Ebooks Are an Abomination

Ebooks have been genuinely life changing for me and I will continue to enjoy them as long as I can.

Just the ability to control font face and size alone is a huge benefit I find it increasingly difficult to live without, with my shitty eyes.

There's also the matter of access. Project Gutenberg, for a huge part of my childhood when I wasn't as well off, gave me access to TONS of books I would never have been able to afford, and many I wouldn't have access to anyway. I am not only forever grateful, but also willing to overlook any imperfections and enjoy the medium.

I don't buy this at all.

The first reason being- a novel is a novel. A story is a story. A well-written non-fiction is a well-written non-fiction. The medium does not matter at all.

I have beeen reading voraciously since I was three and a half. It's not much, but I finished reading 200+ books that are not text books/tech books before I turned 20.

I tell you, dead-honest, once I am into a book, I absolutely, literally forget in which medium I am reading it. A book becomes the highest level I am interacting with where the medium is just abstracted away. This feeling is literal to me.

I have used laptops, tablets, 5, 6.5 inch smartphones, Kindles, and desktops as readers. Reading books on desktop is the least physically pleasing. But I must tell you that even while reading on desktop, I totally, absolutely forgot what I was reading on.

I read non-fictions spanning 300+ pages, novels spanning 600+ pages on desktop screens. I was so into them, I was so immersed, that I did not even remember it was a desktop screen.

Secondly, the author assumes the reader standard being Kindles. That's so shallow and out of touch with reality.

A lot of people read ebooks differently, not to mention ebook readers from other companies.

After trying all those, tablets are my best choice for reading ebooks, even better than Kindles.

Kindles are inadequate and have a lot of shortcomings.

I use an android tablet for all my reading- tech books, research papers, novels, comics- all of them.

I use paid apps for reading documents. I always use the lowest brightness available when indoors, with an always on blue light filter. This is a much better option and is very cost effective.

This is the best way I have to read books.

I only buy physical books when I absolutely feel that I should collect it, for my future generation to see, or I must have it.

> you have been able to scroll through Word (or WordPerfect or WordStar or plain text) documents for as long as computers have existed, even if few would call such an experience reading.

What snobbery. Reading is about the content, and many great insights have been written and read in Microsoft Word.

The software on ebook readers seems awful, and the responsiveness nihil. Years of upgraded models haven't changed this. Reading PDFs was borderline impossible because in addition to being slow, my device didn't even cache the previous/next page... Even though there is ample time to do so while you are reading.

The fact that it didn't occur to anyone involved to do so should be all you need to know to avoid the entire product category.

In a parallel universe, a company would've treated e-ink as a medium in its own right instead of as a webkit front end. They made the same mistake that html/css did: locking in the capabilities before they understood what people needed it to do.

ebook environments generally are awful mostly because of DRM.

I am endlessly happy to own an e-ink reader and reading books on that. However, I will also buy books in print because nothing replaces a hard copy.

This is a pretty confused article that tries to find flaws in ebooks without using a distinct definition of what ebooks are. The author is also pretty uninformed about the history of ebooks and misunderstands the target market. My first ebook format was the .LIT format books from microsoft, a format released back in 2000 and supported on windows 95. I also don't know what scholarly nonfiction the author reads but every single research paper I've read has been a pdf. Ebooks are much bigger than the kindle.

The author cares about mainly aesthetics aspects of physical books but then argues those aspects makes them superior. That's not what makes a book valuable. The actual words and meaning matter and only if you consider poems does formatting matter.

Art books aren't books in the traditional sense, but it seems that is what the author of the article seems to care about. With an iPad, you can keep all of the pages and formatting you would find in a typical book if you stick with a pdf. For really complex books, you could just make a pdf of scans. Even comics now come as a digital archive (CBR/CBZ) of high res pictures if not pdfs. I personally prefer digital copies because I can zoom into art that is impossible to do on physical copies.

Being able to change font type, font size, line formatting, line spacing and paragraph spacing without having to reprint a book is fantastic. Making different iterations and improvements of a book wastes nothing. These are positives, not negatives.

These arguments make it clear to me that in a few decades people will see physical paper books the same way people see records/cassettes today. Luddites seem to care more about what the experience is supposed to feel like rather than what it can be.

People's attachment to physical books is the reason why ebooks are so expensive. They aren't supposed to be equivalents, ebook distribution is free, lending ebooks doesn't make it unavailable to others, ebooks aren't tied to any specific device. But things like copyright or library lending laws treat ebooks like physical copies. If you're that attached to books, you can always take an ebook and print it out yourself.

You see people argue that music sounds better from actual records but digital music has become such an easy and mainstream thing, no one argues that we should be choosing records over digital files. School children today are using digital textbooks, the era of paper books is ending. No one argues that dictionaries need to be physical books only.

I don't like them either, but I always want to. I wonder if e-paper or whatever will eventually get so cheap and so good, you could have a physical book full of e-pages, then after you read it, press a button, and it becomes a different book.

ebooks with a good reader , were a game changer for me to read more books.

I enjoy reading a lot more now Just need a epub file and a the default books app on my iphone and I’m set for weeks.

Counterpoint: the Atlantic is well on the way to being an abomination.

I have written them twice in recents weeks to say that as a long-time subscriber, I am considering cancelling and furthermore urging others to do likewise.

Maybe I missed some change in ownership; the new editorial policy appears to be to invite terrible opinions, typically with a clear and politically unpalatable agenda, cleverly dressed up in intellectual snark.

This is not what I subscribed to, nor what I want.

This is a fine example. Ludditism that is literally 10 years stale. WTH.