Life Behind the Stacks: The Secret Apartments of New York Libraries | Hacker News Reader

Life Behind the Stacks: The Secret Apartments of New York Libraries

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Tangentially, but I love the aesthetics of having lot of books on shelves, but now that's clearly obsolete with digital libraries. In the future, digital e-books may be superior to traditional books in all the way it matters, even.

Paper books will never run out of power, be corrupted by a bad read/write, or be arbitrarily removed from my device (like Amazon did with copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four).

Also, it's easier to flip back and forth through the pages, they look great on a bookshelf, and they have a wonderful tactile feel and smell.

However it is hard to beat the portability and convenience of an eReader. My library is, and will remain, a combination of both physical and digital books.

I've sold books (and regretted that), lost physical books, and have had them destroyed by water and mildew. The worst is dimly remembering you had a book, and searching every nook and box and cranny in the house for it, because you have several thousand books stuffed everywhere. Nothing is perfect.

Oh paper books can certainly fail. By fire, water or vermin damage. Or by being lost. I'd argue that digital books are actually more robust. You may have to pay for them again, but no book will likely every be permanently lost in our civilization again, until the apocalypse.

I like the smell of old books. I also like the ability to flip back and forth through a reference book.

I also speak as a person who does about 98% of his reading on ebooks.

I don't get why ebook makers don't have a proper "bookshelf" display of the ebooks. Arggh.

I've used maybe 20 different ereaders on various devices. Pretty much all of them have some stupid fatal flaw on them. None of the vendors ever respond to my suggestions.

1. touchscreens and eink do not mix. give me fwd/back buttons

2. the newer kindle can only remember your last read place in one pdf. Open another pdf, bam, you're reset back to the beginning on the other! This makes me furious.

3. Windows' pdf reader ups the ante by remembering the place in the last 4 pdfs you were reading. Open a 5th, and the oldest one gets pushed off the bed. You'd think with a 512G machine there'd be enough memory to remember 5, maybe even 6!

4. no MicroSD slot in most of 'em

5. miserable bookshelf display. Come on, how hard can this be? Just look at a real bookshelf. Do it like that. Click on the 'spine', and you can then see the front and back covers. I'd like to sort the bookshelf by a 'star' rating I assign myself, so I remember which ones I want to read next.

6. some correctly display the first page of the book as the thumbnail. Some display a stupid generic PDF logo. It makes you want to scream.

7. Microsoft does even worse, if you add a folder.jpg of the cover, it warps it into some ridiculous trapezoid, surrounded by so much whitespace you have to do lots of scrolling.

8. The Kindle DX has this stupid toggle button that sticks up so it's easily busted off.

Amazon got it (mostly) right with the ancient Kindle 3 (the keyboard one) and my beloved Kindle DX. I am very careful with the DX so I don't damage that button! I regularly buy their newer Kindles, and they just wind up in a drawer somewhere or given away as I go back to the old ones.

iBooks in the iPhone is pretty good, except for the small screen, which is uncomfortable for dedicated reading. The bookshelf view is barely acceptable, still making poor use of the screen real estate. I suppose getting an iPad would fix that. Battery life is an issue for it.

For europeans (or at least german speaking countries) I can recommend the tolino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolino).

Does most of your points the right way. Still does not have a bookshelf view, but other than that a very good product.

Also has read / unread since the latest update.

Ebook dev departments ought to have a checklist entitled "Critical Features List". For example, Windows 7 had a PDF reader that incredibly forgot to have a method to go to page N. Can you imagine furiously swiping the touchscreen trying to get to page 462 of a 700 page PDF? The next update, that was fixed :-)

Ya theres another issue, sometimes on my textbooks the page that is in the book (ex pg 100) is not the same as the page in the application (ex pg 107) this causes issues esp. because sometimes their way off. that would be a must have fix.

The Kindle e-format has a way to embed page numbers that correspond to the physical book. It's optional, though, and you can blame the ebook author if it wasn't done or wasn't done right.

yeah thats true, but most text books pdfs that are passed around in higher education are not from the publisher, if you are picking up what I'm putting down. >.>

Actually, I just wish they'd make me a beta tester so I could help make the ereaders the greatest ever. I've got pages of ideas :-) The existing ones are so close.

