How ebooks lost their shine

I don't care about creating dog-ears or cracking spines. Really, who does?

On my kindle I'm able to highlight passages and/or make notes (which are saved to my amazon account) and I can look them up later. I can create multiple bookmarks. Some books have support for the "X-ray" feature, a reference tool, in which there might be entries on such things as characters, locations and so on.

I'm able to highlight words and look them up on wikipedia or the oxford dictionary. Very useful.

I'm able to "flick" pages back and forth and easily return to wherever I started out.

> "You can’t tell whether the end is really the end, or whether the end equals 93% followed by 7% of index and/or questions for book clubs."

I guess, not that it's a real issue for me.

And maybe best of all... I'm not dealing with mountains of books taking up space in my home anymore.

Still love the physicality of books, but i succumbed to the practicality of the e-reader

I personally doubt that ebooks have 'lost their shine', I think this is more a matter of a journalist not being able to read into the numbers.

I haven't bought the report, but what little I know about the book market, I know that in 2016, adult colouring books became a BIG thing, really big! Are you going to buy those for kindle? No, so more money is spent on physical books and less on e-books.

If you're an ebook reader, you may also have noticed that Amazon has significantly raised prices on e-books in 2016. 25-50% on average it seems to me, and I often now see ebooks that cost the same as physical books. Now, I'm not going to buy a physical book because my ebook price has increased, but I do buy slightly fewer ebooks now.

Physical books have their place, but I don't see ebooks in serious decline in the near future.

I read mostly on my kindle out of convenience, it doesn't take that much room in my bag and is comfortable to read on my commute.

For fiction? No way. I sometimes read 5 books in a month. I really don't want to open up a private library or bother reselling them. When I travel I don't want to add several kilograms of books. When I reach the end of a book in a series, I don't want to have already bought the next part and have it lying next to me, instead I prefer to just click two buttons to instantly but it.

And for now, Kindle unlimited gives me some great value.

There is also a problem specific to Amazon ebook readers that holds me back from many technical books I would otherwise buy in ebook format.

First, the general problem. Suppose I am reading a 200 page mathematics book. I'm on page 150, and to understand something I want to review some point that was covered much earlier. I can close my eyes and visualize when I read that earlier point, and I get an image of the page it was on, where it was on that page, and how far it was into the book. I can pretty quickly jump back and find it.

This is not some "photographic memory" type thing. I don't "see" the page word for word, and cannot read the page number to know where to go. But I will get that the page I'm looking for had a diagram on the bottom and was a left side page, and that what I wanted was near the middle...that kind of thing.

It is enough that when combined with the way the pages are laid out in a physical sequence to give a sense of "place" to each page and the information on it. It seems kind of like a weak form of a memory palace.

With an ebook I do not get that sense of place as I read, and so if I need to find something much earlier in the book I have to rely on the search function or the table of contents, and often have to do a lot of paging around (which is slow on eInk readers). It usually takes a lot longer than it would have taken in the paper book.

The second problem, specific to Amazon's ereaders, is very inconsistent handling of images. For example I have some chess books that make extensive use of images for chess diagrams.

On my eInk Kindles, the chess diagrams are about the size of a postage stamp.

On the Kindle application for OS X, they are about the size that they would be in the paper book (in other words, they are the right size).

On the Kindle application for Windows, they are postage stamp sized.

On the Kindle Cloud Reader, the are the right size.

On the Kindle app for iOS they are the right size.

Same problem for math books. They often use images for equations. If those get the postage stamp treatment it makes that book very hard to deal with.

For things where images aren't needed, and where I'm not going to have to do a lot of looking back, I've greatly enjoyed reading on Kindle. Harry Potter was fine, for instance, as was the complete Sherlock Holmes stories.

I'm betting has more to do with it than romantic notions of people preferring physical books. Given the choice of a fiction book for $10 in hardcopy or $9 as an ebook, I'll take the hardcopy.

If ebooks (and movie downloads come to that) were priced the same as the physical copy minus the true costs of printing, distribution, warehousing, shipping, etc. they'd (I'm guessing) be closer to $2-5 and would sell far more.

I consider PDF viewers to be superior to the experience offered by ebook viewers. For example, Having to tap the left and right side of the screen to move between pages is a pain compared to swiping up or down in a fluid motion.

Another issue is the waste of space by trying to simulate paper. On my iPad both Apple's and Amazon's ebook readers display almost an inch of white space margin all around the page. On the same device PDF viewer will zoom text to use the entire screen with a double tap of a paragraph.

And then there's zooming.

PDF's are easier to view on multilple devices. I keep all my books on Dropbox. They are instantly available no matter where I might be.

I also regret showing up at a friends place and at partys near his book shelve, and get the guy/girl to recommend me the books they lend from me and no returned.

However when it comes to pleasure reading, I usually like to buy a physical copy.

...um, you can't with a real book either? At least without looking, which is something you can also do on a Kindle?

That said, the Kindle Keyboard 3G was the peak. Knowing you need never run out of book; and also the ability, in a pinch, to get on the internet and check your email / look up a map, free, wherever you are in the world.

Ebooks have full-text search, of course you have bookmarks and a progress bar (not as "nice" but does the trick) and usually pages render always the same on one device. For literature I also doubt I remember less, why would I.

Where paper actually excells:

- good for advanced layouts

- you can find something you know was "somewhere arround XY" but don't have a clear keyword for (More important for literature, but even there full text search often wroks better. I once read a book in print and than wrot about it, I mainly used the epub for quotations and not just because of copy and paste).

- some books are only available in print

- a used print is cheaper than an epub...

- you don't look like a mid 50s housewife in the train

If given the choice I still always take the epub.

The only reason I buy hardcopies these day is photography books, which rely heavily on graphics.

Of course, that doesn't mean I horde books :-)

I use the PRS-350 which is an old sony model that fits comfortably into one hand and can be used one handed. I recommend it.