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Comment by ropiwqefjnpoa | Hacker News Reader

The physicality of a book is something that can't be totally replaced on a kindle or an iPad. I feel the bulk of the push to pure digital is coming from publishers trying to lower costs. Which you can't blame them for that.

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I'd much rather read a physical book. Tactile response, dog ears, easier to flip and compare two sections. Just a better experience.

I also haven't read a physical book in a decade due to time and availability. I have gone through hundreds of digital thomes over that same span.

Another plus for physical books I've found is that I can remember where things are easier in a physical book.

Say I'm 200 pages into a math book where something is making use of a lemma that was discussed back around page 30, and I want to go back and refresh my memory of that discussion.

With a physical book, my memory of that lemma will include whether the discussion started on a left side page or a right side page, perhaps even if it was near the top or bottom or middle of the page, what diagrams were nearby, and about how far into the book it was by the difference in feel of the thickness of the stack of pages in my left hand and the stack of pages in my right hand when opened to where the lemma is.

In other words, with a physical book I get a sense of the content as being spread through a 3D space, that my attention moves through as I read, and my memory of the content includes where it is in that 3D space.

It's sort of like a physical book can serve as a kind of self-referential mind palace [1].

With an ebook, I lose the feeling of the information having a location in a 3D space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I can't tell if your comment is pro/anti physical books lol.

The physicality of a book is why so many people prefer the form factor of having thousands of books in a single, tiny, lightweight device they can keep in their purse/backpack.

I never again want to own bookshelves of books or have to track down a physical copy of an out-of-print book that I want to read.

Help one of your buddies move houses when they have thousands of books in bookshelves and tell me it's just publishers who have something to gain from e-books. :)

Btw, OP himself in the post even says that his Kindle has allowed him to "convert into a more fervent reader."

Sure, but that just comes down to preference. Some might dream of that "thousand of books" scenario. Doubt they read even half though. Maybe it comes down to being a book collector or not.

Publishers have a weird love/hate thing going on with ebooks. They do want the costs savings (printing, distribution, warehouse, returns). They hate the possibility of lack of control. They hate the idea that ebooks might not expand the market for books, but just cannibalize print sales, making print sales even more costly.

Also, for a variety of technical and business reasons, the common ebook platforms (Kindle, iBooks, etc.) are not so great for complex books. Most of the books sold on kindle are simple genre fiction. Just a few minutes ago I had a conversation with one of our sales guys about whether a particular new book would even be practical for ebook conversion.

That's true but the profit margin grew for publishers. We don't see the same comparative price reduction in electronic books. And this reminds me of what happened with CDs, they were easier to physically produce than tapes or vinyl and yet they went up in price. One good thing is we do have free e-books, thing that was not physically possible with paper books, the production had to be paid by someone at some point. On the other, electronic books are ephemeral, are locked into whatever platform/device and are bound to render useless as time goes by.

How is .epub (basically a plaintext html document) ephemeral?

XHTML with CSS, actually.

Roughly all ebooks are sold with DRM that shackles you to one platform or another.

Not in the sense of epub which is great btw. More ephemeral in the sense that it’s harder to hold onto bits than a phisical book. Take for instance a collection of books that is stored on a storage device that is encrypted when the owner dies. In the case of paper books they might end up re-sold somewhere, at least some might escape the dumpster. I have 15 harddrives of different formats from the last 15 years that I didn’t make the effort of transfering them to newer storage and the more im postponing the harder it gets. Take for example SCSI, IDE and older SATA HDs. I need to invest in convertors at some point. Anyway, you could argue the oppsite, if one is very organized and responsible with their archive of bits, one can have the potential to hold onto everything they ever interacted with in some form or another, but at the same time the ocean of information makes it overwhelming. A paper book on the shelf is there after 100 years in an attic, a basement or a shelf, albeit a bit dusty, but ready to be consumed.

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