The Deep Space of Digital Reading
nautil.us
nautil.us
As an e-reader evangelist, I've encountered all kinds of resistance. In fact, it's the norm. There is a widespread emotional, aesthetic attachment to physical books. To me, it's purely irrational. My favorite author, Nassim Taleb, tries to explain it:
> Whenever I sit on an airplane next to some businessman reading the usual trash businessmen read on an e-reader, said businessperson will not resist disparaging my use of the book by comparing the two items. Supposedly, an e-reader is more “efficient.” It delivers the essence of the book, which said businessman assumes is information, but in a more convenient way, as he can carry a library on his device and “optimize” his time between golf outings. I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment.
The only shortcoming of e-reading, in my opinion, is the inability to display the books you've read and the books you want to read somewhere in your home or office. You can tell so much about a person by their library. I've been testing some solutions to this problem.
Print the cover pages and make a beautiful wall of those ?
1. Can't re-sell, 2. tend to be significantly more expensive to begin with (no used market), 3. annotations, footnotes and such tend to be much worse, 4. often have severe formatting/editing issues (see: all the 1-star reviews for many books on Amazon, which are often full of "book's fine, but don't get the kindle version, it's terrible"), 5. lending can be tricky 6. two-pages-at-a-time and page-flipping is a really stellar interface that e-readers don't even come close to beating, 7. relatedly, use of spatial memory help with real books in a way they don't in ebooks, 8. on that line of though, shelved books aren't just for showing off: they can aid memory, and their arrangement can even help with finding related content and with learning (my literature is arranged chronologically for those reasons—I learn and reinforce some information just by existing in the same room as my books, basically), 9. can only have one book active per device. Switching is a PITA.
Ebooks' main selling points AFAIK are 1. space (admittedly a huge advantage!), and 2. full text search (OK, but not that great—there's such a thing as an index in most books for which this is seriously important, which will usually be better than full-text search). They're worse in just about every other way (though, again, the space thing is really nice)
1. I can get a new book immediately instead of visiting the book store or waiting for Amazon.
2. I can effortlessly take highlights and notes and then access those annotations through the cloud. I can't stand trying to write in the tiny margins of physical books and even if I did, I'd rarely reference my own notes because it's so much more laborious.
3. I can read at night without needing the light on (i.e., while in bed with my sleeping spouse). This is my main reading time. More generally, the form factor is better while lying down (and to the point above, I can still take notes).
OK, yeah, missed that.
> 2. I can effortlessly take highlights and notes and then access those annotations through the cloud. I can't stand trying to write in the tiny margins of physical books and even if I did, I'd rarely reference my own notes because it's so much more laborious.
The cloud part's the only thing that's much different than having a little notebook, which I find so much easier to work with (aside from anywhere-the-Internet-is availability) that I wouldn't really count this as a win for ebooks, but if you find it easier, then it must be so for some.
> 3. I can read at night without needing the light on (i.e., while in bed with my sleeping spouse). This is my main reading time. More generally, the form factor is better while lying down (and to the point above, I can still take notes).
They make tiny clip-on lights for books that are little different. E-readers are nice for holding up, though I've discovered the hard way that the touchscreen e-ink devices, at least, are more annoying to use in bed than the real thing (brush a blanket or move your thumb a bit while shifting around->page turns)
Huge loss to society. We've lost a lot of things that we loved over the millenia, and we're still around. But I regret the eventual extinction of used (and new) bookstores. So many hours, sniffing those books and listening to the bell ring when the door opens ...
My coffee cup is sitting on a purpose-built book shelf housing a set of The Great Books, both bought used at the dearly departed Shorey's Books in downtown Seattle, decades ago.
There is no serendipity at Amazon.
Perfectly said (and perfectly sad.)
These days, my culled books go to a local charity's thrift shop or to Habitat's ReStore or to my public library for its book sale or to someone I know. Not the bitbucket.
I do think much of this could be addressed by software and legal/copyright, lending & reselling being the most straightforward albeit they would likely lock you to a single DRM-heavy system.
My pipedream is to be able to separate the price of the IP from the method of delivery so that I could say buy a physical book for $10 and for $5 get a digital copy, and vice-versa spend $10 on a digital copy and $5 for a physical print.
Or Shelfie? http://www.shelfie.com/
April 05, 2017 – Rakuten Kobo Inc., one of the world’s most innovative eReading companies, today announced it has acquired Shelfie, a service that was built to enable customers to get free or discounted eBook versions of books in their print libraries, and get recommendations based on print books they already own. The deal includes technology assets, IP, and the infrastructure on which the ecosystem runs; it also includes hiring Shelfie’s skilled team, which specializes in the application of big data and machine learning for book discovery.
Shelfie ceased operations this January. Kobo worked with Shelfie to offer its customers the opportunity to transfer their eBook libraries to Kobo’s platform, ensuring they would continue to have access to their digital books. Over the coming months, Kobo will work to integrate the Shelfie platform into its Android and iOS apps, enabling readers to add their print libraries to their reading history to generate ever more tailored eBook recommendations, as well as the option to get digital versions of print titles they already own.
