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Comment by libraryatnight | Hacker News Reader

I've tried every format and device and I can't read e-books. Nothing, to me, beats a real book. I don't enjoy the experience for one, it strains my eyes (yes even e-ink). But also, and this is something I wouldn't have considered back when I was younger and it seemed like books surely must die in their dead-tree form, I actively seek ways to not be interacting with electronics and books are sublime for this purpose. I work all day on computers, I carry a small one in my pocket that bothers me constantly through the day, so when I want to read. I want to read. I have no desire to have that experience coupled in anyway to the internet or electronics.

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For me, it depends on the book.

For recreational reading, I strongly prefer real, printed ones.

For reference materials, I strongly prefer electronic ones (stripped of DRM and converted into a non-proprietary format). I can keep my entire technical library on my phone and I can grep through the entire set of books for something in particular that I need to find. I remember the days when my technical library was in printed form. It took a lot of space and often I'd be unable to predict which book I'd need at home vs at work, and end up not having it available. On this front, electronic books were a total game-changer for me.

How do you do this in practice? What do you use for OCR, and what do you use to search all the books on your phone?

I don't OCR, I buy the books in electronic form. I convert them to both text and PDF files. I grep to find the book(s) that have what I'm looking for, and search individual books using the PDF reader.

Agreed. As for reference materials, you missed the key point that they tend to go out of date. An outdated reference book is largely useless, in contrast to a good novel.

If you don't mind my asking, how do you best search through your library of digital technical books? I've got over a couple hundred in my phone and many more in another device and keeping track of bookmarked sections is a hassle sometimes. Also, any particular reading app you recommend?

My split is reference/search (ebook), entertainment/immersion (ebook) and education/assimilation (paper). Ebooks are still too undifferentiated and featureless for effective learning. For example I can often remember that a definition or philosophy is in a large green book with an illustrated cover, 3/4 of the way into the book, on the bottom of the left hand page, author's notes in the left margin, citation reference in the bottom margin, smell of the page, paper color, font, initial cap size on the paragraph. That hooks into my recall and keeps the book interesting while I memorize it. Ebook formats lose a lot of information.

Huh, I have the reverse preference. Recreational books are read sequentially, like tape, so they suit e-book readers well. Also, they're usually plaintext. Reference/education books - with those I need fast random access, which mostly rules out the usual digital form, and extra formatting and media used (tables, images, figures, equation) make them problematic on e-book readers.

Same for me. I would say an electronic book has the advantage in searchability, but a well curated index might actually beat a naive text search most of the time.

On desktop, maybe, but I haven't used a decent enough reading software (like most web stuff, Amazon cloud reader is barely fit for purpose, and while I don't know what's "state of the art" in epub/PDF readers on desktop, the few I tried didn't facilitate reliable search and fast navigation either), and most technical e-books I keep as PDFs anyway, because the formatting almost always matters.

On e-book readers like Kindle, a profound disagreement. I can easily find what I'm looking for in a 1000 page book even without using an index in less time than it takes to type in a search query into Kindle's searchbox (especially since I switched from the old keyboard Kindle to touch-only Paperwhite). If there's a well-curated index at the end of the book, it's only that much better.

I think software could get somewhat closer to paper experience, but it needs to be faster. As long as random page access takes more than ~100 ms from selecting the page to full render (and in my experience, it's often close to 300-500 ms), you cannot really flip through an e-book the way you would through a paper book.

(Tangent: it's another of many cases where performance actually matters, because the difference between lighting fast and fast enough to tick boxes on your sprint plan is entire family of use cases.)

I'm curious about this:

"I can grep through the entire set of books for something in particular"

What software do you use for this? I'm guessing you're not literally running grep at a command line on your mobile.

So what software do you use that allows you to search through multiple ebooks? Is there an Android or ios equivalent to DocFetcher?

I actually use grep, although I whipped up a simple GUI front end for it.

weird but the back and forth here made me realize something about ebooks. they provide some kind of privacy and confidentiality.

printed books on the other hand give away what you are reading -- unless you put them in those fancy covers. and that is if you can even find the right size.

you don't get the eyes and no one will ask you what you are reading on your phone. never thought about it that way before...

> I carry a small one in my pocket that bothers me constantly through the day

Personally, I don't get why people put up with that, and then feel forced to escape their devices. I put up with Slack on my work machine, but on my personal laptop nothing can interrupt me, and even on my phone only calls (which I rarely get) and alarms can do so, everything is on the drawer for when I get to them. I know the defaults are often terrible, but it generally only takes a few minutes once to change them.

The annoyances of paper books, on the other hand, can't be configured or scripted away :)

As a fellow curmudgeon who really loves dead-tree books, I still sometimes smile thinking about an appearance Maurice Sendak made on a variety show shortly before he died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPEZj21NmE

I have a few reasons to prefer paper books:

- They don't have to be charged.

- First sale doctrine applies. No 50 page TOS explaining what I can or cannot do with my own books.

- I can lend my books to friends and family

- After reading a book, I can easily give it or sell it to someone else

- Notifications don't pop up when I'm reading.

But like Sendak, I think I mostly just have an innate aversion to ebooks. I just don't like them. To me, an ebook feels like one of those electric wine bottle openers: efficient, but charmless.

> They don't have to be charged

My reader lasts weeks without recharging, that's enough for me not to matter.

> Notifications don't pop up when I'm reading.

I've never heard of notification pop-ups on an ebook reader. I hope you don't seriously compare reading on a normal tablet with paper books.

I agree that old-school books are definitely more flexible and customer-friendly when it comes to lending etc. But I prefer carrying a light, thin device instead of a whole bag of books on journeys.

I'm the opposite, nothing beats the convenience of every book in the world in my pocket. I like my back lit ereader, I can read in bed in the dark and not bother my wife. If I don't have my ereader I can just use my phone. E readers and phones are all much lighter than books.

I agree with so much of what you said, plus I have to say I love post-it notes for keeping track of notes etc, nothing is better and more convenient then flipping the page open and immediately having the content at your fingertips.

No slow crappy UI or micro keyboard to deal with, just what I wanted, the information.

Yes there are downsides, but it's what I find most enjoyable and efficient.

If you have a slow crappy UI you might want to change your reader ...

Sure or just use a book, where as I said, this isn't a problem for me.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 with the adaptive display on is just better than any book IMO. The lighting is always perfect, the text is clearer than paper.

I will be heart broke then I eventually have to replace it. To do anything but read on it is a sin.

Reading on paper, I am just slower than reading on the S 8.4.

2560x1600 on such a small screen is what is needed to beat paper.

Have you tried/heard of the Superbook [1] format? :-)

[1] https://bubblin.io/docs/format

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