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Comment by flippyhead | Hacker News Reader

I know this seems a common sentiment here, but I just don't get it. There is almost nothing better about a physical book vs. a Kindle, especially on the high-eng (e.g the Voyage). Whenever I've discussed this with people the only reason I seem to get is some vague sense of nostalgia.

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- Random access.

- Non-random access: we are surprisingly good at knowing where in a book something we read was, and flipping back to it. While keeping our finger in the place or places we were. You can build a working stack of locations in paper that's a pain to do in every e-reader I've tried.

- Notes/Marginalia/Markup are available on both, but with vastly more expressiveness and options on paper (though without search)

- Share/re-share/bequeath

- Some evidence of better comprehension and retention of physical reading vs screens.

- No batteries required.

- Attractive physical objects can be a pleasure to own (and a pain in the ass when moving house)

> Notes/Marginalia/Markup are available on both, but with vastly more expressiveness and options on paper

I wouldn't want to annotate or highlight a paper book - that feels like damaging it.

> No batteries required.

Not really an issue for a Kindle-like device - it lasts about 30 days without a charge, which is long enough to read more books than I'd care to carry on a no-electricity trip.

>I wouldn't want to annotate or highlight a paper book - that feels like damaging it.

Don't do it with library books obviously, but if you own the book, try it. It vastly improved my reading experience when I started annotating.

Nostalgia is not my reason. Anything that requires a battery, DRM, a subscription, active bank account, various service accounts, and has a touchscreen that will do FSM-knows-what if you touch it the wrong way, is not convenient to me. There's always that looming feeling that the "book" will just stop working.

Same. Books just work.

It's more than nostalgia -- interacting with a physical object is more stimulating than an e-reader. Paper books have a smell, a texture, and a colorful cover. You might remember where something happened in a story because of how many pages you held in your hand.

So... entirely fluff and nothing practical then?

At least for me, the "fluff" ends up being quite practical. I often remember stuff by thinking back to where I saw it in the book. With a physical book, my brain associates content with where I read it on the page (left vs right), how far into the book it was (judging by the depth of the pages), and what the book looked/felt like and weighed. All of this lets me recall information more easily, because the physical sensations jog my memory. Maybe I don't remember the proof of some theorem right away, but then I remember it was on the right page, towards the end of the book, and then for whatever reason it comes back to me.

Perhaps I'm weird in this sense but I know a couple people who remember stuff similarly. It matters more for textbooks or academic literature where I'm trying to recall specific information; with novels it's not as necessary.

Sounds completely foreign to me. I'd love to see a study though on how common this is though.

I'm guessing a lot more people could remember the name of a concept that they could then easily search for in an ebook instead - seems a much more direct and practical benefit to me.

Not outsourcing one's semantic network to Google and Amazon seems highly practical, unless one is a drone.

I'm not suggesting that at all. Ebooks do not necessarily lock you to any particular provider, especially if you're willing to strip DRM to get where you need to be. You can grep your whole collection with full control if you'd like.

A large percentage of the books I read are history or fantasy books with maps. It's such a pain to refer to the maps in a Kindle book that I almost never do it, and they are generally rendered illegibly anyway.

Another example is history books with image plates. In a physical book it's easy to flip to the plate section and skim through it rapidly, on a Kindle, no, and of course any color is lost.

There are other aesthetic qualities to books that are often lost, e.g. flip through a copy of Steven Johnson's Wonderland. Notice the color interstitial pages and the way images are integrated with the text. All lost on Kindle.

In general any sort of subtlety in layout/use of fonts is lost on Kindle (e.g. sidebars, or little italics at the margins summarize a given section)

There's of course the obvious issue of ease of passing on/reselling a book.

This is only a partial enumeration of the reasons I've reverted fully to print books after flirting with the Kindle.

Unfortunately, the source study treats iPads interchangeably with Kindles, and from there assumes any sort of computer attached to a screen that lets you read words is essentially the same. The interfaces aren't being considered for their own merits.

In addition to the points brought up by the others, physical objects that are readily visible serve as reminders and are much easier to introduce and share with guests than a purely verbal introduction and attempt to talk it up.

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