Print is better, in many ways.
So are ebooks, but just in different ways. It's a good thing we have the technology to make both.
Fiction books never have indices.
> They're worse in just about every other way
An awful lot of books go in the trash simply because it is uneconomic to store them, ship them, or even sell them. If your interests run to more than a few hundred books, this becomes the crushing reality.
1. Some books have horrible formats. In the physical books, shitty formatted texts are not printed (hopefully) and fixed. 2. Too many filetypes and some books tend to be only in a particular format, hence creating a separation. Though this is easily remedied by using converters, it loses formatting sometimes.
I still prefer EBook reader for the convenience. However, a physical book is great. I find it better but I do not have a good reason as to why.
An secondary advantage of pysical books is that they're much more beatiful to destroy. Burning books make a striking image, and not only because the ominous historical connotations.
Nobody would be bothered by an ereader melting in a fire or being crushed by a steamroller (unless it is their own, of course!) Even CDs were better for that.
I'd never purify by the flame any book that didn't really deserve it on purely literary grounds; it must be really badly written trash. I think anything by Dan Brown would burn up nicely.
What have you tested?
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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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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.
Plus books are aesthetically pleasing and bookcases are among the most interesting pieces of furniture people can have in their houses. If you invite me to your house, you can be sure I'll peruse your bookshelves, and ask you about your various books, and we'll have an interesting conversation. If we're friends, I'll borrow one of your books or remember to lend you one of mine next time we see each other.
With e-readers it's not the same. I won't ask you for your kindle, and it's definitely not an interesting piece of furniture.
I find it hard to read on a kindle or iPad much as I'd like the convenience.
One reason is that they are so much slower -- you can go from page to page in a flick of an eye or a quick page turn. Another is that it couples the somatic memory, making it easier to flip back to an earlier place (I often read in a random-access fashion, especially as I proceed through a book. The paper typography is still so much better in almost every case. And of course there's the reflected vs transmitted light issue.
I really don't care what other people think about my books and have most of them hidden away in the part of the house where guests are not invited.
My father eventually learned to move the books out of the living room and into the back hall.
Joking aside, the "print or ebook" debate is a false dichotomy...both are here to stay. Both also have significant shortcomings. Thankfully, it's okay for feelings about books to be irrational.
I've met and worked with many people who think that just because it is being read through a computer that they don't have to read it carefully.
As a so-called 'digital native' with an unapologetic love for text, I find it extremely frustrating that people don't take online text seriously. Some people even like to speed-read, racing through text faster than they can recall the pronunciation of the words.
You might think you can speed read and still understand the content - most of the speedreaders I know hold that belief quite dear - but you aren't getting the whole story. A single missed word can profoundly alter the meaning of a sentence. I've seen many conflicts and miscommunications caused by lazy reading and misinterpreted messages.
If I took my time to write a clear, concise, meaningful message/email/post/document/etc, please pay me the courtesy of truly reading it.
/rant
That's totally normal! I don't think I know anybody who doesn't read faster than they can talk.
I agree with you about the problems involved speed reading, but... what you're describing here isn't speed reading --- it's just reading quickly. Speed reading's an entirely different discipline (and which is known not to work well).
This is commonly said about speed reading, but it seems to me like a bit of a misunderstanding about what speed reading even is. Speed reading isn't about trying to retain the same level of comprehension on a single pass through a text as a normal speed pass through it. It's nothing more than an optimized skimming technique if you only take one or two passes through a text. But the idea is to leverage the time saved through 'speed reading', by putting that extra time into additional passes later on, thus making it more of an efficient spaced repetition[0] system than a reading technique. The idea being that you build your comprehension up with each pass, until you surpass the comprehension you would've had of it if you only took one normal speed pass through it, and in the end still use up about the same amount of time or less as a normal reading.
Continuing with the spaced repetition idea, speed reading also helps that along more than normal reading by making the things you've read more difficult to recall, which is good if you plan to review them again later to strengthen the memories. The book "Make It Stick"[1] has a pretty good overview of different scientifically proven learning techniques that are pretty interesting, and a lot of them overlap with the effects of speed reading + multiple passes.
Personally, since I'm dyslexic, I prefer applying this approach to audiobooks and listening to them at 3-4x speed, then re-listening to ones I liked later, all while taking notes as I go. And I have to say, that works out for me pretty well. My biggest issue is keeping track of which book I learned what from.
I also read in print I enjoy the tactical feel and the lack of a back light. I also tend to buy beautiful physical books that stand out as objects on their own.
PDFs, I only read now on an IPad given the high dpi.
If I have a point it is in my reading I switch back and forth so generously it is hard to tell the difference.
At this point, I think the attachment that people have to analog books is purely emotional. There is no practical reason to have books over e-readers.