The biggest feature I want is a read versus unread list.

Yup. The best way to solve that is by having the ability to attach multiple arbitrary keywords to the books, then the collection can be sliced and diced anyway you feel. There's a lot of low hanging fruit.

A 9-10" tablet with FBReader and Pocketbook does well. I'd prefer eink, but this isn't bad. Both remember location within many books (I've got 100s).

I hear you on bookshelf and tagging issues. Also at thumbing, flipping, and flipping between sections.

Archive Org's Bookreader has some very nice features. That's desktop Web based though.

I can't stand trying to use reference books, especially with diagrams, on my Kindle. My bookshelf is full of all kinds of reference material and my favorite books.

I generally buy it for the Kindle or Audible first and if I really like the book or it was especially thought provoking and I want to be able to dig in to it again at some point I go buy the hard copy.

I do most of my reading while traveling so I rarely (maybe not even once in the last 5 years) carry anything other than my phone or Kindle for reading.

I really want a large e-reader for technical reference books. A lot of them are only available as PDFs that don't scale at all to smaller screens.

If a manufacturer made an e-ink reader with an a4-size screen with no always-on backlight (for shame, amazon!) and with physical forward/backward buttons, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Flipping back and forth in reference books is the biggie. Also using your thumb to flip through all the pages and stopping when the diagram you want races by is another.

One possibility is to have a control where you put your finger on the center of the screen. Slide it right, and it starts to flip pages forward. Further right, the flip speed increases. Slide it left, the flip speed slows until you pass center, then it starts flipping backwards.

The thumbnail sequence at the bottom on iBooks doesn't work very well because they are thumbnails. My idea would give you full size fully rendered pages.

yes, but right now e-ink has all the ease of reading without this speed. In the future perhaps!

I'm not so convinced it's obsolete.

I read all my fiction digitally, sure, but for technical/reference books, nothing has yet beat the UX of a paper book, and I'm unconvinced that anything in the near term future ever will.

I think you really have to treat books that are read sequentially vs consulted in random-access patterns as different beasts.

Works in verse tend to be better on paper. Formatting is often important, and sucks in ebooks. Even if it were better, there's no way to do things like choose which line a page splits on (well, not without potentially even-worse formatting weirdness). It'll vary by device and user settings.

Physical books can help with recall of material, fiction or nonfiction, in my experience. Location of text on the page, size and appearance of the book, weight/texture of the paper.

Footnotes/endnotes remain terrible in ebooks, mostly, and this doesn't only matter for non-fiction.

Commercial, big-name ebooks full of stupid errors, as if they came from some early proofreading copy of the text a couple months before it went to the printer, are surprisingly common.

No ebook has ever looked or felt important. Printed books can. Sentimentality? Maybe. But it can be motivating, and it can help get one in the right mood for a book.

You can't arrange your fiction/poetry/philosophy ebook collection chronologically by date of author's first major work and place it on shelves where everyone in the house sees it daily, and thoroughly learns, over some time but with little effort, that so-and-so wrote after what's-his-face. An under-appreciated feature of physical books only because too few people choose this most sensible of shelving strategies :-)

This. I love eReaders for novels and the like, but for the "Six reference books out on my desk" work, paper is still king for me.

I think you might want to try more, bigger monitors.

I have a 15" MacBook, a 30" Asus and a 27" Dell. I often have multiple PDFs open along with an IDE and don't miss physical reference books anymore.

I've got two 27" monitors, plus the display on my laptop.

Still prefer physical reference books.

Depending on which workstation I'm using, I've got anywhere from 6880x1440 to 7680x1440 worth of pixels in front of me.

Still prefer physical reference books.

Note that I'm not referring to API or library documentation; that's a different sort of thing.

This may also be a way to reduce vandalism. E.g. in France, libraries are a favorite target during riots, apparently as they are seen to represent the state: http://www.booksandideas.net/Why-are-people-setting-fire-to....

That sounds like a pretty fun job, actually. I've always had a knack for mechanical things, I write software, I use software, and I don't mind a fair amount of on-call if it's in my own house. Where do I sign up?

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