Ebooks cannot be stolen, but ereaders are much more expensive to replace. - Books can have form-factors tailored to their content. ereaders can zoom and reformat content, but their screen size is fixed. - Books offer rich calibrated colors. Most ereaders do not. - Books can be loaned to anyone for as long as desired. Ebooks can be swapped, as long as the book allows loans and both parties use platforms/devices technology that support loans. Sometimes with time constraints. - Books do not have batteries. Ebooks rely on ereaders with long-lasting but not infinite batteries. - Books are unconditionally owned. ebooks have fine print and vendor-lock in. - Books can be privately acquired offline. Ebooks always leave a paper trail. - Books are physical artifacts that can be passed down. ebooks have some vendor support for "family accounts" and such, but are much harder to pass down (plus open questions around licensing when companies fail). - Books can withstand serious blunt trauma, including getting thrown out of a 60mph car. Ebook readers cannot. - Books can be freely copied for personal use. Publishers are hostile to duplicating ebooks for personal use. - Books are an excellent source of emergency kindling when camping. ereaders are not, although some batteries can be used as fire starters.
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Physical books provide random access. I can open a physical book to any arbitrary page without doing data entry. This is part of the a bigger difference, physical books don't require me to be a systems administrator managing files and licenses and network connections and accounts tied to credit cards.
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Physical books provide parallel access, I can pile open books on and around my desk. I can leave one particular book by my favorite chair and two others by my bed for months at a time and each will be there to create a different experience for my different moods.
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To me, ebooks are like Skyping a lover or dining in an Indianoplis Olive Garden. Sometimes the best available option, but not an experience worthy of trans-Atlantic travel...sure maybe travel is purely irrational when Google can show me pictures and video of Tuscany and Wikipedia can give me its demographics.
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The touch of a clothbound book is not like holding my cellphone and the typeset pages of a trade paperback are distinct from my laptop's screen and the heft of one book is different from the other. Tufte is not a flavor of Soylent.
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https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html