People mention things like the feel of the book, the feel of the paper in your hands, etc. Well I don't particularly like the way paper feels, particularly old paper when it starts to change color and get stiff and slightly misshapen. But even if you do like that sort of thing, in the end that's not what you're after, you don't read books for the feel of the paper or the smell or whatever, you read books because you want a good story or good information.
Yes some nostalgia books might be good for paper format for collectors or people who have preferences (like those people who like to vinyl instead of MP3s , but for ever-day, practical reading, digital readers are better in nearly every respect. They are cheaper, they have adjustable fonts, you can make a backup copy of the book and store it in the cloud so you don't have to worry about ever losing your book. You can adjust the font and font size. You can tap twice on any word and instantly get the dictionary definition. If you have a kobo you can save we articles on the kobo for later reading. It automatically keeps your page for you. Bookshelves take up an enormous amount of room, having that in the space of a small notebook is an advantage. It's much more environmentally friendly. By any measure e-books are better.
The only mildly sensible detraction I've seen on here is the inability to show off your bookshelf or share books, which frankly I don't care about. I don't care about showing off to other people, that's not why I read, and I can share books just fine without pulling it off a bookshelf and showing it.
Why do I read literarary works? For the information inside.
Why do I read physical books? I like all of the things you mentioned people shouldn't care about. The look, the feel, the physical manifestation, and most of all the smell of a stale book after a few decades. It's lovely.
Books fundamentally serve a different purpose for me.
Is this preference arbitrary? Yes. Is there anything at all wrong with it? No. The only thing wrong with mass produced books is the carbon footprint. These days we don't even need to cut trees for decent cellulose paper so the argument of deforestation people like to use is only a matter of current industry practices and not the book itself.
Instead of condemning the preferences of myself and others, why not try to understand us?
I doubt this is true for everyday reading. Because if that were true you would just open up old books and sniff them and rub them in your hands from time to time. And yet I have never once seen anyone do this. Lets face it, we read books for the words not for the feel for the books.
People are just going back to "feel" based sentiments now to justify what they see as a major change in a cherished hobby which they dislike. And while feel based arguments for preserving books aren't completely without merit, they only apply to a narrow type of book and a narrow type of reading (beautiful classic books) and not to actual every day reading.
I understand the nice qualities in old classic books. I get the nice feeling of opening up a really old book that has been around for a long time - but that really is a limited scope sort of use that doesn't capture every day use of books, and it's not really connected to the reading - it has more the value that an antique or a collectible has.
I think the best example is two copies of Shakespeare I have. One is an old classic version of Shakespeare in hard cover printed on high quality paper with ink illustrations. The other is a college paperback copy of Hamlet with torn covers and introduction pages. The prior might not be a good candidate for replacement with an e-reader but the latter certainly would. But if your goal was just to read Hamlet, both would be just as effective. This isn't to say there isn't a place for the great feeling you get with the hardcover beautiful Shakespeare book, just that the feeling isn't necessarily connected to the actual reading of Hamlet.
> I doubt this is true for everyday reading
For some of us books are not everyday reading...
> Because if that were true you would just open up old books and sniff them and rub them in your hands from time to time. And yet I have never once seen anyone do this. Lets face it, we read books for the words not for the feel for the books
Following the same line of thinking, since I never saw anyone eating raw salt I should conclude that people don't really like salt ? You are trying to reduce reading a book to sum of arbitrary components...
Slow down, mister. That is EXACTLY what I do. And it's why I love visiting libraries. Maybe you need to get out more, or at least stop assuming the world operates the same way as the extremely limited sample of people you have encountered.
It's like you think I'm making this shit up just to argue with you or something. "If that were true"... really?
I'm not trying to convince you to have the same preferences as me. Nor am I condemning your preference of digital media. But again, why are you condemning my own preferences, and why are you trying to convince me to have yours? I love digital media as much as the next guy and I've got lots of ebooks so I clearly understand the value in them.
But there's no "justification" as to why I also like owning physical books. Who do I need to justify myself to? No one. In fact apparently I have to defend myself, if anything.
> Lets face it, we read books for the words not for the feel for the books.
Let's face it, you are attempting to speak for the motivations of everyone on planet Earth, when you have no right or authority to do so. That is a downright ignorant thing to say.
You should try going to an old book sale, the kind with tons of 50 cent bins. I could spend hours in places like that. It really might change your perspective on the legitimacy of the preference for physical media.
What, should I stop buying vinyls, too? Just like books, their physical manifestation are symbolic of the material within, and best of all, absolutely no DRM.
If you're reading a PDF on most e-readers, it automatically remembers that you're still on page 1 if you made the mistake of opening 2 or 3 other PDFs in the meantime.
This applies to every PDF reader I've tried except Foxit and the older Kindles.
I just subscribed to the print edition because I like glossy magazines with high resolution illustrations. I can take it in and show it around to students and other teachers.
Because I'm in Europe, I got to pay $30 postage (always an issue) and had, as always, to sign up through a registration process, select product and postage and then finally nominate PayPal at the checkout.
The subscription is non-repeating, so a definite limit: I get 6 glossy magazines for about £7 each.