Study shows printed books are still preferred to e-books | Hacker News Reader

Study shows printed books are still preferred to e-books

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19 pointselorant11 comments

1st place: Printed. Because nothing beats the printed page.

Close 2nd place: e-ink. But unfortunantely there doesn't seem to be in the market an e-ink device of a decent size and price.

Far down 3rd place: tablets, phones or any light emmitting display device, because if I must stare at a screen for hours I'd watch TV.

A special recognition to ebooks for having the unique advantage of allowing easy search of word definitions, highlighting, bookmarking, and for the access they provide to the super large library of free books out there.

> Close 2nd place: e-ink. But unfortunantely there doesn't seem to be in the market an e-ink device of a decent size and price.

I was going to agree with you. But then I googled the price of an Amazon kindle and those 7" screens like paperwhite are under a $100.

It's a bit sad to me that the question here is "did you buy a book in the last year". Also sad that most people didn't. I am curious, among people who buy a lot of books, like a book a week, whether those people still prefer paper books.

Personally, I really prefer Kindle books. They don't take up a lot of space, you don't have to figure out how to get rid of your old Kindle books, you don't lose your Kindle books and accidentally rebuy a second copy. You can keep your Kindle in your pocket to make it easy to read whatever you want wherever you happen to be when you have some free time.

I do wish Kindles were faster. Faster to turn the page, faster to turn on, faster to respond when I tap on a word to see its definition. Sometimes I almost get a "Google Reader" vibe, where I completely love the product, and the company itself seems a little "meh" about it.

I fall into the category you describe and prefer paper books. I’ll resort to ebooks for things like expensive academic books and essay anthologies where I’m only interested in a single chapter. The experience of reading a physical book at length, especially fiction, is far superior.

How so? Ebook I can override the publishers poor font choice or size. All my books weigh the exact 230ish grams. I don't need to flip to the back to read endnotes and a dictionary is a press away. And when I'm done a book I always have another with me even on the bus.

The only thing paper novels do better contrast.

These questions are a bit outdated. People read all the time now. They write all the time. It's just that they read text online that is rarely in book form.

It comes down to convenience. I really like print books. I prefer them whenever I am reading something non-technical. Sometimes, even for technical content, I prefer print books, especially the books with which I will spend a lot of time.

BUT.

You cannot really carry print books. I used to live as a semi-expat pre-Covid, and my bags would always be full and heavy with clothes, food, water, etc. Carrying more than one or two books would be impractically heavy. Additionally books quickly fill up your 7 kg quota allowed by plane companies.

So, I only buy print now if I am sure that I get to stay where I am for the period of time in which I will read a book, or if a book is so valuable to me, that I have to have a physical copy in my collection.

Horses for Courses.

The missing criterion is "What sort of book was it?"

Kindles(etc,etc) are great for text that is in small-format, or free form. For that class of book, there is really no alternative to an ebook reader.

On the other hand, large-format books where you need to see the page as a whole (no matter whether the contents are text or pictorial) are the domain of the physical printed book. If you try to show a single page of a large-format book on an ebook reader, the text is so tiny or the pictures are so tiny that there is not enough definition to discern what you're trying to see. This is the major problem with PDF files especially.

ebooks are a boon to those with poor eyesight who can adjust the contrast and size of text. Yes, you can purchase large font editions but those are costly and the selection is poor. With e-books, an entire new world is opened up.

I would imagine this is a great space for blind readers as well, with text to speech technology.

They are also fantastic for plane rides, travel, and other situations where you are away from your home library.

More and more, physical books to me are becoming fetish objects for collecting. There are rare books and special presses in I like to collect, but for reading I go with the ebook.

Doesn't help that ebook publishers and device developers don't really care about that class of book. Amazon doesn't support MathML on their readers yet which means all math equations are just pictures of equations and often at the completely wrong DPI for a device like the Paperwhite so they look absolutely horrid. To top it off all these pictures really bloat the file size and slow down the weak hardware of most ebook readers. Math textbooks at least could work really well as ePubs if they just support MathML.

That said I'm not sure large format books being a bad fit for most eReader devices is the problem. I think it has more to do with the often higher prices, more limitations and lack of care by publishers of ebooks. It's really really common for the paperback or even hardcover version of a book to cost less than the ebook that's loaded with DRM, you can't loan away to friends or family or resell and are often sloppily typeset by the publisher with random typos and hyphens mid line from their OCR process. Or just other bizzare problems. I've had books where the last "page" was actually several hundred pages and tables of contents not pointing to the correct chapter from books I bought from big publishers! The ebook is often a second class citizen to the paper product and it shows.

Doesn't help that Amazon and Kobo haven't been making much effort in the device realm these days either. They are all slow devices because they use the cheapest SoCs they can find and do so for years so devices are often unpleasant to use and DRM makes the book buying experience for anything outside their ecosystems a chore or nightmare. They've really done very little in the past 5 years except add back page turn buttons.

Nothing beats the feeling of a printed book.

However, I find that I have a preference for printed vs Ebook depending on situation.

Any book that's more than 400+ pages and/or is more academic in nature. I'm reading in eBook.

Short non-fiction books I prefer in printed (Sapiens, Black Swan, joking Mr Feynham etc).

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