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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

The author has a very good point: buying ebooks is a crappy consumer experience.

If that wasn't true, dead-tree books would be as rare as Compact Discs.

Click on my kindle icon for "store", find book, click buy, have it seconds later. Alternatively, go to amazon.com and find book, click buy, shows up on my kindle seconds later.

Kindle has definitely made it as friction free as possible. The lock-in used to be moderately annoying, but I have a phone that can natively handle other formats (not to mention the kindle app), so I just don’t care anymore.

Yeah, Amazon's ebook buying experience is about as seamless as one could ask for. I do not think the ebook buying experience has anything to do with why paper books are still around.

Buying books from fnac.com sounds like a bad experience. I've bought books from https://leanpub.com/ without any problems.

Yep, I have plenty of books dating back to the seventies (some even older). They are all still perfectly functional.

Not heard of a 50 year old epub or pdf yet, wonder if it will ever happen ;)

I have over 100 books in my backpack that I carry where I go and get more books whenever I feel like, and I do not have Hermoine's magic handbag.

So pros/cons of each method.

Don't need a bookmark either. Plus, built-in dictionary, and you can highlight passages without permanently marking up the book.

It does need to be charged occasionally, though.

I used to collect physical books, but there are so many new and novel stories out there that I don’t reread most of them. So it’s a waste of space to keep 98% of them around anymore. Purging them was cathartic.

Majority paper book readers read because of the preference for medium or availability and not for some tenet.

That's only the case if subjective convenience were the only deciding factor in ebook vs paper books

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